4 ways to build better marketing campaign orchestrations

Most marketers have seen a marketing automation tool before where you can design the perfect customer experiences and view them in a visually-appealing way, but Cordial’s cross-channel campaign Orchestration Builder is so much more than just a pretty markup on your computer screen. Orchestration Builder is a user interface (UI) of the Cordial platform designed to add a high-level visualization to your customer journeys. Cross-channel orchestrations offer marketers the ability to build customer journeys  that best serve their customers and their lifecycle. Instead of planning messages as individual touchpoints that trigger in a loosely connected chain, Orchestration Builder puts you in the place of a single contact navigating the twists and turns of a messaging journey. 

Each orchestration starts with a single trigger, how a contact enters the orchestration. From there, contacts will wait through the first delay, should your contacts receive the first message immediately or in a certain number of minutes/hours/days. 

Next, they will pass through a filter. If a contact is filtered out they are completely removed from the orchestration. Contacts who’ve made it through the above steps hit the first action of the orchestration. Subsequent stages in the orchestration will follow the above steps with an added option of including a wait until, where you can delay the remaining stages until a new customer action. Each step of the orchestration flows from the next.

Orchestration Builder is incredibly useful for building complex journeys with multiple forks and paths, but some of the coolest use cases aren’t always the first things you’d think of. To get you started thinking outside the box, here are four things you might not know about Orchestration Builder.

One trigger, multiple actions

A customer just completed a purchase. Do you want to trigger an email, a data job that increments total lifetime value, or a rest call to your warehouse to start order processing? Why choose? 

Orchestration Builder is designed to trigger multiple actions from a single event. From the UI you can pick a trigger and add as many paths as you’d like. Going back to the purchase, we can easily kick off an order confirmation email like the image to the left.

You may also want to trigger a REST call to let your customer service team know that they should reach out to arrange delivery. That is just as easy, like the image to the right.

Adding actions with other channels is as easy as clicking “Add Action.” You can mix and match emails with API calls like the previous example or send SMS with a data job. Every messaging channel enabled in your Cordial account is accessible in the Orchestration Builder UI.

Test content and timelines

Testing is the lifeblood of marketing. Running tests is how we determine what types of content perform best for our audience. Answering questions like “What CTAs are most enticing?” or “How does dynamic content compare to static content?” should already be a large part of your program and daily marketing activities. 

Questions like, “Will two Cart Abandonment messages improve performance?” or “How many days should we wait between messages in a welcome series?” are tougher to answer since they require splitting your customers into unique groups for extended periods of time. This is where Orchestration Builder shines.

When you set up your first experiment, you’ll have the option to add as many forks as you’d like. Inside each fork you can decide to add as many or a few actions as you’d like. 

For example: if you think adding a third message to your welcome series will increase overall conversions, but are worried it will be offset by an increase in opt outs—by running the experiment on the left, you’ll be able to definitively test your theory. 

Measure what matters

Every time you reach out to your customers, there should be a goal in mind. A specific action you want them to take. Maybe you want to keep them engaged with your brand by reading a blog, maybe it’s time to refill a product subscription, or maybe you want them to make their first purchase. That’s where goals come in. 

Orchestration Builder lets you build the goal into the orchestration. All you need to do is click the trophy icon in the top right corner of the page and fill out a few fields.

First, use the open text box to enter the goal of the orchestration in plain text. Next, select an event that means that the goal has been met. Lastly you’ll decide if you want to remove a customer once they’ve met the goal. For example, if you’re setting up a cart abandonment message, you would set a goal for the customer to make a new order. And, if they make a purchase you won’t want them to keep getting cart abandonment messages. You would set up your goal to look like this.

Once your goal is set up, Cordial will also start tracking metrics against that so that you can always see how your orchestration is performing at a glance. 

Think beyond the message

With Cordial you aren’t limited to just email messages, so your orchestrations aren’t limited to email either. In fact, some of the most powerful orchestrations you can create won’t include an outbound message. 

Let’s say you want to start a new campaign to incentivize signups. To do that you plan to send $5 gift cards to new signups who also provide their physical address. But, at the same time you want to make sure people can’t sign up multiple times or sign up with bad addresses. With Orchestration Builder you can build an orchestration that utilizes Data Transformations and REST calls to verify and compare contacts’ reported physical addresses.

To get into specifics, the first thing you’ll need to do is set the orchestration to trigger every time a contact signs up for the program with their address. The first action in the orchestration is to make a REST call to a service that will verify a contact’s address. Once that address is verified, the second action is a data transformation that compares that address to all the other addresses on file. Once that is complete, Cordial will fire another REST call back to let you know if the address reported actually exists or if that address was already claimed by another contact in the system. 

Build your first orchestration

Building orchestrations in Cordial is extremely easy, and (almost more importantly) it is also extremely flexible. If you are starting with a single message or you have a multi-touch series, getting it set up and sending with Orchestration Builder is a breeze. From there you can focus your efforts on incrementing and improving your orchestration. No matter how much complexity you add, it will still be easy to trace a customer’s journey through any orchestration. To learn more about Orchestration Builder, reach out to schedule a demo of the Cordial platform or visit our Knowledge Base for technical documentation.