The Campaign Designer's use of Steps makes building a campaign a quick and intuitive task. Each campaign Step determines which emails are sent to a contact, when they are sent, and when to check to see if the contact has taken the appropriate actions to be moved on to the next Step.

Add campaign steps

When creating or updating a campaign, you use the Campaign Designer. It features a grid on the right called the Canvas, with a list of Steps on the left. Building a campaign is accomplished by dragging-and-dropping the desired Steps onto the Canvas, connecting them to direct the flow, and configuring them to meet your needs.

TIP: Leverage the Wait and Decision Steps to create a dynamic and responsive campaign that meets your needs and provides your contacts a good experience.

The power of an organized, clearly understood, and methodical campaign cannot be underestimated. These Steps are the building blocks you use to automate your communications campaigns.

Campaign steps

Step	Description
	This represents the message sent to the contact. You can choose from messages that already exist or build new messages from scratch. If a message is deleted from a campaign, it no longer displays on the campaign's Mailings tab.
	The Notify Step notifies you or anyone in your organization when a contact reaches a certain Step in the process, and is a great way to easily build in process-oversight or inject human outreach at critical junctures. This Step supports a single email address, which can be an individual email address or the email address of a distribution list.
	Getting to know your contacts is of the upmost importance. Use the Profile Step to automatically add or remove a contact to an Interest based upon their behavior in the campaign. Let the automation do the work for you, and get better targeting capabilities in the process.
	Establishing a cadence for the campaign is a key factor in how your contacts react to it. The Wait Step must be inserted before any and all Decide Steps, but it can also be inserted after any Step to add space in the campaign. There are several different options in the Wait Step and they can be linked: Fixed Amount of Time - Waits a predetermined amount of time. Until Day of Week - Specify a day of the week, time of day, and the time zone. Until Day of Month - Specify the day of the month, the time of day, and the time zone. Please note that if the date selected is invalid (e.g., February 31st), the Step defaults to the last day of the selected month. Until Event Occurs - Specify an event (an open or click of a previously sent message) and the maximum amount of time to wait. Please note that this Step requires a message (if there is no message, the campaign reports an error).
	This Step checks whether a contact has performed a specific action, like an open or a click, or checks to see if they belong to a specific Target Group before moving the contact on to the next Step. Both of these actions indicate some kind of conversion aligned with the campaign's goals.
	The Campaign step allows you to select another existing campaign to flow your contacts into once they have reached a certain Step in the campaign that they are already in. This is a great way to make campaigns reusable and flexible.
	This simple feature is quite powerful: It allows you to have embedded documentation in each campaign. A good comment will include the rationale for a Step, who's responsible, what can be changed, what metric to watch for, etc. Making liberal use of the Comment is a best practice.
	This Step branches a campaign based on the calendar date. It's particularly useful for fixed-date campaigns and events that can add late contacts. This Step enables users to input a fixed date; if it is before the fixed date, the campaign will follow one path, and if it is after the fixed date, it will follow another. Typically, you’ll set a date in the future so that the flow can change when the date arrives.
	Every campaign has a start and stop. You can add multiple Stop Steps on the campaign Canvas. This Step only has an input node, and it is used so that you don't need to draw a long line from a Step to the final Stop Step (this should help ease the design of long flows). Note that while you will see additional Stop Steps in the flow, these will all end up at the final Stop Step.

Connect campaign steps

Connecting campaign Steps is how you map out the flow of a campaign. Each campaign Step performs a specific action to ultimately determine which message is sent to a contact (e.g., the Wait Step governs when the message is triggered, the Decision Step checks to see whether the contact has taken a specific action and then moves them on to the next Step, etc.).

Connecting two Steps is accomplished by clicking the round connector from the first Step and dragging your mouse to the connector of the next Step.

TIP: Zoom in with your mouse wheel or the Zoom slider (located above the Canvas) to make it easier to select connectors.

Keep in mind that Decide Steps require you to make more than one connection, so that the campaign flow may continue no matter how the contacts interacts with that Step. As you can see in the example below, users can decide one of two options, and no matter which option they choose, additional Steps are available for each path.

Delete a connector

You can change the path between Steps at any time by deleting their connection. To do so:

1. Click to highlight the connector.
2. Press the Delete key on your keyboard (alternatively, you can right click the connector and select Cut from the menu).

Make sure to reconnect those Steps so the campaign can be activated: If there are missing connectors between Steps, the campaign will have errors that need to be addressed prior to activation.