Alert Groups

Overview

The primary purpose of an Alert Group is to notify a select group of individuals when some triggering event has occurred. That event could be any activity recorded by the platform, such as an email click or a Web Form submission. When the event takes place, the system deploys a message via Email, SMS Text, or Push Notification to the recipients included in the Alert Group.

Alert Groups are different from Seed Lists. A Seed List allows the platform to send a "copy" of an outbound message to a selected group. Conversely, when you assign an Alert Group to a Campaign, that Alert Group serves as the only Audience for that Campaign, overwriting any other Audience Filter selections you may have made. For this reason, Alert Groups should be assigned to a separate, dedicated Event-triggered Campaign whose only purpose is to send out alert messages when the desired triggering event takes place. The content of this Alert Group message can be anything you need.

You can also manage your Alert Groups through the Alert Groups API. This API endpoint allows you to retrieve information about an Alert Group, to manage the recipients within an Alert Group, or to define a new Alert Group.

Example

As an example, let's say you want to send a promotional email Campaign to your consumers, and you want to notify your internal salespeople when a consumer clicks on that promotional message. In this scenario, you need to set up two different Campaigns within the platform. The primary Campaign is a typical email marketing Campaign, with your desired promotional content, and an Audience Filter of your intended recipients.

Next, you need a secondary Event-triggered Campaign, with the desired triggering event ("Click" activity in this example). You could define the content of this secondary Campaign to include the contact information for the consumer who clicked on the promotional message. That way, your salespeople could follow up with the consumer. You create an Alert Group consisting of your salespeople, then assign this Alert Group to this secondary Campaign. This Alert Group becomes the Audience for this secondary Campaign. You would then launch both Campaigns.

Let's say a consumer receives the promotional email message, and clicks on it. The platform tracks that activity, which in turn triggers the deployment of the secondary alert Campaign. The platform deploys this Campaign containing the consumer contact information to ONLY the Alert Group.

The flowchart below depicts this process of setting up two separate Campaigns -- one that gets sent to consumers, and one with an Alert Group assigned to it.