T_PROMOTION and WordFly Email Campaigns

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

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  • 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a new response in and of itself, at least if you're successfully excluding hard bounces after you learn the address is no longer valid).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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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:

    1. Total count of eligible records according to Tessitura
    2. Total count of eligible (correctly imported) records according to WordFly--Total Sent--hopefully only very minor differences from the previous
    3. and then "Total Delivered", aka Total Sent minus ??? (I thought this was minus new hard bounces, but I can't trace the math on the campaign I pulled up to verify this, and don't see a reference in WF documentation)

    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:  

    6 = Opened
    7 = Hard Bounce
    8 = Soft Bounce
    9 = Click Through
    10 = Unsubscribe
     
    At the time this was standard, but a) could've changed since we implemented and b) could be customized in your implementation, e.g. you might flip Hard Bounces to Unsubscribe automatically (or do that in a contact preference or attribute...) and I might not remember correctly, but I think Wordfly unsubs hard bounces by default. 
    That said, Tessitura is not a fixed constant. Patrons change eaddresses, staff can manually flip promo responses, records get merged between extract/import/review, and not to mention things like Apple's obfuscations, bogged down database because of a data warehouse full refresh or a locked record due to a ticket order in process.  I'd try to leave some wiggle room in your expectations not just tor the known unknowns, but also unknown unknowns.