“What happens when I edit a Keap campaign?”
Versions of this question come up over and over in the Keap community, and for a few good reasons.
Here are two:
First, no matter how much time you spend planning and designing your campaign, once it goes live you’re bound to notice things you overlooked, or you wish you would have done.
And second, being able to confidently edit a live campaign lets us launch a lean version more quickly – with plans to rapidly iterate.
If you’re brand new to campaign building, then I’d recommend starting this Campaign Builder 101 blog post for some basics.
But, if you’ve got a few live campaigns then lets get right to the point…
Can I edit my Keap campaigns after I’ve published them?
Yes. Absolutely.
It’s normal and expected to need to edit your campaigns after they’ve launched.
But, it begs the question…
What happens if I modify a live campaign?
The answer to that one is “It depends on what changes you make”.
The behavior for editing campaigns IS predictable – as in, there is logic to how it behaves.
But it isn’t always intuitive – and so when things happen that people don’t expect, it can feel unsettling.
There are enough Keap users who have been burned by something they didn’t anticipate, that it’s created a sense of mystery and intrigue around the idea of republishing.
Here’s a video I plucked from the CB Trilogy course that details the expected behavior in some of the most common republishing situations:
So to recap – it’s safe to edit your existing campaigns.
Editing an Email
If all you are changing is the copy in an email (or the sender, or the subject line, etc), then when you publish it will start sending the new version to contacts who hit that step. But it won’t affect contacts for whom that email has already sent.
Adding a Goal
When you add a new goal – it starts listening right away. Contacts who have taken that action in the past won’t automatically achieve it* – because at the time they took that action, the goal wasn’t listening.
*the lone exception to this is tags – entry point tag goals will give you the option to pull in contacts who have previously received that tag
Adding a Sequence after a Goal
When you add a sequence after a goal, contacts who achieve the goal in the future will be added to the sequence. But anyone who had previously achieved that goal won’t automatically be added to the sequence (if needed, you can do that manually).
Adding a Sequence after a Sequence
When you add a sequence after an existing sequence, with no goal in between, active contacts will remain active until they complete the scheduled steps in their current sequence, and queued contacts from the first sequence will immediately flow into the second sequence (because now they have a place to go).
Adding or Changing Steps inside a Sequence
The video above is part of chapter three in the campaign builder trilogy course, which is a comprehensive deep dive training on Keap’s campaign builder.
Thanks to a partnership with Keap, this course is now available free of charge. If you’d like to learn more about the campaign builder, you can unlock the course today.
