Discussions
Emergency "Pause All" for Campaign Canvases
While there is a "Stop All Services" section in the Eloqua notification service, I think it would be great to have a "Pause All" for or "Pause Campaign Type" section in Eloqua.
During certain societal events (George Floyd Murder, School Shootings, January 6 Insurrection, etc.) I would like pause all outbound campaigns. The last thing people need while they work through these events is someone knocking on the door to sell them something.
Having this level of control would allow admins that ability to control outgoing comms for a set or indefinite amount of time. It wouldn't require marketers to disable each and every active/scheduled send individually or remember which ones were active.
Then admins can hit the button to resume once the time is appropriate.
Comments
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Love this idea! Something like a master control board that lists all assets, you could expand/collapse, turn them on/off, etc.
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I would not be in favor of a button to stop everything as it might also stop critical campaigns that need to go regardless of any situation.
I do like the idea to have a list with checkboxes to cherry pick the ones to pause/reactivate.
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If you do need something like this urgently you could work around it with the api.
Create a campaign field and set it for each campaign (critical/non critical). Once you have this you could run an api call to get all active campaigns with a non critical value and then use further api calls to pause and activate them at will.
It's a small time investment to build something (or even just a postman collection) but it could be re-usable once you have it.
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Like it, good idea Ryan! @Vic Almeida-Oracle @Stephen Streich-Oracle
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It is a good idea and @Sebastiaan Van Dingenen thoughts went exactly where mine went. In most cases I think you would need/want to distinguish between critical and triggered campaigns (customer initiated) versus those of a more passive nurture type. For example, an action by a customer like a form submit may place them directly into a campaign that will fulfill the CTA/offer. If that campaign were paused, the customer would not get their expected message/content/offer. Another example might be a webinar registration where the Zoom/WebEx/GoTo integrations on the campaign canvas are fulfilling part of an explicit registration process.
Stopping all campaigns of a campaign type or based on a custom campaign field would give the most control as long as customers are diligent about setting that. Other factors to consider are whether you want all the contacts dripping into various campaigns or batches scheduled to be activated but paused to be queuing up the whole time campaigns are paused and then flow en masse was things are un-paused. There is some inherent trickiness there too as some messages are time-bound in terms of relevance and some are not.
Finally, you might want automation to proceed but channel messages to be suppressed or queued. This would be much trickier to implement (from a product perspective) but rather than pausing the workflow automation put the campaigns into a state where action steps like email or SMS send queue contacts.
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@Stephen Streich-Oracle Totally agree. I know there are layers here, hence my "Pause Campaign Type" thought. Whether that's determined by a custom campaign field or you just suppress emails by email group, I'd like to see this put in place without having to pause all automations like form submissions/processing, integration, program flows, etc.
I do think (like many things in Eloqua) it can be a solution that you have a restructure your asset management around, similar to contact level security.
@Sebastiaan Van Dingenen, the API idea also works well, but there are so few marketing professionals - even admins - who don't get into API work. Since these are the people who would probably be at ground level, it'd be ideal to have it in the UI of the product.
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The Email Governor for Eloqua supports temporarily pausing sends. You can pause the entire Eloqua instance or a specific “email queue” giving you control over what types of communication to disable. Like @Stephen Streich-Oracle suggests, you wouldn’t want to pause the workflow automation itself but rather queue up the contacts for any send email (or SMS) steps and that’s exactly what the Governor does. Contacts are queued so when the instance/email queue is un-paused the sends continue as normal. Best of all, the touch frequency settings make sure contacts don’t receive a ton of messages all at once when the campaign flow is resumed.
