The My Oracle Support (MOS) knowledge base has several articles relating to the campaign canvas and how to manage contacts as they flow through it. Here are a few highlights.
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Contacts flow through the Campaign Canvas once, unless you change the settings.
By default, contacts only flow through a campaign once. This is an extra safety net for your campaigns to make sure that contacts aren’t bombarded with the same email multiple times. Sometimes, you may want to allow contacts to flow through a campaign more than once because you want them to flow through a different path and receive a different email. Or you may have an ongoing campaign where assets regularly change, so each time the contact flows through it, they receive a different email.
Fortunately, this is an easy setting to change. See these related MOS articles:
- How to Configure a Campaign to Allow Contacts to Enter More Than Once
- How to Ensure That Contacts Do Not Enter a Campaign More Than Once
A contact cannot be in two places on the Campaign Canvas at once
If you do change your campaign settings to allow contacts to enter more than once, keep in mind that contacts will not be able to re-enter the campaign until they have completed the flow of the campaign and exited it. Contacts can exit a campaign through a step that moves them to another campaign, program, or shared list. If, for example, your campaign ends with an email step, contacts stuck in this step will not be able to re-enter the campaign.
If a contact is not re-entering a campaign as expected, see this MOS article to find out if it is stuck in a particular campaign step: How to See Which Campaign Step a Contact Is in.
Contacts can be moved, even if the campaign is active
Sometimes, contacts don’t flow through your campaign the way you hoped they would. Or maybe you want to change the path through which certain contacts flow. Every once in a while, you may even catch an error on an active campaign. For whatever reason, you may need to manually move contacts on an active campaign.
Keep in mind that it is best to move contacts to a wait step. If you want to move contacts to a different type of step, such as a decision step, you should deactivate the campaign, add a short wait step to the campaign canvas, and connect it to the step that the contacts will be moved to.
For steps on how to do this, see the MOS article: How to Move Contacts from One Step to Another in an Active Campaign.
You can have multiple campaign flows with multiple segments on the same canvas
If you are comfortable with the Campaign Canvas, you can set up an advanced flow that uses multiple segments. The flows don’t have to have shared steps, although they can. This can be useful if you are running multiple simultaneous campaigns and you want to keep a single set of reporting data.
For details on using multiple segments, see the MOS article: How to Add Contacts to an Active Campaign.
The contacts in a segment may be dynamic, but the contacts on the Campaign Canvas are not
Segments that use filters to dynamically pull contacts from your database will change regularly. The contacts in the segment last week may be different from the contacts in the segment this week. When you activate a campaign with one of these dynamic segments, the contacts that are added to the campaign are the contacts in the segment at the time of activation. When the segment changes, any new contacts in the segment will not be added to the active campaign, unless you select to add contacts to the campaign hourly. This is why you sometimes see contacts that look stuck in the segment step.
Another important thing to keep in mind about segments is that you can’t change the segment after the campaign is activated. If you do, contacts may get stuck in the segment step.
For more information on segments use on the Campaign Canvas, see these related MOS articles: