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Orchestration use case: welcome series

Overview

Podium Orchestrations make it easy to set up a welcome series for contacts when they join your program. Using Podium, you can build the trigger, delays, filters and message content all in a single Orchestration view. Once the Orchestration is published and enabled, you can check performance stats on each automation of the series.

Pass the trigger data

In order for the welcome messages to send, there needs to be data sent to the system that will trigger the automation. In the case of a welcome message, we'll use the trigger of when a contact is added to a list.

Methods

There are two methods you can use to send the data to Cordial:

List attribute

Our welcome series will utilize one primary piece of data: a list attribute.

  • Purpose: Used to flag a contact as being on or off a specific list. We recommend that date tracking is enabled on the list, which tracks the date each contact is added to this list.
  • Data type: A list is a type of contact attribute. This value is passed as a boolean true/false value.

Create the Orchestration

1. Navigate to Automations > Podium Orchestrations and click New.

2. Give the Orchestration a name and click Continue.

3. You will be taken to the main Orchestration page where you can set the Trigger, Delay, Filter, and message content (Action).

Define the trigger

This welcome series Orchestration will be triggered when a contact is added to the newsletter list. To set up this trigger in Podium, click the Trigger component and complete the following fields:

1. Select A contact's profile data is updated.

2. Select the option for When a contact is added to a list.

3. Choose the list (newsletter in our example).

Initial message

Once the trigger is set, you can build out each automation in the welcome series by configuring the delay, audience filter, and message content.

Define the delay

1. Click on the Delay component to set a delay for the message send after the trigger is activated.

2. For the first message in our welcome series, we'll choose No delay (process immediately). This way, a contact will receive the initial welcome message as soon as they're added to the list.

Define the filter

1. Click on the Filter component to set an audience filter for the automation to include or exclude contacts. Using the Audience Builder, you can create an audience or recall a saved audience.

2. For this message, we won't add a filter because we want to send to All contacts who met the trigger criteria.

Define the action

1. Click the Action component to define the action for this automation. We'll use the email channel for this welcome series, so we'll choose Send an Email.

2. Complete the fields for Message Name, Message Tags, and choose the Message Editor Type.

3. Click Continue to go to the message creation page.

4. From here you can configure the Message Header, Message Content, and Delivery Settings. If the message has been sent, you can view Message Performance for both individual and aggregate sends.

5. Once the message has been created successfully, Publish the message.

Additional messages

1. After composing the first message in your welcome series, you can easily add additional messages. Click the Plus icon to the right of the first message to create a new automation under the initial trigger. You can then add the Delay, Filter, and Action.

2. For example, if you would like the second message to be sent a day after the initial trigger, choose to delay the second message by one day. You can then add additional messages with the desired delays from the initial trigger.

Additional triggers

1. You can add additional triggers by clicking the Plus icon below the initial automation.

2. When a secondary trigger is added, it will be labeled as Wait Until, denoting that the message will not be sent unless the specified behavior is performed by the contact.

There are options for:

3. For example, if a contact engages with the initial message or visits your website, you could trigger a followup message.

Horizontal or vertical orientation

Podium's flexible infrastructure allows you to build complex campaigns using multiple channels and data sources working in concert with one another. Our example welcome series can be rearranged vertically where the three automations are stacked, starting with the first automation at the top, followed by the second and third automations.

The advantage of stacking automations lies in the Wait Until component, which allows you to set additional triggers your contacts must meet before moving down the automation path. If your use case does not require additional triggers, but you wish to stack automations vertically, you can set the Wait Until component to not wait, allowing your contacts to continue on the path down to the delay and filter components.

One Podium Orchestration can execute multiple welcome series campaigns as long as the main Orchestration trigger applies to all of them. For example, contacts can enter an Orchestration when added to the welcome list, but in order to continue, they would need to qualify for one or more automation paths as defined by your Filter components.

Publish and enable

1. Once you've configured your components and published your messages, you can publish the entire Orchestration by clicking the Publish Draft button.

If any components are not complete or there are unpublished messages, you'll see an error with the incomplete components highlighted.

2. After successfully publishing the Orchestration, you can enable it using the Enable/Disable dropdown.

3. Once messages start sending, you'll be able to view message performance stats right in the Orchestration.

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