Hi everyone!
I am having a bit of a trouble with orchestrating an email campaign using Audience Paths. The plan is the following. Send 4 emails, each email with a delay and to a different segment. The 1st email is simple/easy and straight forward. It is sent to audience selected at the beggining.
The 2nd email is to be sent only to those who did not open the 1st email. So I selected Audience path, assigned group 1 to those who did not open the 1st step of the canvas, being the 1st email. However, the 2nd email was still sent to the wrong # of recipients. Suppose that the 1st email was opened by 22k recipients, I'd expect the 2nd email of the 2nd step, to be sent to the remaining 60k users, since the entire audience that we began with was 82k.
The 3rd email, is to be sent only to those who opened the 1st and 2nd email. Same issue happened, with wrong # of recipients set.
The 4th email, is to be sent only to those who did not open the 1st and 2nd emails, but also to those who opened the 1st,2nd and 3rd email.
I cannot get the correct # of recipients based on these parameters. Should I not use Audience Paths? Is there a bug? As for the delays, they are set correctly, after each email and before the audience path nodes. Any help/ideas would be great to review and attempt.
Thanks a lot for your time
Hi kyriakosgg
It sounds like the core issue is related to the wait periods before each Audience Path, not the Audience Path logic itself.
For example, if Email #1 sends at 10:00 AM and you only have a 1-hour wait before the Audience Path for Email #2, Braze will evaluate the “Opened Email #1” condition only based on opens that happened during that first hour. Anyone who opens after 11:00 AM won’t be routed correctly because they’ve already passed the evaluation point.
Also, if users reach an Audience Path immediately-meaning there’s no wait before the path-Braze will filter them instantly, long before they’ve had a realistic chance to open the previous email.
With your specific use case, it’s also important to note that the Audience Path approach will never produce matching or expected audience counts. Users can open an email days, weeks, or even months later. So if your wait periods are configured in days, and someone opens Email #1 two months later, the filter will never capture that behavior-Braze only checks the condition at the moment the user reaches that node.
If you’re using Opened/Clicked Step filters, this is expected behavior: Braze does not continuously re-check conditions after the user moves past the Audience Path.
To help troubleshoot properly, could you confirm the exact wait periods configured before Emails 2, 3, and 4?
Thank you very much for your input! As a general rule of thumb, and for this specific campaign, we basically wanted to send 1 email per 1 week, so the Delays between, and before each audience path, is set to 1 week.
After looking into it further, I can have a specific Calendar date set instead of Duration to X amount of Days/Weeks etc. Would this be better for the implementation of the campaign described above? Also, the kpi are measured for the first 3 days after being sent.
I would add to the good info from NirnayP, opens are not a great measurement for lack of engagement as both false positive and false negative results (it just means the images loaded which can happen automatically based on reader and platform) - Clicks are a more reliable measurement of engagement.
Hi Ted and thanks for your input! I have noticed there are 3 different types of Opens. Regular, machine and other. I have only filtered for the Regular opens to prevent the issue you are describing but now I'm having second thoughts. I will definitely look into that again.
