Fulfillment activities (broadcasts, controls, exports, offers and decision offers) within an interaction workflow represent an effort by RPI to make contact with an audience (although, in the case of a control activity, contact is never actually made, being a pseudo-fulfillment activity for internal use only).
In the case of a broadcast, it is not possible to continue a dialogue with the targeted audience – a broadcast is published to the world at large (e.g. via a Twitter account). As such, it is not possible to add activities downstream of a broadcast activity, which is shown with a ‘dead end’ icon to its right:
In the case of the other fulfillment activity types, it is possible to add the following activity types directly downstream:
•Batch Audience
•Interactive Activity
•Delay
•Wait for Event
•Broadcast
•Control
•Export
•Offer
•Decision Offer
•Subscription Group
•Data Process
•Data Transfer
In this way, you can continue the ‘conversation’ started when you made initial contact with your target audience. For example, following an initial email drop, you might want to respond to those people who click through a specific URL within the email who then fail to make a purchase by sending them a discount voucher.
Using downstream, post-fulfillment activity activities you can map out your tactical marketing activities precisely in advance of their execution, as part of your overall customer interaction strategy.
If you wish to place a fulfillment activity downstream of a fulfillment activity operating in ‘interactive mode’ (i.e. after an interactive activity), you must also precede the downstream fulfillment activity with another interactive activity:
Note that you can follow a fulfillment activity directly with another fulfillment activity if the upstream activity is not operating in interactive mode.
When you add one of the following activity types…
•Interactive activity
•Batch audience
•Control
•Export
•Offer
•Decision Offer
•Data Process
•Data Transfer
…downstream of a fulfillment activity, the Inputs tab within the downstream activity’s configuration panel is amended to allow the downstream activity to specify the fulfillment states to which it is to apply. Full details of the Inputs tab may be found elsewhere in the documentation. Full details of the actions undertaken when executing an activity downstream from another fulfillment activity can also be found elsewhere.
Note that a queue activity can only be placed immediately downstream from a queue listener. No activities can follow a queue activity.