1. User Guide
  2. Flows - Cross Channel Messaging
  3. Actions in Flows
Force Move or Delay Users in a Flow

Flow Controls enable the marketers to control the user movement inside the Flow. Following are the flow controls:

Wait for/till

The MoEngage system provides marketers the flexibility to configure the duration for which the user will wait in a specific stage in the flow before taking the next action. Marketers can choose specific time frames such as users moving to the next stage on weekends at specific time slots or on Mondays at specific time frames or choose a rolling time frame such as 30 minutes, 6 hours, 24 hours, and so on.

Such flexibility in choosing time slots to move the users to the next stages helps marketers control the time of delivery of the campaigns thus ensuring better conversion rates and engagement. The following options are available:

To configure wait time, do the following:

  1. Click on the plus icon to add the 'Wait for/till' control. WaitForTill_Option_CreateFlows.png
  2. Click Wait For/Till.
  3. Click on the pen icon to edit the wait till/for time.WaitTillNode_PenIcon.png
  4. The following screen pop-ups. Set the desired wait time using the options provided.
Wait for a specific duration Wait for a time slot Wait till a particular date and time

Duration

This option can be used to set the duration for which the user will wait in the flow before taking the next action or before moving to the next stage in the flow.

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Choosing this option ensures that the user has to wait in the flow for a specific time duration such as an hour, 6 hours, 30 minutes, and so on.
Only after the time interval elapses can the user move to the next stage of the flow.
This is useful in cases when marketers wish to provide some buffer time for the end user to react to the messages or notifications sent.

    • Type or use the up and down arrows to set the wait time.
    • Select minutes, hours, or days from the drop-down.
    • Note: The minimum wait time is five minutes and the maximum wait time is 30 days.

Go To

Send your users to any existing stage in the same Flow using Go To. Adding Go To stage will delete the flow branch below this stage.

  1. Click the plus icon
  2. Click Go To
  3. Click the pen icon to edit
  4. Search and select the destination stage on the Go To page.
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  5. Click Done to add the action or click Cancel to cancel the action.
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Points to remember

  • MoEngage Flows does not allow you to add Go-to Block if it results in-to a circular loop to avoid users getting stuck indefinitely

A/B split

A/B Split allows you to test up to 5 variations of flow paths to determine which is the best performing option. You can experiment with different channels, different messages on the same channel, and different message frequencies across these flow paths. 

You can set up the experiment and, after analyzing the performance of each branch on publishing the flow, change the user distribution in favour of the winning branch. This will enable most users entering the flow to go forward with the best-performing branch. 

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Opt for intelligence

You can let MoEngage Flows automatically adjust the user attribution in favour of the best-performing branch as more and more users enter the flow.
For more information, refer to Intelligent Flow Path optimizer. 

Test Setup

Add A/B Split at any part of your flow from the control category of flow stages. 

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  • Add the number of branches you want to experiment with. You can add up to 5 branches in one A/B split stage. 
  • Configure the user distribution split for each branch. The variation percentage can be anything between 0-100 for each branch. 
  • Make sure that the sum of all the branch variation percentages is 100.  
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Test Everything

You can use the A/B split at any stage in a flow and add up to 5 A/B splits in one flow.

Please make sure to add different display names of each branch to distinguish between the branches on canvas. 

Understanding the Performance

As users keep entering the flow, each branch's performance keeps updating on the canvas. 

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  • Email (50%) denotes the display name of the branch and the configured user distribution for the branch, which is 50 in this example. 
  • 4 Done is the actual number of flow trips that have gone through this branch. 
  • Converted trips are the number of branch trips that resulted in at least one conversion. 75% is the Conversion rate for the branch in the example above.
  • The engagement score is a derived metric reflecting the engagement of the branch. Higher the number better the engagement. Read more about how engagement score is calculated here. 
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What is a branch?

  1. All the action stages from an A/B split node to the flow exit stage are included in tracking the branch's performance. 
  2. If the branch splits into multiple branches, all the resulting branches are considered part of the parent branch. 
  3. If a branch merges into another branch at some point, then the common flow path is considered a part of both the merging branches. 

Finding a winner

To analyze and compare the branches' performances, you can check out the report for your Split node.

You can either click on the report option hovering over the stage on canvas or go to the split node stats section in the flow's detailed stats page and filter on a particular split node from the dropdown. 

