By following the best practice workflow when building campaigns, you both save time and minimise the risk of configuration errors.
It's important to note that if there's more than one configurator working with your instance, all larger jobs such as Flow predictions, Flow statuses, Target Group predictions, reports, Flow executions, and publishes should not run at the same time.
In this article, we'll go through Agillic's best practices on workflow, as listed below.
Agillic's Recommended Best Practice on Workflows
Working on Staging or Production?
As a general rule, you must always configure your campaigns in Staging and then publish to Production.
You only need to log into Production to report on a campaign or to look at live campaigns or live recipients.
| Configurations | Staging | Production |
| Recipients are | Test Recipients | Live Recipients |
| Create campaign | Yes | No |
| Edit campaign | Yes | No |
| Test campaign | Yes | No |
| Execute campaign | Yes (for testing) | Yes |
| Report on campaign | Yes (for test recipients) | Yes |
| Investigate recipients | Yes (for test recipients) | Yes |
| Edit recipient data | Yes (for test recipients) | Yes |
Table 1: Configurations on Staging and Production
Other than working in Staging for all campaign configuration, we also recommend the following workflow when working in Agillic. Following this workflow ensures that all elements in Agillic are correctly referenced and tied together.
The Optimal Workflow in Agillic
Log into Staging and follow the steps below as needed, depending on your campaign.
1. Data Module
Data
Consider the sort of data you need in order to reach your goal for your use case. In Agillic, you'll find four data types, all of which have their own purpose. You can read more about the four data types and the data models here.
Events
Another really important aspect of the Data module is the 'Event' subsection. You can use an Event to achieve a number of things. These include changing a recipient's data, triggering Flows, or to report on how many times a recipient clicks on a specific link.
Target Groups
Target Groups are essential to building your campaigns. They are collections of recipients who have shared characteristics. You create Target Groups by setting rules, or what we call Conditions. The Conditions dynamically filter which recipients should belong to each Target Group.
Target Groups are useful in a number of ways in Agillic. Their main use is determining which recipients receive each of our outbound communications.
You can learn how to create Target Groups here.
2. Promotions Module
Promotions, Propositions, and Promotion Fields help you to create dynamic, personalised content. You can show different text, images, or links in your outbound communication to different recipients depending on their characteristics or which Target Groups they belong to. This way, you won't have to create several email versions to present dynamic content. Instead, you can personalise within the email itself.
You don't have to use Promotions and Propositions when creating a campaign in Agillic. Only use them if they fit your use case.
You can read about how to create Promotions, Propositions, and Promotion fields here.
3. Channels Module
The Channels module is where you create all the content you want to send to your recipients or want them to see.
Emails are the most popular form of communication to send through Agillic. We have lots of features that enable you to easily create and personalise emails, boosting open and click rates.
In Agillic, emails are made up of Content Blocks. They help you arrange the content of your emails. You can insert static text, personalised text, images, or links into them. The underlying email HTML template determines the layout, available elements, and overall structure of your emails.
Our Email Editor is located in the Channels module.
You can learn how to create an Email here.
Transactional Email
Transactional emails are, in short, any emails that result from a transaction. They are emails sent when a user or customer takes some action and contain information that's relevant to that action. This could be an order receipt, shipping confirmation, or password reset.
Creating a transactional email requires the same steps as when creating a standard email as described above.
You can learn more about Transactional Emails here.
Advisor or Webpage
Web pages and Advisor pages fulfil different purposes in Agillic. Web pages are a great way of showing personalised content to your recipients. Advisor pages, on the other hand, help you create Advisor portals where you can display Person Data for reference purposes to those who don't have Agillic configurator status, such as your customer service department.
You can learn more about how to create an Advisor or web page here.
SMS
As well as emails, you're able to send text messages through Agillic. Our SMS feature is also controlled through Flows, meaning you have full control over who receives your SMS and when.
The SMS editor has a built-in character counter, which counts how many message parts your SMS will consist of. The total amount of characters will change depending on what types of characters you use. You can learn more about how SMS characters are calculated here.
There are two types of SMS in Agillic, Outbound SMS and Inbound SMS.
Learn more about how to create an SMS here.
The print channel allows you to generate PDF or HTML files to send out. They can be attached to email communications or exported to an external server which is ideal for physical printouts.
The Print Editor allows you to combine static and dynamic content in the form of Promotions, One-to-Many and Global Data Tables, and Data Lookup blocks. It works in a similar manner to the Email Editor.
Learn how to create a print file here.
Push Notifications
The push notification feature allows you to send a push notification on behalf of your smartphone app to your recipients. The push notification will then be sent to your own app push notification gateway, which will send the content to appear as a standard notification on the recipients' smartphone, which the recipient can swipe away or open.
Learn how to create a push notification here.
4. Flows Module
Flow
A Flow is primarily used to send outbound communications. You can also use a Flow to export recipient data, update your paid media audiences, and update data fields. They are the foundation of how you deal with data in Agillic.
Learn more about how to create a Flow here.
Steps
Steps are the building blocks of Agillic Flows. They control the types of communications in a Flow and how recipients will make their way through the Flow. This also means that a single Flow can contain different sorts of communications, leading your recipient down campaign paths depending on whether they fit the Flow logic.
You can learn more about Steps and how to insert them in Flows here.
Flow Execution
Once a Flow is configured, tested thoroughly, and ready for execution, one of the most important things to consider is how the Flow should be executed. In Agillic, there are three different ways to execute a Flow. They are manual Flow executions, scheduled Flow executions, and triggered Flow executions.
You can learn more about Flow executions and how to set them up in your Flows here.
5. Testing
Before going live with any campaign, it's very important to test your set up to make sure that everything works and looks as intended.
To test your set up, you'll need to make a Changes or Full Publish to Staging.
You can also learn more about publishing as well as Agillic's best practice for publishing here.
When testing your campaign, it's strongly recommended to test with different scenarios as well as:
- Testing your campaign with one or more correct test recipients.
- Testing your campaign with one or more incorrect test recipients.
6. Going Live
When you've tested your campaign, you're ready to go live. To go live, you'll need to publish all your configurations made on the Staging environment to the Production environment.
Learn how to Publish to Production here.
If the Flow for your campaign doesn't have a trigger or schedule on it, you'll need to manually execute the Flow on Production.
7. Reports Module
When your campaign is live, you may want to see how your campaign has performed. You can do this by making a report. It's important to note that you can only make a report of live data on the Production environment.
Learn how to create a report here.