Let's imagine that you have a nurture campaign for prospects with four emails, each relating to a product. If someone clicks the link in a product-specific email, you want them to get a series of three emails related to that product and then move them back to the previous set of emails if they did not engage in the product-specific stream. Do you put this in one engagement program or two or more?
Here are some factors you should keep in mind when you're trying to make this decision about program design:
- Will this nurture program always remain as it is? Are there any possibilities that the client might decide to vary the initial set of emails in some way, such as making industry-specific variations, sending the emails in different time zones to different regions, or adding more emails that are based off a different set of rules? Would they do this to the product-specific nurtures as well - potentially make the current set an early stage stream but then add mid and late stage emails also? If you anticipate changes that would involve expanding your nurture program, you may want to split these out into two or more nurture programs to give yourself room to adjust the rules later without having to redo everything.
- If you separate them into more than one nurture program, you're going to need extra smart campaigns to pause people in one nurture program and unpause them in the other. This is a relatively minor consideration but if you have relatively new Marketo users, it can be overlooked and it is possible people might be active in both at one time when you don't intend for that. If you have everything in one nurture program, the system automatically ensure someone is only in one stream at a time.
- You also need to consider reporting. Do you have a different measurement of success for the first set of four emails than you do for the different product-specific streams? If you want to measure success of the entire program of 16 emails based on these leads being passed to sales, then you are fine to report on them in a single program. If you want to report on how many people engage with the first set of emails but you want to report on conversion for the product-specific nurtures, you would want to put these into separate programs.
Anyone have any other factors they think should be included?
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