This article explains how to add marketing touchpoints and set stage thresholds within BlueConic Lifecycles. Touchpoints are the specific actions or interactions a profile has with your brand, such as visiting a website, clicking an email, or making a purchase. They represent the various ways a customer engages with your marketing efforts. Thresholds define the criteria a profile must meet to advance from one stage of the lifecycle to the next. They act as the gatekeepers, ensuring profiles progress through the customer journey based on meaningful engagement.
Adding marketing touchpoints to a Lifecycle
For each stage in a customer Lifecycle, you will want to add marketing touchpoints targeted to profiles in that stage. You can add as many touchpoints as you would like to each stage.
BlueConic dialogues as touchpoints
To add marketing touchpoints in a Lifecycle stage, click Add touchpoint under the stage name.
A window appears with a list of BlueConic dialogues and connections you can choose to add to this stage.
Select the dialogues you want to include in this stage.
Dialogues that you place in a Lifecycle will now be directed to the audience for that Lifecycle stage, and only that audience. For this reason, it's best not to reuse dialogues that are active elsewhere in BlueConic.Click close.
Note: A single dialogue touchpoint can appear in more than one stage.
Adding connection goals as touchpoints
You can use BlueConic connection goals as Lifecycle touchpoints to export Lifecycle stage information and the profiles associated with a Lifecycle to other tools and systems for further analysis.
Note: A connection goal can be part of only one Lifecycle. Connection goals placed inside a lifecycle stage apply only to the profiles in that stage. They cannot be used elsewhere. Make copies of any connection goals you would like to use outside of the Lifecycle.
In a Lifecycle stage, click Add touchpoint. An overlay window appears that lists relevant connections and dialogues you can add as Lifecycle touchpoints.
Select the connections you want to use in the current stage.
When you've chosen a connection with multiple goals, you can select specific connection goals to be active for the stage. For example, you might choose to export all the profiles in a certain stage to your ESP as an email audience, or export these profiles to a BI tool for further analysis.
Note: Each Lifecycle stage can contain several different connection goals. While a connection goal can appear in several stages of the same Lifecycle, a connection goal cannot appear in multiple Lifecycles.Click Close.
In Lifecycles, you can see the export goal(s) listed in the stage.
Learn more: Visit BlueConic University
See the Lifecycle Touchpoints video in the BlueConic University.
Adding stage thresholds to a Lifecycle
Lifecycles offers a threshold setting that lets you reduce campaign pressure by limiting the number of touchpoints a profile encounters across channels in each stage of the journey.
For example, say your Lifecycle targets profiles on different channels and through different methods of activation. After a customer receives 2 emails, a push message on their mobile phone, and 3 Facebook messages in a week, they might start to feel overwhelmed. To prevent this pressure, you can add thresholds limiting the number of possible touchpoints per day, week, month, or quarter (for however many touchpoints you deem appropriate).
Setting thresholds for a lifecycle stage
In the Threshold section of a lifecycle stage, click No stage threshold.
Click the Stage threshold box to enter the number of interactions and the time period.
Choose the threshold time period from the dropdown menu: per day, per week, per month, or per quarter.
Click OK.
Keep in mind
The time period for thresholds is a sliding window, not a calendar day, week, month, or quarter.
The daily threshold is a rolling 24 hours. The following scenario explains how this works (with a threshold of 1 touchpoint per day):
Day 1: 10:00 a.m. - A customer visits the website; a dialogue is shown.
Day 1: 5:00 p.m. - The same customer visits the website again; no dialogue is shown because of the threshold of 1 touchpoint per day.
Day 2: 10:01 a.m. - The same customer visits the website yet again; the dialogue is shown because it's now more than 24 hours later, meaning the daily threshold passed.
All dialogues are automatically counted toward the threshold, but not all connections. For example, in the Lifecycle shown below, the Facebook Ads touchpoint in stage 1 does not count toward the stage threshold. See Connections and Lifecycles for details on each supported connection.
Threshold counts can go slightly over the stated limit in cases where several dialogues appear on a single page. For example, if the page display pushes past your threshold limit, BlueConic will display all the expected dialogue touchpoints, rather than leaving an empty space.
Aside from multiple dialogues on a page, thresholds might exceed their count because of scheduled batch connections with the same timing and importing events through a connection. (A touchpoint will only be registered on import.)
Learn more: Visit BlueConic University
See the Lifecycle Thresholds video in the BlueConic University.