Let’s talk goal setting! Luckily, this has nothing to do with those New Year’s resolutions and everything to do with your email marketing.
In ActiveCampaign you can add a Goal step in your automation. You get there by clicking the plus sign node in the automation, going to “Conditions and Workflows”, and then clicking “Goals”
What Are Goals?
Goals serve 3 primary functions:
Blocking. Similar to a goalie in soccer. If you want to stop a contact from continuing on in the automation until they’ve meant a certain condition you can use a goal to keep them in place. For example: Maybe you don’t want a contact to continue until they’ve filled out a survey. You can tell the goal to not let the contact through until a tag or field is updated to signify they have filled out the survey.
Magnet. Pull your audience to where you want them, skipping the in between steps. Let’s say you have a nurture automation in place with 10 emails all with the goal of getting a contact to purchase. If they end up purchasing on the 3rd email you don’t want them to keep getting this series of emails. You can use a goal step to pull them past the rest of the emails and any other steps you might want them to skip in the automation.
Segmenting Perhaps you want to know who has reached a certain point in your automations to send a specific message to. You can segment by whether or not they have achieved the goal to segment your audience and send to the right people.
What makes up a Goal
There are five components to setting up a goal correctly.
1. Name
This is an internal field so you can quickly see what a goal step is doing when you look at your automation. We recommend keeping this name simple, but including the main points of what the goal is doing.
2. Jump to this action when...
This is where you tell the goal what it’s waiting on. You use the normal conditional builder to say things like “This tag is added” or “Wait until they login to the member site” If it’s a field or tag in your account you can probably create a condition for it.
3. And when the goal is...
This will affect when a goal interacts with a contact based on the contacts placement in the automation. The first option is “below the contact's position”. Meaning if a contact is already past this goal in the automation then they will not interact with it (even if they meet the condition). And if a contact has gone down a separate “If/Else” branch then they will not jump back over to the goal. The second option is “anywhere”. Similar to the first option, if a contact has passed the wait step then they will not achieve this goal even if they meet the criteria. However, unlike the first option if the contact has gone down a separate “If/Else” branch of your automation and achieves the conditions of the goal then they will jump over to where the goal is.
4. Trigger this conversion when this goal is achieved
This is tied into the Attribution feature on Professional and Enterprise plans only. This is where you would tell ActiveCampaign if meeting the conditions of this goal should trigger a conversion, no conversion, or a new goal.
5. If the contact does not meet goal conditions
What happens when a contact arrives at your goal, but hasn’t met the conditions? You have three options:
Continue anyway: Contacts will pass through to the next step in an automation.
Wait until conditions are met: Contacts will wait in this Goal action until they meet the Goal conditions. Be careful. Since there is no time limit contacts could just stay here indefinitely.
End this automation: Contacts will end the automation as soon as they reach this step. Meaning they will not interact with anything after this goal step.
And there you have it - you’re ready to get started with goals. These are great ways to send and stop sending information to the right contact at the right time. Hopefully, you wrote down learning more about goals as one of your goals for the day and you can now check it off!
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