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Marketing Cloud Application and Automation Fixes #6

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ktheiler opened this issue Oct 12, 2021 · 16 comments
Open
2 of 3 tasks

Marketing Cloud Application and Automation Fixes #6

ktheiler opened this issue Oct 12, 2021 · 16 comments

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@ktheiler
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ktheiler commented Oct 12, 2021 •
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There are several automations created in Marketing Cloud and Cvent that are no longer working.

  • CU Anschutz Acknowledgement email Data Extension and email send
  • CU Boulder A&S Acknowledgement Data Extension list build
  • Marketing Cloud Send Report app
  • Ongoing All Emailable Imports
  • Cvent CUF financial report (donations made through Cvent web pages)

Salesforce tech support will not support fixes on either of the Acks automations because it is out of scope with each using more than 200 lines of code. The OG All emailable import may be pulling a list that is too large as a Salesforce Report, so it may just require us breaking the list out per campus. The Send Report app is no longer working and not sure why. The Cvent automation built for CUF has not consistently worked in the past and needs to be reviewed after the latest fix.

Ideally, we can learn more about how automations can be built effectively and scale the ones we build for all users (i.e. Acks lists and emails).

  • Alex, Ian, Katie meeting to review
  • Katie, Jen Mortensen, Melanie Jones, Travis Holland, Saskia Sawyer meeting to discuss latest fix for Cvent automation (Mel Jones may have a long-term solution)
  • Eval whether issue needs to close based on moving into another direction to solve fundamental issues (i.e. why and when we send Acknowledgements; Acks being one of our more important touchpoints because of the act of recognizing the donor. But, we need to ask ourselves, "what does the donor want to hear? when do they want to hear it?" We already send two thank you receipts for automatic acknowledgement triggered by the payment process that help a donor file for tax purposes. What is the purpose of the individualized department Ack?
@ktheiler ktheiler changed the title Marketing Cloud Application Fix Marketing Cloud Application and Automation Fixes Nov 16, 2021
@alexfinnarn
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alexfinnarn commented Nov 22, 2021 •
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@ktheiler I think the next step here is to link to the two broken apps. I have an account with access to "CU Advancement (MID: 7327142)" instance, and I'd need to view them there. at this point, I'm not even sure what part of MC the apps relate to.

I think "Contact Builder" is where the app should live, but I have a lot to learn about MC. Any links to apps, wiki articles, etc. would be helpful to have. Is the Confluence wiki the place to go for that info?

@alexfinnarn
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Advancement eComm users submit an EID list in Workfront, which we use to create and add contacts to a Salesforce Campaign. We then build a sendable (filtered by email preferences) Salesforce Report from this campaign that the users can send their solicitations, event emails and stewardship comms to via Marketing Cloud.

Taken from: https://advwiki.cu.edu/display/digital/Salesforce

I think that was the information I was looking for. It makes sense why "email preferences" aren't used exclusively using this method, but ideally, users would submit which lists they want an email sent to and be done with it.

Unfortunately, the simple solution of changing business processes vs. fixing them in code is probably a hard one to stomach for this group if they can't send emails to specific EIDs they've gathered.

Realistically, the donors (EIDs) will already be in the lists they subscribed to when making a donation unless someone has unsubscribed from that list already.

Also, this burdens the research team, if they are involved in pulling EID lists. They have to come from Advance now but in ascend hopefully, it is different. I'm not sure they should be involved in marketing emails vs. prospect development, but that's another conversation.

I was looking for other docs in the wiki, but after reading a bit on this process, it does seem crazy and very involved for little gain vs. the simpler "create email, pick lists to send to, send" workflow.

@ktheiler
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Two things jump out at me from your thoughts:

  1. Prospect development should be a bit of a different approach from email strategy. Email done on a mass scale like we are doing (for the most part) is impersonal and disposable. Prospect development doesn't have to be white-glove treatment for each donor, but it can be a bit more personalized where the digital framework that supports it is so polished and easy-to-use the donor, or potential donor, still feels connected to the brand and to some sort of human element.

  2. I'd really need to dig into the analytics more to assess whether there is "little gain" from our email strategy. But, it is a hunch because we know that we're not optimizing our resources across staff or the SF tools themselves.

@alexfinnarn
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alexfinnarn commented Nov 24, 2021 •
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@ktheiler I think https://www.cu.edu/doc/ecomm-policypdf-1 has some teeth in it as far as enforcement goes.

Sends to any audience shall have a legitimate and strategic business purpose that collaborates within the larger CU ecosystem. If a legitimate and strategic business purpose cannot be demonstrated, an exception shall be required. When communications target lists beyond constituent affiliation (e.g. cross-campus program promotions), they shall be assessed and approved or denied via the exception process.

So the "Happy Thanksgiving" email could easily fall under "a legitimate and strategic business purpose cannot be demonstrated" and be rejected for that reason. To remedy it, they have to bring in their boss or something like that in order to get an exception.

If this information isn't on WF request forms, I think it should be. The document still says eComm is under University Relations so the policy may have changed since then, but this is what people on giving.cu.edu end up at if you were to try and find out how/why you are receiving emails.

