Exit criteria are an easy way to remove contacts from a program as soon as your objective has been reached.
For example, if you have a trial period for your product during which a contact does not have to pay, you may want to set up a conversion program. Your objective is to convert each contact to a payment plan by sending a series of daily emails with useful information, and maybe even incentives as the end of the trial period approaches. As soon as the contact has signed up to the payment plan, you don’t want to send them any more of these conversion messages.
Instead of adding a filter after every Wait node, you can simply specify exit criteria. This automatically applies a filter with these criteria after every Wait node and before the entry point. Once a contact fulfills the criteria (i.e. has signed up) they are removed from the program and cannot re-enter it.
We dont recommend inserting a Wait node between the Web Channel - add and remove or Digital Ads - Add to Audience and Remove from Audience nodes if you are using exit criteria in your Automation Center program because the program checks whether contacts fulfill these conditions after each Wait node. Otherwise, it may happen that contacts who passed through the Web Channel - add or Digital Ads - Add to Audience node will continue to see your Web Channel or Digital Ads campaign even after being removed from the program due to exit criteria.
To define such criteria, first create a segment that will identify the contacts you want to exclude. Then open the program and click Exit criteria on the bottom of the canvas. Here you define a program-level setting for what criteria are used to remove a contact from a program. There are two options:
- No exit criteria – No program-level settings are used.
- Segment Based criteria – Select from your available segments to remove a contact from the program when they meet the criteria (e.g. made a purchase).
If there are exit criteria defined:
- The number of contacts who left the node due to these criteria will show up under Exited in the History widget on the Program Reporting page.
