Emfluence has released a new workflow functionality, in which marketers can use a drag-and-drop workflow canvas to visually plan their marketing campaign flows. According to emfluence, this is their first step towards integral automation.
Creating a workflow
A new workflow can be created in a couple of steps. The marketers need to create the automated email messages. These can be assigned to an existing or new group. Once marketers have created their canvas they can drag and drop emails and groups using the icons in the left sidebar and connect them to create the workflow.
Drag-and-drop workflow canvas
All emfluence Digital Marketing Platform users can now use the new Workflow tool to help them set up anything from a simple auto-responder up to a 20-plus part drip series. In this new Workflow tool marketers can use the drag-and-drop tool to create their own campaign on a large canvas. On this canvas, they can use panning and zooming capabilities, which will make showing the campaign overview as well as details of the campaign very easy.
A emfluence workflows example
On the screenshot below we see an example workflow for training session reminders. The user has created a group to which he sends an email concerning a training session reminder. After sending the email a group of new user contacts is created that gets a welcome email.
Using dynamic groups for recurring campaigns
On this second screenshot, the user has made different groups; one for contact with their birthday this month, one with their birthday this week and one with their birthday today.
Each of these groups will receive a specific email regarding their birthday this month/week/day. Note that all these groups are dynamic groups, which means only contacts who match the criteria of that certain group will be added to the group.
What is next for workflows?
In this first release, marketers can make a selection from their existing automated emails and groups to design a workflow for their marketing campaign. In future releases this will include creating new automated emails within the canvas, adding other campaign items like surveys, and creating filters or branches based on engagement behavior.
Earlier emfluence releases this year
Earlier this year emfluence released other features including their new Query Builder and the possibility to create Dynamic Groups.
Last May the new Query Builder was released through which marketers can build their own queries (as surprising as that sounds). Emfluence has already created a couple of example queries such as birthday searches, active and inactive searches, location searches and domain-specific searches. After editing marketers can save their queries as either traditional (Static) groups or Dynamic Groups.
Dynamic Groups: these groups collect all the contacts matching certain criteria. This can be a birthday, anniversary or basically all data points. A Static Group can only be updated manually but a Dynamic Group is, as the name probably states, dynamic and updates itsself on data rather than which contacts the marketers have added.
Development on emfluence workflows
The development of the Workflow feature has been in planning and development for a total of 6 months of which 2 months dedicated to development, quality assurance, and rollout. Workflow is available at no additional cost to all users. According to emfluence, it is expected that 90% of all the users or more will be using Workflows.
