With the Goal automation action, you can add contacts to a specific point in your automation. This is helpful if you want to add contacts to your automation but not have them go through each step in order to reach a desired spot.
Let's say a contact completed your automation before you finished adding steps to it, or you may have an event coming up and you want to make sure that your contact receives the appropriate message rather than going through each step in your automation. With the Goal step, contacts will jump or skip directly from the trigger to that goal and proceed through the rest of the steps of your automation. For more information on the Goal action, view this help document.
For this example, we will use a tag as a condition for the goal. However, you can use other conditions, such as visits to a specific page, custom field value, campaign opens, and more. To add your contact to a certain point in your automation using a Goal and tag:
- Locate the step in your automation that you want your contact to jump to. Click the grey “+”.
- From the modal pop-up, click “Conditions and Workflow” then click “Goal.”
- Give your Goal a name and select “Click to add a goal.” This will open the segmenting tool where you can set your goal conditions. For this example, we will want “Tag Exists” and then we will specify the tag. In this example, we will use “Skip to goal” as the tag.
- Under “And when the goal is...” select “Below contact's position.” Under “If the contact does not meet conditions:” select “Continue anyway.”
- Navigate to the contact profile page of the contact you wish to add to your automation and apply the same tag to this contact that is in your goal condition.
- Manually add your contact to the automation by clicking on the grey “+” located on the top right of the automations widget. From the modal pop-up, select the automation you wish to add them to and click “OK.”
As soon as the contact is manually added to the automation, they will jump from the manual add trigger right to the goal step you created. You can view their automation path from the contact profile page. Click the automation name in the automations widget and click “Entered DATE.” You will see a page that looks similar to this: