Now Here - Conditional and Wait Steps in Program Builder

I got a bit ahead of myself last release, and boldly announced the arrival of two very useful features - conditional steps and wait steps within Program Builder.


Unfortunately, as luck would have it, they were delayed by a release, and my announcement was premature. I'm pleased to announce that they are both part of this current release on June 14th and greatly simplify the building of Programs.



Conditional steps allow you to simplify the creation of a "if X happens do Y" structure. Whereas before it was a matter of building a decision rule that would evaluate the condition X, and then bypass the step if the condition was not met, that can all be embedded simply and quickly within a step. Not only does this make it easier to build Programs, it makes it simpler to visualize their flow.



The flexibility of the full workflow design process is maintained, of course, and if you want to branch down alternate paths (rather than just a single step), you can do so with Decision Rules as you normally would have.



Wait steps, as the name implies, allow you to define a step that pauses Contacts in a Program for a period of time. This was always possible, of course, with evaluation conditions, but now it is greatly simplified as a step for clearer readability of Programs.

Inside Scoop - Conditional Steps in Program Builder

There are lots of exciting things coming out February 22nd, our next release of the Eloqua platform. Over the next few posts, I'll give you a quick preview of some of the new capabilities.

One of the quick wins that will help you build yout programs more quickly, and keep them more manageable is the conditional step. It's a simple addition that allows you to build the conditional rule right into a step, rather than having a Decision Rule set up to bypass the step.

Not only is this quicker and easier to set up, but it leaves your programs looking neater and cleaner, and it is much easier to add later if you decide to make changes to a program to add a condition to an existing step.

Build your program as you normally would, but in the Action details for your step, you will now (or as of the coming release) see an Action Condition option. That is where you add the rule for whether the step is to be run or not.

Clicking "Add" brings up a configuration box for the condition. You have a full set of options here similar to your set of options in building a Decision Rule. You can look at data that is known about your contact in order to guide personalization, whether they responded to a prior marketing campaign, whether they have submitted a form or registered for an event, or whether they are a member of a specific group.

Once you decide how you want to define this condition, you have a set of configuration options, again similar to the options on Decision Rules. In our case, we're going to send Email 2 if Email 1 was not clicked on, so we select that option and choose the specific email we're looking at.

With that in place, you are all set. You can have the action execute only if the condition is met, or only if the condition is not met. Using this should allow you to simplify how you build your programs, and keep them even more manageble and clean.

I look forward to your comments on this feature once you've had a chance to try it after the February 22nd release.