When a person does not qualify for an Engagement Program cast, let them skip this one and qualify for the next email instead of waiting for the next cast in the stream cadence

[Dan_Stevens_]

Many of us use child/nested programs within Engagement Programs to further refine who receives what (e.g., if someone has already engaged with the content (outside of the engagement program), don't send it to them again as part of the EP) and to provide more granular reporting/attribution (at the individual program level vs. at the EP level).

Today, when a person doesn't qualify for an EP cast, they don't proceed to the next program in the stream.  Instead, they must wait for the next cast (1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, etc.) before they receive anything.  I would like to see members of the EP continue down the stream - within the current cast - until they qualify for a program send, so that we're able to continue with a consistent cadence of content, rather than have large gaps that can occur today.

[Anonymous]

Dan Stevens​this should not be the case. If someone has already received a piece of content in an engagement program, then they are supposed to move on to the next piece of content in the stream. I tried to reproduce this in my demo subscription, and each time I moved onto the next piece of content in the stream. If that is not happening for you, please open a support ticket.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Frank Passantino - it's not whether or not someone has received the content already (aka, member of a program when using nest programs in a smart campaign), but rather if they don't qualify for a smart campaign in a nested program.  Veronica Holmes states this perfectly in her comment in this thread: Engagement Program - Skipping Unused Smart Campaign?

[Olivia_Piper]

Dan Stevens​ I was looking into the same thing and Marketo have updated their documenation (not sure when this happened) Adding a Program to an Engagement Program Stream - Marketo Docs - Product Docs.​ It now says "If the engagement program calls a smart campaign within a program, people who do not meet the smart list criteria will not qualify for the smart campaign. They will move on to the next piece of content in the stream for the current cast.". So this verifies that they do not have to wait for the next cast to recieve the next piece of content within the nurture. We have also tested this and it does work. I hope this helps.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Thanks Olivia.  Unless this functionality has changed recently, our tests have shown that the lead receives nothing if they don't qualify for a smart campaign (when there's additional nested programs to qualify for).  Veronica Holmes, has that been your experience as well?

[Veronica_Holme4]

I have often said I think the Marketo documentation as quoted above is incorrect. My experience is what Dan describes. They receive nothing in this cast if they don't qualify, and they receive the next piece of content in the stream at the next cast, not the current cast.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Frank Passantino, does this make sense now; and can you see where this is a big issue?  What are the chances of getting this prioritized on the roadmap (especially given some of the other enhancements in the works - like dynamic sending based on time zone)?

Grégoire Michel offers one way this can potentially be accomplished:

But ideally, would like to see this happen automatically - without the need for this creative approach (which doesn't exist yet).

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Dan,

My idea that you are pointing to was more about the possibility to skip a simple email (not a nested program) content

I fully concur with your idea above: if the lead does not qualify, it should automatically skip to the following content.

Furthermore, the automated skipping if the lead has already been sent to the program is not good because we might expressly need the lead to be sent twice to the nested program. in case the content is a nested program, the lead should be sent to the sub program until it becomes a member or it becomes a success. As proposed here:

Typical use case is : I have a sub program that is a white paper download. I set it up with a smart campaign and add it to an EP. The cast sends the content promotion email to the leads but only 5% of them click the email. I have no way to send this content again as part of the EP to the 95% that did not click, and this is really annoying. We very often want to propose a specific white paper to an audience in a TOFU stream. We do not have that many TOFU gated content available for this specific audience, so we need to be able to send the Gated content once every 3 content. If they download, they are moved to another stream, with different content.

-Greg