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After analyzing the branch performance, you can choose to edit the configured user distribution so that most of the users entering the flow next will go forward through the best-performing branch. 

Intelligent path optimizer

Intelligent Path optimizer allows you to A/B test up to 5 branches where Sherpa automatically keeps adjusting the user distribution towards the best-performing path. You can focus on experimenting on which channel to use or what should be the messaging frequency in each branch and let Sherpa optimize the user distribution. 

While deputizing Sherpa to optimize the user distribution, you must also configure the metric you are expecting to maximize in your flow. This can be one out of Engagement, Conversion, or both. 

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Worthy Alternative

If you wish to handle the user distribution manually, you can opt for A/B Split. Read more about it here.

Setup

You can Add an Intelligent Path optimizer at any part of your flow where you want to experiment with some worthy alternative options. You can find the option to add this in the Control section of Flow stages.  

Make sure you name each branch distinctly to identify them on the canvas. At every stage, you can experiment with up to 5 flow paths, and in each flow, you add up five such stages. 

Maximized metric selection

MoEngage Flows are used to solve a variety of use cases which can be generalized into two main categories. 

  • For increasing user engagement 
  • For increasing user conversions

So while optimizing a flow, we depend on your selection of metrics to be maximized in order to align the optimization to the Flow Goals.

How does this work? 

Initially, the users get uniformly distributed, and as we get more performance results, sherpa keeps adjusting the user distribution towards the best-performing branch. Based on which metric is configured to be maximized, we track different performance stats of each branch involved in the experiment.

  1. Maximizing Conversions
    For each branch, we aim to maximize the ratio of converted branch trips/total trips of the branch. This can be loosely termed as the Branch CVR as well. 
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    Things to notice

    MoEngage refrained from using total branch conversions as the maximized metric as that would give preference to users doing multiple conversions on a branch and would also favour a branch having more action campaigns. Both necessarily would not mean that the branch that eventually wins is the most optimized one.

    We believe that our approach relies on finding the optimized branch based on the most common user behavior leading to conversion.
  2. Maximizing Engagement 
    Similar to the conversion calculation, we aim to optimize the total engaged trips instead of total engagement for each branch. To do this, we give an engagement score to each branch and try to maximize that score instead of total clicks or email opens of the branch. 
    The engagement score for the branch is the ratio between the number of branch trips that have fetched a click from at least one of the action campaigns(BTC) + one-tenth of the number of branch trips that have only fetched email opens(BTO) and Total Branch Trips.

    Engagement Score = (BTC+ 1/10(BTO))/Total Branch Trips
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    Help us

    The engagement score allows us to optimize for the best-performing branch, which might not necessarily be the branch with the most clicks or most emails open. 
    If this approach does not suit your use case or expectation, please reach out to us at product@moengage.com  
  3. Maximizing the combination of Engagement and Conversion
    For each branch, we combine Branch CVR and Engagement score with emphasis on branch CVR as we believe fetching conversions is more important than generating engagement. So the Maximized metric, in this case, becomes Branch CVR + 1/10( Engagement Score)

Sherpa will distribute maximum users toward the best-performing branch when the user reaches the path optimizer stage. 

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Keep Experimenting

Sherpa will not stop distributing users towards low-performing branches even when a branch is identified to be performing better as the best-performing branch may keep changing from time to time as more and more users go through the flow.

 

Analyzing performance

Each flow branch's performance keeps updating on the flow canvas as more and more users go through it. 

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  • A branch can be identified by its branch name. Email is the branch name in the above example.
  • 4 done is the number of branch trips in the above example, and these 4 trips constitute 66.67% of the total trips reaching the intelligent path optimizer stage. 
  • Convertrip trip count is the number of branch trips that lead to at least one conversion from one of the action campaigns in the branch. 
  • The engagement score of the branch is also shown for each branch, irrespective of which metric is maximized for the branch. 
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What is in a branch?

  1. All the action stages, from an Intelligent Path optimizer stage to the flow exit stage, are included in tracking the branch's performance. 
  2. If the branch splits into multiple branches, then all the resulting branches are considered part of the parent branch. 
  3. If a branch merges into another branch at some point, then the common flow path is considered a part of both the merging branches. 

To analyze and compare the branches' performances, you can check out the report for your Split node. You can either click on the report option that appears on hovering over the stage on canvas or go to the split node stats section in the flow's detailed stats page and filter on a particular split node from the dropdown. 

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