Hello WordFly users,
Has anyone ever had the problem of using a list in WordFly, making changes to the list on the WordFly side (removing subscribers), then having a promotion assigned to the record anyway? Ideally, a promotion would only be added to a record if the email was sent to them--or at least attempted to get sent to them. Do you have any ideas for how one might go about correcting said issue (short of hopping in a time machine and correcting the list on the Tessitura side)?
Thanks in advance for any insight you feel inclined to share!
Michael
Hey Michael,
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but doesn't the list get promoted whenyou pull it through in the subscriber phase. I've use the sourcenumber data field in the past as a conditional block value and I think that's created when the source_no gets written back to the appeal (and taged the customer_no in T_Promotion). I think that's because you get difference source_no if you pull in multiple lists into the email campaign. I agree it could be nice to then have the response in T_promotion of SENT.
Heath Wilder is correct - the promotions are added when the list or extraction is pulled in to WordFly. You can find more details in their support doc.
But yes Michael Dorsey you highlight a good point in that the promotion record is not a record of whether the constituent record was sent the email, rather that they were included in the list that was passed to WordFly. If WordFly doesn't send to them for whatever reason - unsubscribe, suppression, invalid email etc - then that data only lives in WordFly and does not end up back in Tessitura.
All this highlights that for email campaigns the only real source of truth is WordFly itself. Tessitura constituent records will have gaps.
Thank you, David Geoffrey Hall and Heath Wilder, for taking the time to respond. As I pondered this further today, I realized that some of this is inevitable. I think what it comes down to is we need to do our best on the front-end to weed out the gap points on the Tess side so there's minimal change made to the list on the WordFly end. I feel like it's easier to do with extractions, but one wrong setting in communication mgmt will put a source on a record that will not be included once it gets to WordFly. It's good to know I'm not alone in seeing this discrepancy. Thanks again!
Although this has mostly wrapped up, I'll add one reaction it prompted for me:
Depending on what work you are tackling when editing subscribers in WordFly, you might be able to do that same manual effort in Tessitura pre-import. You'd have to be using a List rather than an Extraction, and I only think this is is remotely practical if you're removing names because you're seeing them and recognizing them as candidates to remove--a small-ish and 1:1 exercise. But for situations where you are cherry-picking what to cut, doing it within the Tessitura List will avoid them getting the promoted source.
Hello! Two things I'll add to this discussion:
-In my extractions, I have a suppression segment with the criteria of "Promotion Response = Unsubscribe." At least that way I'm not promoting the source to an account that is not going to receive it. Similarly, I used to include Hard Bounces here, but I've stopped that for now because I'm trying other methods of tackling bounces and don't want to automatically suppress those constituents.
-One of my pet peeves with Wordfly is in the reporting process for email sends themselves. I do NOT like that a constituent's profile doesn't actually say if they were sent the email, just that they were on the list. Yes, we can see if they opened or clicked it, but we can't simply see if it was successfully delivered. I find this very frustrating! There is not a simple way to answer the question "did this person get the email," which is asked frequently.
Jean, what are you considering proof of successful delivery?
In my book, we don't have this data at all, anywhere, at least not outside of Hard Bounces (which is a new response in and of itself, at least if you're successfully excluding hard bounces after you learn the address is no longer valid). I agree that it's imperfect that we get another layer of filtering after the import and the tagging of the record, but, at least for us, this is maybe 2-10 records per campaign and we use it as an excuse for manual clean up in Tessitura. Typically, anything that pops as a mismatch is a discovery of a duplicate and we schedule a merge. There's very little chance that a record is labeled as included AND appears viable by the time someone would ask if the constituent got a message.
Jamie O'Brien Probably just more of a terminology difference I'm still not used to. In previous ESPs, like MailChimp, I could look up a record and it would say "was sent this email," not just "was on this list." Though of course that doesn't tell us it actually made it through spam filters and whatnot.
Yeah, semantics it seems.
Though I'd appreciate a correction if I'm overlooking something, my understanding is that we'll encounter 3 different total numbers when we're using WordFly-as-integrated-with-Tessitura Lists/Extractions:
I'd assume--though probably incorrectly?--that if the difference between Sent vs Delivered is a bounce, the constituent record WILL indicate this rather than be a null response. At least if your procedure syncs Hard and Soft Bounces.
You can drill into your WordFly code to see what status are supported. For us WordFly can update Tessitura promo records: