Mutual exclusivity

For example, if your contact has received an abandoned basket email, you wouldn't want to send them a browse abandonment email an hour later.

Mutually exclusive campaigns are also useful if you have multiple stores (e.g., GB, US, Aus, etc.) and want to keep your communications with your contacts store-specific.

Campaigns can be mutually exclusive with as many other campaigns as you want.

Mutual exclusivity and testing

Test campaigns behave exactly like live campaigns, except they do not send to contacts. 

So, if you apply any of the mutual exclusivity methods listed on this page to a test campaign, it might affect your live flows.

E.g. A contact could be excluded from a live campaign because they have been included in a test campaign.

Making your automation campaigns mutually exclusive

Create or edit an automation campaign as usual, and once you are happy with the flow, click Save.

Once you've saved the campaign, you'll be able to access the Settings cog in the tool bar:

Click on the Settings cog to open the Edit Campaign Settings window.

From the Mutual exclusivity dropdown, choose the campaigns you wish to exclude your contacts from:

Select Save.

If a contact is already active in the campaigns you selected, they will not enter into this one. 

This will automatically be reflected in the Settings for the campaigns you selected, with no need for you to take action.

Prioritisation 

The entry wait node in an automation campaign (i.e. the wait placed immediately after the trigger) determines which campaign will be triggered first.

So, if there are two mutually exclusive campaigns then contacts will enter the campaign with the shortest wait time after the entry event.

For example, if you have two published campaigns: abandoned basket and abandoned browse, and the abandoned browse campaign has a two hour wait node after its trigger, while the abandoned basket has a  one hour wait node, the abandoned basket will be triggered first:

Without mutual exclusivity:

With mutual exclusivity:

Wait nodes

Entry wait nodes, i.e. wait nodes set immediately after the entry trigger will look back for any contacts that fulfilled the trigger conditions within the specified wait time.

E.g. If you had a wait time of two hours after the entry trigger 'visited the website and viewed a product attribute', then this wait node will only enter contacts that performed the trigger (visited your website and viewed a product attribute) two hours ago.

Ometria checks for contacts matching trigger conditions at least once an hour.

If a wait node is placed after an email action, this is the length of time the contact stays in the flow after being sent the email (or other action):

For this reason, wait nodes following actions are also a useful way to 'hold' contacts in certain campaigns, e.g. for 24 hours, before they can enter another, helping to space out your sends.

Segmentation and exit conditions

When a contact reaches a segmentation node in your campaign flow, Ometria checks the exit condition first, and then the conditions of the segment.

E.g. A contact reaches a segmentation node with the condition ‘Contact’s lifecycle stage is ‘At Risk’, and the campaign has an exit condition of ‘Has placed an order’, Ometria checks whether or not the contact has placed an order before it checks the lifecycle status.

Frequency capping

Finally, you can also insure against over-sending from the Frequency capping screen. 

Go to: Settings > Frequency capping

Scroll down to the Email field and enter 1 per day (or 2 at most).

This ensures that a contact can only receive 1 (or 2) emails from you in a 24 hour period.

Select Save to finalise.