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.

Wait Steps in Program Builder

As we have continued to make it easier to build nurturing and marketing programs in Eloqua, some smaller simplifications have made their way out into production without much fanfare. I'll try to use this blog to mention a number of the small simplifications that you might not have noticed, as they can often greatly simplify how you might have been used to doing a task.

One such capability is the ability to define a “Wait” step that pauses the members of your program for a specified period of time. This is very useful for simple nurturing programs such as a 30/60/90 day welcome program, or for invitations where you might wish to wait a week after an initial invite and then send a reminder invitation to those who did not respond.

Although it has always been possible to build in a time delay with a delay in the evaluation of a Decision Rule, using a Program Step to do so simplifies the layout and readability of your Programs. It is also a simpler and more intuitive way of adding a delay.

To create a Wait step, add a new step to your program as you normally would. For the action, select “Add Wait Step” from the list of options. Your configuration options are quite simple, you select the unit of time (days, weeks, months), and how long of a delay you would like.

As contacts move into the wait step, they will each be delayed by the amount of time you specify, based on when they each individually entered the step. When a program is active, you can easily see who is in the step, and when they entered using the normal Program Step options.

This small enhancement will make it easier to build your nurturing and marketing programs, and easier to read and understand them when they are built. I look forward to your comments on this feature or how you think it can be enhanced further.