FIFA World Cup part 3 of 4 - Marketing Automation

Part 3 in a series of 4

1. Introduction
2. Sitecore Forms
3. Marketing Automation
4. XConnect

Having my contestants signed up, I'm ready to watch some football (yes, football!). As results starts rolling in, I need to evaluate the bets and award points.
I have chosen to use the Marketing Automation module for this. Meaning that I need to create a plan for each match.

Now, I could have gone the easy way and created all the plans before opening the signup, and just let the start action enroll contacts once they were awarded the goal in the form. However that would require that I had actually gotten that far before I opened the forms. I figured out another way, I'll get back to that later.

Enrolling a contact list to a Marketing Automation plan

The new Marketing Automation in Sitecore 9 has a lot of built in options to automatically enroll contacts as they trigger goals or events, or satisfy custom conditions. However this is largely focused around user actions and not marketings desire to enroll a group of contacts into a plan.

I was posed with a problem where I needed to enroll contacts that had already ended their interaction. For this I made a simple service that would enroll all contacts from a given Sitecore List Manager list into my Marketing Automation plan.

Making this was surprisingly easy by combining the enrolling a contact in a single plan and the list manager api guides from Sitecores' documentation.

Working with the Marketing Automation api programatically

The new Marketing Automation interface is awesome and it has a lot of great functionalities. However it seems that much of the implementation has been made with the interface/frontend in mind.

I wanted to be able to duplicate a plan programmatically, much like the "Copy" button in the interface.

The copy plan button in the Marketing Automation interface