Comments on: Unattended Drip Campaigns with Time-Based Workflow

By: Wasim

Wasim — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:33:50 +0000

Hi – Thank you for posting the video – I am not seeing an option for “Email” – I see options for “Email Alerts” which are internal or for “Outbound Email” which don’t let me select templates…. basically I can’t match what I see your video – is there some configuration setting I need to tunr on ? (Enterprise user)

Thanks

By: gokubi.com » Blog Archive » Daily Email Series in Salesforce

gokubi.com » Blog Archive » Daily Email Series in Salesforce — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:38:45 +0000

[...] a system for sending out daily emails to Contacts that uses Time-Based Workflow. We’ve done some work in this area before, but now it’s really starting to come [...]

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:50:28 +0000

Right now it’s manual. But you could create an Inbound email handler that could process unsubscribes, or a Salesforce Sites page.

By: Daniel Chalef

Daniel Chalef — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:45:22 +0000

Great blog post. How would we go about exiting a Lead from a workflow? i.e. if the Lead responds to a drip email, how do we ensure that they don’t receive further emails in the workflow?

By: Running Email Drip Campaigns in Salesforce - ONE/Blog

Running Email Drip Campaigns in Salesforce - ONE/Blog — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:32:34 +0000

[...] and trigger based email campaigns with just a little planning and training. Steve Andersen shows how it’s done in a little video on his [...]

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:31:48 +0000

Thanks Alex, that’s a good idea. I think we’ll probably just go off a checkbox when we implement this. Seems to be the most minimal implementation. Dates are nice, though, as they show more info.

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 04:29:33 +0000

Great stuff, Seth. Thanks for passing it on. We haven’t verified that these would fall in the 2000 daily limit, but I’m assuming they would.

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:40:44 +0000

Very nice! Thanks. Instead of using a custom field to enter manually the date and use this field to trigger the rule, we create a fields for Lead Age. Lead Age is a custom field (type Formula) that calculates the age of the lead. Here the formula: TODAY()-DATEVALUE(CreatedDate). Than because this field is calculated automatically we have set the workflow to be trigger when Lead Age equals 0. This way, everytime a lead is created, automatically the Drip is triggered. We would use other Criteria like Lead Source to simply the trigger the rule to specific leads upon creation.

By: Seth Schneider

Seth Schneider — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:23:06 +0000

I came up with a similar approach to what Matthew did. See my blog post at http://usergroups.salesforce.com/non_profits_bayarea/2008/06/creating-an-aut.html and the instruction sheet at http://usergroups.salesforce.com/non_profits_bayarea/files/email_welcome_stream.pdf.

In brief, the main difference in what I did was to use the MOD and CASE functions in a formula field to calculate the subsequent Tuesday after the date someone signs up, and then to start the drip campaign on that Tuesday. The advantage of this approach is that you can have your drip emails get sent on higher-readership days (such as Tuesdays and Thursdays) instead of whenever someone signs up. However, Matthew’s approach has the advantage of being able to customize the drip campaign to start whenever you want it to. Clearly this is something that would depend on the organization’s business processes. Matthew, you, and I were all approaching this as proof of concept.

A minor point: I’ve found that if you use hours instead of days in the workflow timing you can have your emails get sent at a specific time of day instead of at midnight (e.g. 57 hours would be 2 days from now at 9:00 am, whereas 2 days would be two days from now at midnight).

One point I’m not sure about is whether the 2000-email limit applies to workflow emails or not. I thought I’ve heard someone from Salesforce say that the limit only applies to mass emails and not to workflow-triggered emails, but I can’t track that down right now.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:51:50 +0000

Good point–I noticed that in my first test send. It would be easy, though, to create a “Create Task” workflow task to create a closed activity that records each send. I will definitely do this so that these sends can be shown in a dashboard component. That way you can monitor the number of sends going out each day to make sure you don’t cap out at 2000.

By recording tasks, you also could go back and find any gaps if you do run into the 2000 cap. Wouldn’t be fun, but at least it would be possible.

By: Bethany

Bethany — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:47:47 +0000

This is a great idea. Just wanted to point out to everyone that another limitation of this type of workflow is that you are not going to have the activity history that a certain contact received 10 emails. Also, no HTML tracker so you could use that date field to develop a call list for follow-up, but you can’t report on the number sent in a given timeframe. Still, this idea is helpful and I will definitely implement when appropriate.
Thanks for the info!