Using Campaign Studio’s Stages feature can help marketers identify how contacts are moving through the lifecycle or funnel. Campaign Studio uses stages for segmentation and campaign conditions. There are also specific dashboard widgets for seeing the movement of stages and the number of contacts in each stage.
Creating stages
Navigate to the Stages section in the left side menu, and then click +New.
Name: While most companies have similar stage structures, each company uses them differently. Come up with the stages you want to track different parts of your marketing funnel with.
Description: Acquia recommends adding a description to make it easy for you and other users to identify what qualifies a contact for that stage.
Weight: Used to decide the progression of your stages. The greater the stage weight number, the further along in the funnel a contact is. Contacts cannot move backwards to stages with lower weights.
Category: You can have multiple funnels with different stages, and multiple stages across those funnels or categories with the same weight. A contact can only ever be in one stage at a time, and cannot move backwards in stages. For more information, see Global Categories.
Published: Set the Yes/No toggle bar to publish or unpublish a stage. If a stage is unpublished, data for the stage is not displayed on the dashboard widget. The stage is not displayed for segment filters or campaign conditions.
Publish at: Set the date and time you want the stage to publish.
To schedule a stage to publish at a specified date and time:
Click the Publish at (date/time) box and select your preferred date and time from the Date and Time picker.
Set Published to Yes.
Campaign Studio marks the stage as Pending and publishes it at the scheduled date and time.
Unpublish at: Set the date and time you want a stage to unpublish.
To schedule a published stage to unpublish at a specified date and time:
Click the Unpublish at (date/time) box and select your preferred date and time from the Date and Time picker.
Campaign Studio unpublishes the stage at the scheduled date and time.
Important
The Date and Time picker shows the date and time according to the default timezone set for your user’s profile in System Settings. Therefore, before scheduling a stage to publish or unpublish, you must check the default timezone.
Moving contacts between stages
Moving contacts between stages requires a campaign action. Depending on how you define your contact lifecycle and stages, there may be different triggers for a contact to move between stages. Examples include behaviors within a campaign, or moving between segments which have criteria set up for each stage. In any campaign where you want to have contacts move between new stages:
Add a new Action.
Select Change contact’s stage as the action type.
Select the stage you want to move the contacts to. You can base this on a prior event, or on a segment that contacts are in based on filters matching your requirements for a stage.
For more information on setting up campaigns, see Adding events.
Visualizing stage movement
The Campaign Studio dashboard features two widgets to help users see how contacts are moving between stages.
Stages in time
The stages in time widget shows how often contacts change stages. More change indicates more velocity through your funnel.
Lifecycle
The lifecycle widget enables marketers to see the number of contacts within a specified segment in each stage. You may include multiple segments on the widget. It is possible to have more than one lifecycle widget to break down the information into separate graphs, but still display the data on the dashboard for multiple segments.