A special feature of marketing automation campaigns is that they are usually not set and scheduled, but are rather controlled by triggers that are activated at different times for each customer. This leads to the risk of overlapping marketing automation campaigns. We show you how to avoid this.

Some examples for triggered marketing automation campaigns:

  • Birthday emails are sent on the birthday of the respective customer.
  • Welcome note sequences start as soon as a customer registers for the associated service (for example, your newsletter, your store, or your cloud software).
  • After-sales campaigns (for example cross-sells and upsells or satisfaction surveys) start after a purchase.
  • Lead nurturing campaigns are triggered by a download or webinar participation.

There are many more occasions for Marketing Automation campaigns. Also, keep in mind that in addition to your Marketing Automation campaigns, you also send a newsletter as well as transactional emails, if applicable.

The more you communicate, the greater the risk of overlap between different campaigns. These overlaps can be of a content nature, as in the same offer from different campaigns. However, what happens even more quickly is that the customer simply receives too many emails at once and feels annoyed by them.

How to avoid overlapping

There are three main possible ways to prevent this from happening: 1.You design the workflows of your Marketing Automation campaigns to minimize overlaps. For each new campaign, you have to take into account the interdependencies with other Marketing Automation campaigns and other assets. Advantage: perfect orchestration. Disadvantage: quite complex to plan and manage. 2.You define priorities – meaning that when a campaign is running for one customer, all others with lower priority are either not executed, paused or canceled. Advantage: clear priorities also in terms of goals regarding the customer. Disadvantage: sometimes low-priority campaigns might then run very infrequently or not at all. You set up a maximum dispatch frequency for all your campaigns using so-called frequency capping. Then only a maximum number of messages is played out across all campaigns. Advantage: usually very easy to plan. Disadvantage: this can sometimes interfere with campaigns that build on each other, because individual steps are omitted.