MinuteAdmin Newsletter
Presented by: Kaelan Moss
Hey Reader,
How one client's journey had me ready to quit marketing cloud.
There wasn't a light at the end of the tunnel for me.
I searched every website, StackExchange forum, blog post, Youtube video, etc... to find the answer.
But nobody documented a journey this tough before.
Imagine spending 2 weeks (40 hours straight), trying to find an answer, and not finding a single thing online.
Literally crickets...
That's when I knew I was screwed.
There was no way to build this journey for my client.
What was I going to tell them?
That they just weren't going to get what they paid for?
I knew I couldn't do that.
So what did I do?
I leaned on the community.
I found a friend who's a Marketing Cloud Developer and he helped me think through the architecture of the journey.
We met for 5 hours and brainstormed everything we could think of to solve this problem.
After a certain point, he told me he had to "sit with a coffee in the morning and meditate on the solution."
Eventually, he found out how to solve the journey.
So you may be wondering:
What was the journey and why was it so hard to build?
Here's the business scenario:
When someone submits an application online, they might have missing documents that are required for the application to be accepted.
Those missing items need to be dynamically included in the email to follow up with the person who filled out the application.
But that's not the hard part.
The hard part is that the person can have multiple applications at the same time (AND) new required items can be added to the application at any time.
So they needed a way to:
- Remove people from the journey when they complete all of the required items for the application.
- But also stay in the journey if they have another application that is incomplete.
This poses a challenge for one main reason.
How do you exit the person from the journey when they complete a specific application if they exist multiple times in the same journey at the same time.
It's not as simple as it sounds.
That requires special data architecture experience.
The solution ended up being the SQL query that solves for "Who enters and exits the journey".
You couldn't use the out of the box Update Contact activity or Exit Criteria.
It would seem so simple, but when you're dealing with:
- Contact Re-Entry Any Time
- Many to Many relationships
You're not dealing with a simple scenario.
That's why I'm creating a course about how to accomplish this.
Mainly because there's nothing online about how to solve for this.
And because I want you to not have to experience the pain and frustration I felt when I was going through this.
But that's for a later time.
If you're interested in that journey builder course, hit reply and say "Interested".
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But I wanted to leave you with a little something that I learned along the way.
You NEED a set of questions that you ask clients when you build Journeys for them.
Don't go into building journeys blindly.
Have a set of questions that will force the client to give you what you need and save you time and energy.
I created a spreadsheet of those questions.
Here's a few of those questions:
- What is the journey name?
- Who is the journey audience?
- What is the audience entry criteria?
- Which fields will be personalized in the email?
- What is the email cadence? ie - email 1 day 1, email 2 day 2, etc...
- When is this journey due?
- What day(s) should this journey run?
- What time should this journey run?
- What is the journey exit criteria?
- What is the Subject line, pre-header, and body copy for each email in the journey?
- What is the email send classification for each email in the journey?
- Should there be a unique code added to a send log when the email is sent? If so, what is the code and what data do you want in the send log data extension?
This is just the start of the list of questions to ask when you're building a journey for a client.
All of this information will come in the course and right now I'm preparing it for you in a simple way so you don't suffer like I had to.
Once again, if you're interested in the course, hit reply to this email with the word "interested" and let me know.
Don't be shy. We're all in this Journey together 😉
Kaelan Moss MinuteAdmin out ✌🏽