Nested program in nurture - smart campaign email sends - leads getting stuck in loop?

[Anonymous]

I am trying to use a nested program within my nurture. The first smart campaign to send the email contains smart list criteria that filters out a certain industry. The next cast of the nurture contains a separate nested program with a new smart campaign which allows all industries (none are filtered out).

I came across this section in the product docs which makes it seems like the second cast will not be sent to the leads that were filtered out of the first cast:

What happens to people who don't meet the smart list criteria?

If the engagement program calls a smart campaign within a program, people who don't meet the smart list criteria won't receive the email. They also won't move on to the next program in the current cast or in subsequent casts. Essentially they'll be stuck in an infinite loop, where they never qualify. You may want to use choices on flow steps to filter people out instead of adding these criteria to smart lists when you nest programs inside of an engagement program.

Is this true? Could someone further explain the logic of using separate nested program email sends? Each one of my email sends filters out a certain group of people. Will these people never receive future casts because they were filtered out of one email send?

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, this is true. A good reason to be careful with Programs in Engagements or to just use Emails.

If you need to fix this, you probably have to Remove from both Programs and insert them back into the Engagement.

[Anonymous]

Thank you. Are there any work arounds for this?

Some of my email sends have smart list criteria that filters out a certain group of people by industry but they all fall into the same engagement program because the general content is the same. But some content is only relevant to one industry or the other so I filter out everyone else from that specific cast.

Would it be preferable to set up separate nurtures for each industry? I only have 3 that I target directly.

[Kevin_Martin3]

For anyone that stumbles upon this post like I did, note they've changed the language in the docs referenced above to:

What happens to people who don't meet the smart list criteria?

In the event that someone is filtered out of the smart list of a nested program’s smart campaign, they do not move on to the next piece of content during the current cast. They will move on to the next piece of content in the stream for the following cast.

So no more infinite loop; they'll just move on to the next piece of content in the following cast.

[Anonymous]

You could create a Program Status: Excluded and run a smart campaign prior to email sends that updates the "industry" you don't want to send an email to as "Excluded"

They will be skipped over and receive the next email in the stream.