My workflows could trigger a flood of emails

[pahy96]

My organization has a number of tools available for free download. With each tool is a unique workflow that sends a series of nurture emails relevant to the tool's topic/content. I just realized that if someone downloads a bunch of tools in one go, they could get flooded with all of these nurture series at once.

My first idea is to add a step to all workflows that exits a contact from all other workflows before continuing with the most recently activated one. That seems a bit hacky, and I'm curious if someone has a better solution.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @pahy96,

The best way to go about this, in my opinion, is to create a property, e.g. 'Currently in nurturing' which you set at the beginning of workflows and clear at the end.

This scales a lot better than updating all workflows whenever you create a new one. Simply remember to always add this property to your workflows.

In the enrolment criteria of each workflow, make sure to not let contacts in that have this property checked. Also make sure to limit enrollment to contacts who submitted the form less than two days ago, for example, otherwise these nurturing workflows will just queue up. One ends, the next starts immediately.

If your nurturing workflows have exit criteria, some contacts might not see the end of the workflow - so you'll need another extra workflow that clears the property after after as many days as your longest nurturing workflow takes.

Lastly, while we're at it, create a 'Last nurturing enrolment date' property and also set it at the beginning of your workflow. That'll be useful for filtering and reporting.

Best regards!