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Product Details:
- Product Family: Emarketing
- Product: Act! Marketing Automation
Answer:
Specific Date/Time
Act! Marketing Automation allows customers to set a campaign to be released as soon as it is activated “Instant Release” or at a specific date/time. The Specific Date/Time is helpful for when you would like to send a campaign in the future, but you do not want to log back into the system in the future to activate the campaign.
A feature of specific date/time is that it will skip the first email or action if the date has expired. For instance, let’s say that today is March 1st and you configure the campaign to send on March 5th. You activate the campaign and on March 5th, all of the recipients receive the email campaign as expected.
Now let’s say that you would like to add more members to this group on March 10th. If the campaign is set on “Automatically compare lists to this campaign” or your re-sync and new members have been added, then these members will skip the first email because it was told to send on March 5th.
This feature is in place for those customers that have time sensitive information in the first email. For instance, let’s say that you are giving a 3 day offer to register for an event. After three days, the event returns to normal rates. So, you do not want recipients receiving this first email.
Pause/Change/Re-activate
If you have a campaign that has a specific date, the date is expired, and you want your recipients to get the first email, then:
- Pause the Campaign
- Change the Specific date/time to Instant Release
- Activate the campaign
The result of this action is two-fold. First, by re-activating the campaign, Act! Marketing Automation will examine all include and exclude lists and will add any net-new recipient to the top of the campaign. Second, since it is now an instant release email, they will get this first email campaign.
Adding new members
In this use case, you have a normal campaign that is set to instant release, but the List Compare Feature is set to “Do not compare lists to this campaign”. You would like to add more recipients to this campaign while it is active. To do this, then:
- Upload the new recipients to the list
- Open the active campaign and select “Force Sync” from the Actions menu.
This will send a signal to Act! Marketing Automation and Act! Marketing Automation will compare the lists and add new recipients to the top of the campaign and will remove any recipients that have been removed from any of the lists. This also works for dynamic groups.
Continuous campaigns
In this case, you want the campaign to run continuously and look for any new members to any of the lists that are attached to the campaign.
In this case, always set the first email to “Instant Release” and set the campaign property of “List Compare Options” to “Automatically compare lists to this campaign”