Readers of my blog
will know that I am always going on about how easy marketing automation is
using Customer State Marketing. Hard to believe that it could get even easier,
but it is true! The addition of Super States (i.e. a master state) means that
it is no longer necessary to include “housekeeping” events in root automation
processes. Using email as an example, it was necessary to track if the contact
was optin for email when considering how to respond to a customer event (e.g.
contact does not open email). Now there is no longer a need to include an
Unsubscribe event in all the scenarios where you want to interrupt the process
whenever a contact unsubscribes – Instead you now just need to specify a
“Subscriber” Super State that encompasses child scenarios. As long as the
contact in in the Subscriber Super State the child level processes (i.e.
processes that are dependents of the Super State) will execute. As soon as the
contact moves out of the Subscriber Super State then all child level processes
stop.
As a result the scenarios are a lot less crowded as there is no longer a
need to include the “housekeeping” events.
Another benefit of this approach is
that it makes reading and understanding the hierarchy of scenarios (remember
that a contact can be in a different state in different scenarios) even easier
because the housekeeping noise has been removed. It also streamlines the
construction and modification of scenarios. Now the longest part of creating
Customer State Marketing automation solutions is the documentation of the
scenarios (excluding waiting for the customer’s creatives, of course – i.e. It
is no longer the bottleneck). This documentation issue will be solved in an
upcoming release of the software. I can’t wait for that one because I estimate
it will further reduce my workload by half!
