What Program Type Recommendations

[Jordanlux]

We are working on setting up a new campaign in Marketo and I am still fairly new to the system. I want to know what the best way to set up this campaign would be. 

We have people from location A,B, and C with contacts that will be receiving emails. We have different products that we want to launch to each location 1,2, and 3.  The emails will have dynamic content based on the location the contacts are associated with. 

Location A might have product 1 & 3, but not 2 and so on. 

I was going to set this up as a nurture program and create a different stream for each of the products, but If we go live for location A, but Location B isn't ready yet would I have to create another stream for them? Or could I just adjust the first one? 

There are are also multi variants on the emails that will go out for each product. For each product there are 7 total emails that will go out, but the locations have an option to use module 1 or 2 in each of the 7 emails. So we have to build out the templates based on the variations the locations choose. 

My question is, would it be easier to set this up as a nurture program and create a different stream for the different email variations based on location? Or set this up as a default program type with the channel content and create all the variations as different smart campaigns. 

[Katja_Keesom]

I think you are on the right track looking at an engagement program for this. With this level of complexity an engagement program will be a lot easier to keep control of. How you exactly want to set up your program depends of course on a lot of variables, but here's some considerations to take into account:

• You use smart campaigns to add people to your nurture program. So if your timing is different per location, you simply add people to the program at different times. Every person added to the program will start their journey from the moment they are added with the first piece of content in your stream.
• Deciding which streams to set up depends entirely on the journeys that you want people to go through. So define the different variations of content sequence you want to offer and set up your streams based on that. As an added consideration you can of course have people switch streams during the process if that helps to simplify your streams.
• If you set up your content pieces each into their own individual content program (typically a Default program) and ensure you manage program membership in each content program correctly you can quite easily reuse one content piece in multiple streams without risking a person receiving the same email twice. This also gives you the flexibility to have different versions of the same email in one content program and have the content program decide which part of the audience gets email A and which email B (which could solve your module conundrum).

It sounds like a great opportunity to take a large piece of brown paper and start drawing out your flows. Based on that my top tip would be to really carefully design your orchestration and set up your smart campaigns for adding / pausing / stream transitioning your audience and make sure you have all scenarios covered. Only then build the whole set up into your program and make sure to use folder structure and naming convention to keep it nice and clear.