Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Enterprise (Thrive Marketing Enterprise) enables you to have multiple campaigns working in parallel. Some of your campaigns might send emails, others may assign points based on Contact reactions to emails, and others still may segment your Contacts into different groups. Because Thrive Marketing Enterprise runs all of these campaigns in real time, there a few timing considerations to keep in mind if you stop and restart a campaign.

In this article, you'll learn what happens when a campaign is stopped and restarted.

Stop a campaign

Why would I stop a campaign?

The simple answer is you don’t want it to perform any more actions (e.g., send any more messages, assign any more points, apply any more tags). This might occur for several reasons, including:

• The campaign has a clear end date (e.g., it might be promoting a conference that only occurs once, and once the conference is complete, the campaign can be stopped).
• You have built new campaigns based on new business requirements, and an old campaign is no longer needed. For example, maybe you had a single Welcome campaign to send greetings to new members, but now you have three Welcome campaigns for different membership types. In this scenario, the old one is outdated and can be stopped.
• The campaign was accidentally deployed before you finished editing it. You have more changes you need to make before you are ready for it to go live.

How do I stop a campaign?

There are two ways to stop a campaign.

1. If the campaign is running, edit it and go to the Deploy Campaign page. At the bottom of this page, click the Stop campaign button.

TIP: If you don't want to stop it right away, you can also schedule an end date by selecting Schedule end date in the Schedule section. More on this below.

2. The second way to stop a campaign is by scheduling an end date when you initially deploy it. You can select a date and time when you would like the campaign to stop automatically (this must be at least one hour in the future). Note that setting an end date will not prevent you from manually stopping the campaign using the Stop campaign button beforehand, as discussed above.

What happens when I stop a campaign?

There are several important ramifications to keep in mind when stopping a campaign:

1. Enrollment stops. No more Contacts will be enrolled in the campaign.
2. Contacts stop moving through the campaign. They will stay in whatever stage they are in. This includes being moved to the Goal stage.
3. The campaign stops taking any actions. The campaign will no longer:

1. Send emails.
2. Show Contacts as having met the goal.
3. Consider Contacts as having renewed membership.
4. Add tags to or remove tags from Contacts.
5. Add Contacts to or remove Contacts from groups.
6. Update Contact fields.
7. Assign points.
8. Suppress Contacts.

4. Landing pages will no longer be available. Visitors will see a message telling them that the landing page has been taken down. When you set up a landing page campaign, you can choose to redirect visitors to a web page of your choice.
5. Campaign Tracking will still update for message deliveries, bounces, opens, and clicks. Report counts will still increase if Contacts open messages, click links, etc. However, no actions will be taken based on these actions.

NOTE: Landing pages are taken down when the campaign is stopped, so additional submissions are not possible.

Restart a campaign

Why would I restart a campaign?

If you stop a campaign, you can always restart it later. However, as explained above, stopped campaigns don't “listen” to incoming events, and don't take any actions, but their tracking will still update.

BEST PRACTICE: Because of the aforementioned reason, rather than restarting a campaign, we instead recommend making a copy of the campaign using the Save As feature on the campaign management page.

Refer to the table below to help you decide whether you should restart a campaign or make a copy.

How do I restart a campaign?

If a campaign is stopped, you can restart it by clicking the Re-start campaign button in the same place you found the Stop campaign button.

Edit the campaign and go to the Deploy Campaign page (this is the third page of the Edit Campaign workflow.) At the bottom of this page, click the Restart campaign button to restart it.

NOTE: If you check the box above this button, Thrive Marketing Enterprise will search for any Contacts who meet the enrollment criteria you specified and add them to the campaign upon restart. This allows you to add Contacts who were missed when the campaign was stopped.

What happens when I restart a campaign?

There are several important things to keep in mind when you restart a campaign:

1. Enrollment will resume if you chose either AFTER the campaign starts or BOTH for enrollment when you set up the campaign. If you chose WHEN the campaign starts or BEFORE the campaign starts, additional Contacts will not be enrolled unless you check the box above the Restart campaign button (which adds new members).
2. The campaign will resume taking actions, with some very important caveats. Thrive Marketing Enterprise uses “triggers” to cause actions to occur. Everything from sending a message to moving a Contact to the Goal stage is accomplished with a trigger. There are several types of triggers:

1. Immediate triggers fire as soon as the Contact meets the criteria. These will resume firing.
2. Delayed triggers fire after a certain period of time (5 minutes, 1 hour, 3 days, etc.) These triggers will start over. They will not consider any time the Contact spent waiting for the trigger to fire before the campaign was stopped.
3. Event triggers fire after some action is done by the Contact , a user, or another campaign. Some possible actions are opening a message, clicking a link, receiving a tag, etc. Event triggers will not consider any actions that occurred while the campaign was stopped.
4. Date and Time triggers occur on a specific date and time. If that date and time occurred while the campaign was stopped, the trigger will not fire. This means that any messages scheduled during times while the campaign was stopped will not go out.
5. Scheduled triggers occur on a recurring basis (every day at 1:15 pm, every Thursday at 11:00 am, every month on the 11th day at 3:30 pm, etc.) These will fire the next time the appropriate time occurs.

3. Conditions will consider events that occurred while the campaign was stopped. Conditions are used in Advanced Enrollment, in Message Filters, and can even be applied to triggers. Examples include opened a message, is in a group, has a certain number of points, etc. Conditions check against the central record of all events, so anything that occurred while the campaign was stopped will still be considered.