Skip Steps/Move Contacts Within Sequence
planned
Taylor Maurer
Been waiting on this one for about a year, and have been asking for it. A function to skip steps within sequences when there is missing data, or to move contacts within a sequence would be extremely useful. As it stands, one marketing campaign must have at least two sequences if you have some prospects with phones, and some without, if you want it to be fully automated.
Currently, since I like to differentiate people with work emails from those without, this means for one marketing campaign I need 4 sequences for it to be entirely automated. This skews stats and in general seems like an unnecessary hoop that should have been fixed long ago.
Reply Support
planned
Reply Support
under review
E
Eugene
Ollie speaking of the proposed skipping of the fields - we're working on the solution (it's different from what a customer suggested) however it would make their life easier. In short - it would be putting an entire sequence on pause in case there's missing data. Instead, it would be processing the rest of valid prospects and notify customer about missing data for some of the prospects.
the second issue about moving a prospect inside of the sequence - we can do it now no need to implement anything in addition
Taylor Maurer
Eugene: Just seeing this now, this definitely would not be the ideal solution, and moving candidates within sequences doesn't currently exist for SMS per my talks with support (unless things have changed, you're referring to moving people from one sequence back to the original, which is not automated and exactly the issue I'm talking about).
The idea of an automated email service is to be just that; automated, until I get a response or the sequence ends and I manually follow up. Simply put, if the solution you're proposing is what you go with, you may as well not bother, since it's simpler to just split the sequences entirely than it is to manually go in and shift people around multiple times when they happen to have missing information. I can basically choose:
1: Split the sequences and have Reply.io actually be an entirely automated experience, but have even less meaningful stats for emails (considering stats also don't take texting into account whatsoever to begin with, over half of our replies). This means if I want the stats to be of any use for my email messages, I need to gather the data across multiple sequences and average it, and considering 4 different sequences per active marketing campaign and the many active marketing campaigns I have going, just gathering the data is time consuming enough, not to even mention trying to figure out the stats for the texting.
2: Don't split the sequences and every time someone happens to have missing information for the 4000 contacts you reach a day, take hours a week to manually move them around the step.
Neither actually solves my problem, which would be option 3, an actual solution:
3: Reply.io identifies missing phone numbers in a sequence, and automatically shifts contacts to the next email step, meaning I can add all contacts for a specific campaign into a single sequence and it's 100% automated, other than when I get a response.
To further clarify, frequently we won't have phone numbers for contacts and sometimes emails, though it look like you're working on adding non-email contacts to Reply as well. While great, that will definitely also slam square into the problem that sequence stats don't track SMS replies, and we'll have to create another sequence for a single marketing campaign if we want to send more than one text AND have it be actually automated. When I say active marketing, I mean that relative to passive marketing, which is not trying to directly pitch our primary service, but maintain loose contact. Active marketing is where the money is really made, so having an easy way to do it and keep track of stats is key.