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Adding Past Profiles - after adding an email to an existing flow

  • 6 April 2024
  • 3 replies
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Userlevel 1
Badge +2

Hello!

We currently have a Post Purchase ”Care Guiide” flow for one of our best selling collections, and this has been running for over a year and a half. There’s currently one email in the flow (and it goes out 50 days post fulfillment - with the trigger being “has placed order in ** collection”)

We’d like to add a second email to this flow in the next few weeks, but would like to have this go out 180 days post fulfillment. 

Now my question is, i see that you can select the action “add past profiles”. Can someone confirm with me that if i select add past profiles, people who already received email 1 of this flow, would then go back into the flow and receive email 2 (180 days), once they’ve hit that timing period. Say they purchased this sofa 100 days ago, they received email 1 and now they only need to wait 80 more days to receive that second email?

Thanks in advance!

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Best answer by StefanUE 8 April 2024, 08:41

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Userlevel 5
Badge +18

@LM0721 hey, thanks for your question!

Backpopulating flows (as it used to be called) is very tricky, so you’ve done well in reaching out to the community!

Your flow is metric-triggered, so good news - you are able to add past profiles to it!

A caveat regarding adding past profiles to metric-triggered flows is that you can only add past profiles relative to when someone performed the action that triggered the flow. 

What this means is that it doesn’t matter when you’ve clicked the button, what matters is when they actually performed the metric. If that happened 80 days ago, for example, they would receive email 1 immediately (as the delay time has passed), and then they would need to wait another 100 days to receive the second email (that you’re trying to implement now, as that one has a 180-day delay). 

Here’s an article explaining this in slightly more detail.

Happy to chat further!

Userlevel 7
Badge +36

Hi @LM0721 

In addition to the great response by @StefanUE as he says, adding past profiles can be tricky, so I suggest you copy your flow for testing, add your new 180-day email and set ALL emails to manual. Then, when you add past profiles to that test flow, no emails will be sent, but you will be able to review the contacts waiting at each step so you can validate a sample of them to ensure all is as expected. Then return to your original flow and make your updates there.

An extra step but one that I find avoids errors and reduces stress 😀

Hope that helps

Regards

Andy

Userlevel 1
Badge +2

Thank you both!

@StefanUE , if i turn the add past profiles on, would they receive email #1 again (if they already got it?)

Love the idea of creating a test flow before going live with this.

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