How to get 160%x engagement using content you already have

Rachel_Noble
Level 9 - Champion Alumni
Level 9 - Champion Alumni

Our first engagement program took four months to set up. It was our first big accomplishment after implementing Marketo, and believe me, we celebrated! It had one stream made up of seven emails that went out Wednesday mornings at 9am. We immediately saw a huge lift in engagement which, at the time, meant the same lift in the number of MQL alerts passed to sales.

Fast forward two years: we now have 9 active engagement programs through which leads and contacts are funneled based on a combination of persona and lifecycle status. These engagement programs each have multiple streams that further personalize content based on behavioral triggers and predictive data. We’ve seen continuous growth and are super excited about the results!

Here’s the problem: we haven’t had the resources to develop new content as rapidly as we are learning to personalize what we deliver. As you probably know, this is a growing problem in the world of automation. Until our most recent addition to our content team, we had to make huge efforts to stretch our content as far as it would go without sacrificing personalized, relevant messaging.

So what did we do?

Our Senior Content Developer sums it up perfectly: “we found the lowest-hanging fruit that people actually want to eat.” For us, it was nurture. We created a new stream within each engagement program and called it the “Exhausted Content” stream. Every time we add an email to one of the other streams within the program, we clone it into the same program and add the clone to the Exhausted Content stream. Give it a new subject line and exclude everyone who opened it before, and boom! 60% lift in nurture engagement.

How to set it up

They say a picture is worth a thousand words (always wished that would fly in college).

Schedule this campaign to run based on the cadence of your nurture cast.

How easy is that!

Looking for other ways to make your nurture programs more robust? Check out these fan faves:

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11 Comments
Rachel_Noble
Level 9 - Champion Alumni

Hey Kayla,

No problem! We set up our Nurture program channel to include a (non-success) status of "Exclusion". Then, incorporate every email within our nurture streams as sub-programs instead of emails. So in the Early Stream (our default stream), someone will get this first email:

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If they open this email, it triggers a smart campaign in the Exhausted Content version of the email (we call it the Exhausted Content stream). This smart campaign makes them a member of the EC version of the email program with the status of "Exclusion" we previously set up.

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Then, when the nurture cast hits this EC program, anyone who opened the ES version of the email will already be a member of the program and thus will be excluded from entering the EC program (and therefore will not receive the email).

Hope this helps!