Best practice for setting up campaign to nurture new accounts? Smart campaign or engagement stream?

[Kirsten_O_Steen]

I am trying to figure out the best approach to setting up a welcome program that will enter newly created account leads into a nurture campaign that will trigger off of a lead being added to a SFDC campaign, and will send the first email in the stream immediately, and following emails will come at 1 or 2 week intervals. 

I am new to engagement streams in Marketo, but from what I've researched and tested so far, it doesn't seem like an engagement program would be the best approach because I want these leads to be hit with this first welcome email immediately, and engagement streams seem to be very limited to the set days/times for the cadence. The leads would also be continually added to the program 24/7, and to me engagement streams seem to be set up for more static audiences with less flexibility on when emails send while still maintaining appropriate wait steps between them. 

Would a single smart campaign with built in wait steps be a better approach? Would that provide enough reporting detail to evaluate the success of each email in the stream? I don't need fancy, I just need functional, and I'm wondering if I'm overcomplicating things by trying to make this work with an engagement program when there might be a simpler approach out there. 

[Kaitlyn_Simko · Accepted solution]

I would probably build a drip campaign (single smart campaign) that adds people daily, sends a zero minute email, waits 1 week, remove unsubs/bad emailibility, send email 2, repeat.

[PascaleC]

@Kaitlyn_Simko I would love to see how you did that! Do you mind sharing some of the screenshots for this type of drip email? 

My thought was I would need to have a trigger for this campaign but i didn't know about this zero minute email. Any info that you can share would be super helpful! 

[Kaitlyn_Simko]

Here is how I would set it up

Smart list

add your triggers here

Flow

Change program status to member or equivalent

send email 1

wait (wait until you want to send em2, maybe wait a week?)

add email unsubs/invalids to a list

change program status of email unsubs to invlaid or equivalent

remove email unsubs from flow

Send email 2

repeat