Campaign Restart: Life After the Last Campaign Step

Picture your contact. They opened the welcome email. They clicked the link. They waited the polite three days, got tagged, got scored, got the follow-up. Then the campaign ran out of road, and they were left standing in an empty car park at midnight, still holding a lanyard that says Member. Nobody is coming to pick them up. Mautic doesn't know they're there. Neither do you. 

I actually made a video about this issue 4 years ago introducing Future Joey and Caffeine Addicted Future Joey:

But this post is not about the video and the probelm it describes, but a solution with a small plugin: Campaign Restart.

The problem: finished is not the same as gone

A contact who reaches the end of a campaign is still a member of it. Mautic just has nothing left to schedule for them, so the campaign engine stops looking. They're not removed, they're not failed, they're simply... done. Furniture.

And you can't easily point at them. Mautic's segment filters will happily tell you who is in a campaign. They won't tell you who has finished it. "In campaign" lumps together the person on step 2 of 9 and the person who wrapped up in March. Those two need very different emails.

So the usual workarounds come out:

• The tag at the end. Add a "done with onboarding" tag as the last step. Works until someone edits the campaign and forgets it, or until you have thousands of contacts who finished before the tag existed.
• Remove and re-add. Kick them out of the campaign and put them back in. Now they start again at the top, and get the welcome email for the second time. Very welcoming.
• Spreadsheets. We don't talk about spreadsheets.

Fix 1: a segment filter that sees the finish line

Campaign Restart adds one new segment filter: Finished campaign (no pending actions). Pick a campaign, and the segment fills with contacts who are:

1. a member of that campaign,
2. not manually removed from it, and
3. without a single scheduled event left in it.

That's the car park, in segment form. It comes in two flavours:

"Not equal" is handy for the polite version of marketing: don't send the re-engagement offer to people who are still in the middle of being engaged.

Fix 2: jump to any step, in any campaign

Finding them is half the job. The other half is getting them moving again, without dragging them back through the welcome email.

Mautic already has Jump to Event, but it only jumps inside its own campaign. It's a lift that only goes between floors of one building. Campaign Restart adds Jump to event in campaign: a campaign action that sends a contact to a specific step of a different campaign.

In the action you pick two things:

1. Target campaign. Any published campaign.
2. Target event. Any action in it. Step 6? Step 6. The list fills itself once you choose the campaign.

When the action runs, the contact lands on that exact step, right away. Not at the top. Not at the start of the onboarding. Exactly where you pointed.

The plugin also bumps the contact's rotation in the target campaign first. That's Mautic's "this is their next lap" counter. Without it, a contact who already ran that step once would bump into their own earlier run and get nowhere. With it, they can take the same step as many laps as you like.

Hello, object-oriented programming

Here's the bit that made me grin when it first worked.

Until now, every campaign was one long script. Top to bottom, start to finish, a few branches, done. If you wanted the same five steps in three places, you built them three times. Lovingly. By hand. With the same typo in each.

With a cross-campaign jump, a campaign stops being a script and starts being an object, with steps you can call from outside:

Onboarding.sendTips()
ReEngagement.winBackOffer()
Renewal.reminder()

Build your "re-engagement" steps once, in one campaign. Then every other campaign can call into it at the right step. That's reuse. Change the offer in one place, and every caller gets the new version. That's encapsulation, or at least its cheerful marketing cousin.

There's even a type check, of sorts: the jump only works for contacts who are already a member of the target campaign. No membership, no method call. Think of it as a private method with a guest list.

Yes, I know. Somewhere a computer science lecturer just felt a disturbance and doesn't know why. But if you've ever copied the same twelve campaign steps into six campaigns, you'll feel the relief too.

The recipe: second laps on demand

Here's the setup I'd start with. Your onboarding campaign runs to the end. A segment catches everyone who finished. A small win-back campaign picks them up and drops them back into onboarding, at the step you choose.

The contact never sees the welcome email twice. They skip straight to the bit you want them to see again.

The fine print, because there always is some:

• Members only. The jump only works for contacts already in the target campaign. Anyone else is let through with a note in their event log, and nothing gets scheduled.
• Actions only. You jump to an action step, not a decision or a condition.
• Deleted steps fail loudly. If someone deletes the target step later, the action fails with a clear message instead of quietly doing nothing.
• Published campaigns only. Drafts don't show up in the pickers.

Get it

Campaign Restart is free and open source (MIT), for Mautic 5 and PHP 8.1 or newer: github.com/jos0405/MauticCampaignRestartBundle.

1. Copy it to plugins/MauticCampaignRestartBundle.
2. Clear the cache as your web server user: sudo -u www-data php bin/console cache:clear. Not as root. Root-owned cache files are how a quiet Tuesday becomes a loud one.
3. Go to Settings → Plugins and click Install/Upgrade Plugins.

No tables, no settings, no wizard. Then go and collect your contacts from the car park. They've been waiting.