Another resource I found https://www.cu.edu/blog/ecomm-wiki/emailing-donors-ecomm is giving me a better sense of the process.

Emails should be sent to the smallest group of individuals possible while still reaching the intended audience.

Another gem. do you think the people who control this content would be open to suggestions for changing messaging? If they guide people into using lists vs. developing audiences using "your helpful ecomm specialist" to do all the work, it likely will be easier to change minds.

@alexfinnarn
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Confusingly enough, I see many email lists when I want to unsubscribe so it seems like picking lists to send emails to is already set up?

Screen Shot 2021-11-24 at 11 47 12 AM

If users could select these lists from an autocomplete or select list when filling out a WF request, would that work for people?

Since they have to ask for the data, I think this would be easy to change for Advancement. Just point people to lists and when they complain enough, a new list is created based on what they want from the old method of gathering EIDs.

@ktheiler
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Hi Ian and Alex,

Below is the information I’ve gathered on the “broken” apps/automations in Marketing Cloud. One supports CU Boulder Arts & Sciences Thank You/Acknowledgement emails and the other supports CU Anschutz Thank You/Acknowledgement emails.

Both Marketing Cloud Automations start when a user adds data in the form of EIDs (as a tab delimited Text (txt)" file) via their respective “app” web page Matt built.
A&S
Anschutz (not sure why, but this one is now requiring a login and it wasn’t before)

CU Boulder Arts & Sciences – MID: 7327145

You can find the automations that get triggered by the data input on the web page under:
Journey Builder > Automation Studio

There is one Data Extension build automation and then three separate “merge data” automations that pertain to specific Thank You/Acknowledgement email types.
GS = Graduate School
AS = General A&S
CWA = I believe stands for Conference on World Affairs

What’s interesting, is none of the automations indicate that they are NOT working. Usually there is a red symbol to indicate it’s not functioning. For fun, I tried the option to “Run Once” for the GS automation and it worked from what I could tell. I’d say we could go ahead and test this, but I want to wait until Jenny Milligan – our stakeholder at A&S – confirms for me that she manually hits send for these emails because the Anschutz automations are completely automatic in the sense that once the user adds the data to the external web page Matt built it builds the Data Extension and sends the email. I’m fairly certain, though, that Jenny plays a role in the send.

CU Anschutz - MID: 7327143

Journey Builder > Automation Studio > OG Acks Letters

Again – this one has no red indicating a malfunction. I did not try the Run Once option because I know for certain this one is fully automated, I would hate for some old data to get run through it again (may not even be how these automations are set up – but I’m not certain).

Rudimentary thinking here – but the fact that I don’t see any obvious indications of a failure in the automations themselves, is the disconnect between the data input web page and the automation (something gets lost in translation)? Just one thought for now.

What other info would be helpful to have at this point?

@ktheiler
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FROM ALEX in response to MC information

Thanks for pulling this together. I can’t seem to get anywhere when I click those two links, but I think it’s better to write out the main steps and then work forwards from there.

I did find more in the document https://advwiki.cu.edu/display/digital/CU+Anschutz+Acknowledgements+Builder and I think the docs in here are mostly accurate?

“That 09 ADV OGAllEmailable SUB TY SFDE is updated from this Report in Salesforce with the same name. This update runs nightly via and Automation Studio activity called 09 ADV OGAllEmailable Imports in the main CU Advancement biz unit.”

I think an automation could update separate lists so users can choose them to send emails to those lists instead of submitting a list of EIDs, but that would require changing the process of what people do now. It’s also bad practice to email people who didn’t sign up for emails, and an email I used for making a donation is subscribed to all communications…or at least I can be sent all of the emails, but I guess I get filtered out of most of them.

One “Happy Thanksgiving” email from CU Advancement is the reason I looked to unsubscribe…the email had no substance, solicitation, or link…and I’m wondering why someone thought it would be a good idea to send those kinds of emails to people. In fact, I don’t think I get any other emails like that in my whole inbox…everyone else has a conversion they are trying to make.

The “09 ADV OGAllEmailable SUB TY” data extension seems like it would be better split up per campus as realistically, most donors have affinity towards a campus vs. all of CU…at least that’s my assumption. The extension has each campus listed as a boolean, but you could easily just remove a user from a campus list rather than change the Boolean in a data extension. This would cut down on processing time amongst other benefits. But once again, I’m not sure of the appetite for people to make these changes.

But I digress…it’s best to keep conversation in GH issues vs. email. I can only get to the “CU Advancement” MC instance so I can’t look at the two cloudpages you linked to.

I think the best next step is to take on the perspective of a user. How do they get added to lists? Are they added to all lists at once? I don’t ever remember signing up for anything myself, but I have made donations to different funds.

@ktheiler
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First thing I want to tackle – you can’t access any other Advancement biz unit? Ian, can you access more than just CU Advancement? I am doing provisioning today and can make sure I let the Central eComm team know what kind of access we all need. If I don’t hear back today, please let me know Monday because that is the last day I can provision until end of December.

