Overview

A marketing sequence, flow or campaign, is made up of a series of steps. These steps allow you to create more sophisticated marketing .

Adding a Step

Within the campaign or flow editor, click on the plus button as shown below.

Open

Next a dialog will appear asking for the type of step you want to add. Only the steps that are appropriate for the location will be displayed in the drop down list.

Open

List of Step Types

Send Email

The send email step is the most important step to familiarize yourself with, since most campaigns and flows will contain one or more email steps. The first two fields are the most important piece text you will configure on your email. The subject and preview text are visible to the customer within their inbox. Write something catchy to get their attention.

Important Message Regarding Email Copy Review Requirement

Next you’ll pick a template type. There are six different templates available to give you a variety of layouts to work with. The first three templates contain headers while the last three templates do not.

The smart email option will be enabled by default. When this option is enabled, if the customer has received an email within the last 24 hours then this email will be skipped to avoid annoying the customer with too many emails. Be careful turning off this setting.

Next click on “Save and Customize Email” to launch the StoreFront Visual Builder.

If your flow or campaign is utilizing either a cart or an order object, an intermediate dialog will appear for you to specify items or an order id. Selecting these values will allow the editor to show a contextually complete email to modify.

The standard StoreFront Visual Builder editor will appear. The screenshot below points out the Test button (will send a copy of the email to you) and the save button.

Wait (Time Delay)

The second most common step in a sequence is the time delay step. The settings on a wait step are shown below.

Wait Step Release Option

Condition

A condition step allows you to check the customer’s profile for a particular activity or property and then branch the sequence based upon matching the condition. The condition step settings allow you specify the customer filter and flip the yes/no sides.

After creating a condition the sequence will look like the screenshot below. By default Yes is on the left and No is on the right. Use the optional setting to reverse that behavior. Click on the + button underneath either side to add additional steps.

The merge step below will allow you to rejoin the Yes and No sides of the sequence.

Experiment

An experiment step allows you to test one or more emails against each other. By default an experiment will have two variants split 50/50 as shown below.

Within the settings of the experiment you have the option to perform a limited test. A limited test will send a particular number of customers through the experiment and then route the remaining customers to the winning variant. An experiment within a flow will use a fixed number of customers as shown below.

An experiment within a campaign, a certain percentage will be sent the email first and then after a set amount of time the variants are evaluated and the remaining customers are sent to the winner.

List Subscribe / List Unsubscribe

The list subscribe step will place the customer on the specified list. For example at the end of a campaign you might have a conditional step that evaluates the customers behavior and then decide to subscribe them to a list.

Likewise, the List Unsubscribe button will allow you to remove a customer from a list.

Merge

The merge step allows you to rejoin the Yes and No sides of a Condition step or Left and Right sides of a Split step. After the last step on the right side click on the plus button and then select the Merge step type. The two sides of the sequence will then rejoin as shown below.

Rate Limiter

The Rate Limiter step is one of the most sophisticated steps available. The settings for this step are shown below.

A description of each setting for the rate limiter is described in the following table.

An example usage of a rate limiter is marketing a product with limited quantity available to:

• most active customers first

• while supplies of the product last

• in batches of 1,000 per hour

• during normal business hours

Send Postcard

A postcard step will cause a postcard to be on-demand printed and mailed to the customer. The StoreFront Visual Builder will allow you to customize the content on the postcard. The editor will show you the front and back of the postcard. The area where the address and postage are located is blocked from editing.

Because of the $0.65/postcard cost associated with mailing a postcard, a dry-run option is available allow for the postcard to be rendered but not actually mailed to the customer. This setting is recommended for initial testing. Copies of the postcard will be emailed to you as PDF attachments.

Setup / Modify Cart

The setup / modify cart step will allow for manipulation of the cart object associated with the marketing sequence. A common use case for this step is to apply a coupon at a certain point during an abandon cart recovery or recommend replenishment flow.

All of the modifications available are shown in the screenshot below.

Coupons can also be added during the email step using the “email coupon” element within the visual builder. The “email coupon” element allows for further fine tuned control over how long the coupon is valid for, etc.

Split

A split step is similar to a condition step except the left and right sides are configured with a fixed percentage split. When a split is added to the sequence it will default to 50/50 as shown below.

The settings for this step will allow you to adjust the percentage of the split.

Just like the Condition step, a Merge step on the right side of the split can be used to rejoin the left and right sides.

Update Profile

The update profile step allow you to add, update or remove properties on the customer’s profile. The properties can be text, number, date or boolean properties. How you utilize properties on your customer profiles is completely up to your business, but setting them along the way in your campaigns and flows will allow you to segment customers more effectively in the future.

A single update profile step can perform multiple property operations at one time.

Loyalty Points

The Loyalty Points step will establish a customer profile, if one is missing, and then adds the defined credit to their loyalty balance.

Internal Notes

Most of the steps contain an Internal Notes field. This is an area where you can record notes about the purpose of the particular step. Notes are incredibly helpful to keep track of what you’re testing, etc.

Your internal notes will appear in the sequence editor as shown below.

“…” Menu

Each step contains a “…” menu to provide contextual options as shown below.

The following table shows all the options you might encounter in this menu.

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