When a campaign's trigger conditions are met and nothing happens, you assume you built the automation wrong or the leads were dead. It is a yes/no switch inside the campaign, and on no it stops that campaign from starting whenever the contact is already on another one.
This is a live BoldTrail training session. An attendee named Todd asks about the yes/no button in the right-hand column of the campaign list, and the trainer stops the walkthrough to explain it.
"Always run means that it will run concurrently." Then the mechanism, in her words: "if always run is set to no, the campaign will not run. So, you've got a running campaign, you meet the criteria for a second campaign. If that second campaign says no, it will not run." The other setting: "If that second campaign says yes, it will run on top of it."
Where the switch lives: "So, it's inside of the campaign. You click in, you hit edit, scroll down, always run, right?"
Her co-host gives the default and the reason for it. "General rule of thumb, usually no." Because "the rule of thumb is you typically don't want multiple campaigns running side by side because that's a lot of outreach going out that could potentially have conflicting communication in it." The exceptions are the campaigns that send nothing to the contact at all — a campaign that is only task reminders for you, or "maybe it's a datebased campaign like a holiday campaign" you want going out regardless of what else is running.
“if always run is set to no, the campaign will not run. So, you've got a running campaign, you meet the criteria for a second campaign.”
Agents build a campaign, watch the trigger conditions get met, and conclude the platform is broken or the leads are bad. It is one toggle, two clicks and a scroll inside the campaign itself, and it explains a very specific kind of silence: the second campaign never started because the first one had not finished.
No is the right default for anything that sends. You do not want two sequences emailing the same person with different messages in the same week. But a campaign that only creates tasks for you, or a dated holiday message, wants yes so it can stack on top of whatever is running. Auditing which of yours is which takes a couple of minutes per campaign and explains a lot.