The automated email list import you refer to is actually an automation that also broke after Matt left, but SF support seemed to help partially solve the failure and it seemed to be working for a good month. However, when I went to check on it today, it was … you guessed it – brokety broke! Part of the fix was changing the name of the automation. Here was SF tech support advice originally that worked for a while:
Please eliminate spaces in the File Naming Pattern of the import activity and it should complete without any errors.

But, I also just found some follow-up advice in the case that stated they actually think the import is pulling too large a group of records (pulling from a Salesforce Report). So, it’s probably going to continue failing until we do something like break the list apart – per your thought on campus automated list imports. Problem is, I don’t know how large is too large for Salesforce and Marketing Cloud, so we’d have to find out.

@alexfinnarn
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This just keeps getting more confusing...

Each email HAS to be part of a list since that's what users unsubscribe from. So lists are being used and MC automatically unsubscribes people from them. I'm not sure CAN-SPAM is being followed now and the eComm help puts the "eComm specialist" on the hook for compliance.

Theoretically:

  1. As a donor I get an email and I want to unsubscribe from similar emails.
  2. I go to manage my preferences and click unsubscribe from one list but not the "unsubscribe from all emails for campus X". I think I will not get more emails.
  3. My EID is included in a new request.
  4. I still get an email after thinking I unsubscribed from the correct list. So, I have to go back to manage my preferences and try to figure out how many lists I have to unsubscribe from.

So yeah, I'm not sure if the process complies with the law as it's done now and the university will point at the person running the MC app as the issue.

Also, "opt-out" might be illegal now and it appears to be the strategy used vs. "opt-in" to each list. Regardless, the UX for donors is far from ideal and not like most people are used to.

@ktheiler
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Philosophically, you raise an interesting point - "what does the user believe is happening when they manage their preferences?" It's very possible they assume choosing "unsubscribe" means they'll never hear from CU again, but they'd be wrong because they have to be very specific about what they want to get an email about and what they don't. On the flip side, I've already run into situations with high-end donors who explicitly WANT certain emails from CU and DO NOT WANT other emails and get really miffed if it's not captured correctly for them.

As for how they get added in the first place, it's a question Matt wasn't able to answer for me when he left and I got overloaded and didn't follow up with someone like Caroline to find out. Giving a donation is definitely one way we add people to our email lists, but I want to know if there are other ways (donor newsletters, event sign up etc.)

@alexfinnarn
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alexfinnarn commented Nov 29, 2021 •
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@ktheiler

To follow up with this issue. I'm mainly looking at the Marketing Cloud UI and https://advwiki.cu.edu/display/digital/eComm+user+data+extension+update+process and I thought it best to make an ordered list since I still have a lot of questions...now unordered since markdown groups things better that way.

In the end, hopefully, the whole acknowledgment email process can be automated. I can't think of a reason a human needs to be involved if the main purpose is to send emails to donors about recent gifts they've made.

  • You can provision my user account to more orgs/divisions in MC. I'm wary of spending more money on licenses but if there are available then why not.
  • It's probably best to look at a specific send with the correct input of EIDs and correct output of...
  • Determine data extensions used
    • I see "ongoing acknowledgment data extension"
    • a weekly extension for each email? - "creates a target DE for current week's acknowledgments"
  • Do "acknowledgment types" equate to "lists"?
    • From the docs, it says "Acknowledgement type (named Ack Type) (MU for music, CSF for Shakespeare festival, CWA for Conference on World Affairs)".
  • Do I need to know about the acknowledgment process? Seems like there are business rules for when people are supposed to get these emails.
    • From docs: "For example, if they gave on any day during the week of January 11, their acknowledgment date group would be 01-11-2021 (the first workday of the week)."
  • Why is there an extension created for people you can't send to? Is it used?
    • From docs: "While loading, the Builder app is creating the initial data extensions — one for your email audience and one for those who cannot be sent to."
  • I can investigate how people get added to acknowledgment lists and see what the giving.cu.edu site communicates to MC when someone makes a donation, but maybe you have a start?

..and that's all I can look at for now. Still a lot of things to parse through, but I'll leave that for another day.

Reading this over, it's mostly me thinking out loud, but feel free to comment on what stands out to you.

@alexfinnarn
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I just followed https://www.cu.edu/ecomm/login to log into MC. Even after resetting my password, I get the following message:

Please check your username and password. Reset your password if necessary.

So, I'm not sure if my user account was disabled or what, but I was able to reset the password for my [email protected] account.

@ktheiler
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ktheiler commented Jan 18, 2022 via email

@ktheiler
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ktheiler commented Jan 18, 2022 via email

@alexfinnarn
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It was the VPN issue; however, you don't see an error related to the issue. So, just the same as the held transactions on the Giving site not showing users what the actual error is.

@alexfinnarn alexfinnarn mentioned this issue Aug 9, 2022
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@ktheiler
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ktheiler commented Aug 9, 2022

The current state of this issue is that Sys eComm is using their new technology-focused staff to figure out more automation options and training on that in the future. So, I can archive this (lots of good context in this issue).

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@alexfinnarn @imkleats @ktheiler