One of the many interesting features in Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform is the ability to design and monitor “Engagement Plans”. These Engagement Plans allow you to envision and lay out the path you are hoping your customers take—from entry point to ultimate goal. I’ve had enough discussions about this feature in Sitecore 6.5 to know (at least) two things:
- It’s really cool
- It’s pretty hard to describe and absorb in the short window of time people generally have to evaluate it
It’s not that the concept is above us, it’s just that the nature of an Engagement Plan is such that by definition it describes a process over time—a set of states, triggers and decision points that can confuse our already busy minds. Sitecore 6.5 does a nice job at setting some of these up for us…one that I find particularly compelling is the Engagement Plan that is set up by default when using the Email Campaign Manager. Below is a screenshot of this plan that is put in place automatically for all my Email Campaigns. Don’t worry, we’re going to concentrate on a much simpler one today, but we can all agree that the States (the rectangles below) are all very understandable buckets we’d expect our audience to be in if they were part of your Email Campaign. I’ll let you draw arrows and match the states:
- You might have learned (via the Message Transfer Agent) that the email address you had was bad.
- Your recipient might have received the message but it’s sitting there in his inbox unopened.
- He might have opened the message but not yet visited your site.
- He might have followed the link in the email but became distracted as soon as he hit your landing page
- He might have spent time on your site after hitting the landing page, done something OF VALUE on our site (your definition of value of course)
OK, what we want to do today is create one of these from scratch. A really simple one that will help us investigate the main concepts. I encourage you to take a look at the Engagement Automation Cookbook for a more thorough description of these mechanics.
For this one, here’s the scenario:
- Your visitor got to your site as part of a well-placed link on your company’s Facebook page.
- The link was trying to get that visitor to hit the landing page and fill out a registration form (the definition of valuable in this scenario).
- If the visitor followed the link and got to the landing page but didn’t fill in the registration form, you want to give him five days of peace before you send him an email (OK, we might not do this in the real world, but it helps with the concept) telling him he better hurry up and fill in the form.
Here’s the overall model for our simple example:
The top rectangle describes our initial state. All visitors that have reached our site as a result of clicking on the Facebook wall link are part of this state. As an aside, here’s the field (“Enroll in Engagement Plan”) in our overall Facebook Wall campaign where we can automatically place the visitor into this state:
The state itself is pretty straightforward. Think of these states as the “buckets” any of our audience members might be in at any time during this overall Engagement Plan. Many things can move people from state to state—from their own actions (like opening an email or registering using a Web Forms for Marketers form) to our actions as site owners (manually moving members to a different state) to automated triggers (move them to a different state if they’ve been in this state for 5 days).
When we take a closer look and edit the Conditions (the diamonds), we see a bit more detail:
Here we are able to create a branching decision point—a Yes/No decision point where a particular condition will be evaluated. In our example, it’s simply a check as to whether the current visitor in this Engagement Plan has filled in our contest registration form. In our example, we simply apply the “Register” goal to the act of filling in the form. Web Forms for Marketers makes this incredibly easy, as the out of the box submit actions include the ability to tie to this very goal. For those of you new to CEP/DMS, a goal can be anything you deem an important event on your site, from filling in this form to downloading your newest whitepaper to following a particular trail through your pages. The rules engine is fully at our disposal here as you can see from the capability to “Edit Rule” above.
In our scenario, a YES answer to this condition means that we’ve achieved our modest objective….the campaign was a success and we have a VALUABLE visitor. Let’s put that visitor into the Valuable state bucket. As we do that, we have an opportunity to perform any number of additional Actions—change a profile attribute in the CRM, send a thank you email, move them to another Engagement Plan:
OK, we’re done with our Valuable visitors. Now to those procrastinators who have refused to fill in our registration form (even though they saw that juicy offer to on our landing page). Our scenario states that we will wait 5 days and then really hound them with an email.
Editing our condition gives us the ability to easily model this rule:
Now, if 5 days has passed, we can send that reminder email to this group:
Hopefully this article highlighted the basic concepts of the Sitecore Engagement Plans. I will use this simple scenario and expand on it in the coming weeks to dive deeper into Sitecore’s Customer Engagement Platform.
