What are conditional groups in completion actions?

As you may or may not know, completion actions are actions applied to a prospect record when they interact with specific pieces of content in your Account Engagement instance. Completion actions can be added to forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails, and page actions. They ultimately allow you to save on your automation rule usage and ensure the appropriate updates are made on the prospect records immediately after engagement.

But what about conditional groups? Essentially, they are an extra layer of flexibility you can add to your completion actions. While regular completion actions will apply the action to all prospects upon engagement with an asset, completion actions with conditional groups will only apply the action to the subset of records you specify. It’s a pretty nifty capability, so let’s dig into some examples of how I have used or would use conditional groups in my completion actions.

What are some use cases for conditional groups in completion actions?

Forms/form handlers

A lot of B2B companies will gate their web content (i.e. a whitepaper) behind a form or form handler. Once the prospect has submitted the form an auto-responder email will then be sent to the prospect with the material they requested. This will usually come in the form of a one-size-fits-all email template. This isn’t necessarily bad, but we have the capability to do better in terms of personalizing the content towards our audiences. Using conditional groups in completion actions, we can evaluate the department or seniority level of the prospects that submit the form and send auto-responder emails with different types of messaging based upon those segmentations. Generating the form fill isn’t the last step in this process – it’s ensuring that form fill leads to a fruitful engagement that leaves your prospects feeling empowered and knowledgeable about your content.

Files

One location you can insert your files on is your landing pages hosted within Account Engagement. This could come in the form of an infographic demonstrating why your product is better than the next company, which could be indicative of a prospect’s intent to purchase when they view the file. And while accessing a file can already be included in your scoring model, you know this isn’t just your average file view – there’s a potential customer behind the view! You want your sales team to follow up with them immediately. Using conditional groups in your completion actions you can first check to see if the prospect is owned by a sales rep at your company. If that’s the case simply notify them using a conditional group in a completion action and create a task for them to follow up in SFDC. If the prospect isn’t assigned, though, you can create another completion action in a different conditional group to assign the prospect using your assignment rules in SFDC. No more unintentionally re-routing leads causing confusion amongst your reps and your potential customers.

Custom redirects

In our marketing automation platforms we should seek to avoid unnecessary processing wherever possible. One example of this would be if your company uses tags to classify potential prospects for deletion due to a lack of engagement over a defined period of time. Your company might run a “wake the dead” campaign to get old prospects to re-engage with your content to see if there still may be some lingering interest. By using a custom redirect with a completion action that has conditional groups in that email campaign, you can remove that tag from the prospect record if they end up clicking the custom redirect in your email. This will ensure the prospect won’t be deleted the next time you seek to clean your database.

Page actions

I’m a big fan of page actions. Gone are the days where you can simply wait around for your prospects to make the first move and reach out to you. Us B2B marketers need to be proactive by going out and capturing the demand our prospects are showing us. One example of this is when our prospects visit a high-intent page on your website, like a pricing page. Here’s the catch, though: you probably don’t want your sales team to follow up with everyone who is visiting your pricing page. Using conditional groups in your page action completion actions, you can first evaluate the prospect’s grade or score to determine if they’re ready to talk to your sales team. This will ensure only the highest quality prospects are assigned to your team for follow up, thus increasing the likelihood the prospect will convert to a fruitful opportunity.

Are there any best practices around using conditional groups in completion actions?

Keep these pointers in mind as you go about implementing your completion actions with conditional groups across your instance:

Completion actions, as a whole, only apply to prospects and not visitors

Now that you see the benefit of adding conditional groups to your completion actions you might be thinking of all the different places to implement. Keep in mind, though, your completion actions will more likely than not be applied to less people than you intended. Why? Well, not only do the individuals need to be prospects in your database, but certain assets (i.e. custom redirects) will only apply those completion actions to cookied prospects in your database.

Conditional groups in completion actions only allow for one criteria point to be evaluated in each group

While you can add multiple conditional groups to your completion actions, the same rule in only evaluating a single criteria point still applies. This may come into play when you’re really trying to segment your audiences. To balance everything out, I do believe the next pointer makes up for some of the limitations.

Conditional groups in completion actions allow for multiple actions to be applied to a prospect

This can come into play when you want to assign a prospect to one of your sales reps and add them to a specific campaign. Did somebody say “efficiency”?

The more complexity in your conditional groups in your completion actions for a form the longer it may take for that form to submit

A common theme in the technology world: the more complex your logic the more time it takes the system to evaluate various criteria points you have established. At the end of the day it’s our job as marketing ops professionals to ensure our prospects and customers have a great user experience with a brand, and that includes interactions with the assets that contain these conditional groups. Don’t get too spicy with your conditional groups, and definitely test the functionality before launching to ensure a solid user experience.

You are not able to configure conditional groups within email completion actions

I’ll be honest, this was a bit of a bummer when I first discovered this. However, you can still apply generic completion actions to your list emails, so don’t get too sad.

Conclusion

Conditional groups in completion actions are a solid functionality available to us in Account Engagement. You can use them with a variety of assets, they can be applied in a variety of use cases, and they have a variety of fields you can update within them. They ultimately allow you to execute your marketing strategy in a more flexible manner and ensure your operational processes are running in the smoothest way possible. So what are you waiting for? Take a look at your current forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, landing pages, and page actions to see how you can start using conditional groups in your completion actions today.
Not sure where to start? Reach out to our team today to get the ball rolling and see how you can improve your Account Engagement instance.