best practice quesiton on engagement model

[Anonymous]

wondering if this is a good use case for engagement programs.

I have about 15 nurture emails currently in use and we want to start using the engagement program feature.
i have 2 streams in my engagement program set up, one stream is for form fills and event uploads, the other.stream is for those folks in stream 1 that show activity (e.g. clicking through on the emails or hitting our website.).

What if i put all 15 of these emails in BOTH streams, so the streams look identical, the only difference is that the cadence of each stream is different.  the first stream would be for initial form fills or event leads.  the 2nd stream would be for leads that show signs of activity,   these folks would get 2 emails a week, whereas the first stream would get 1 email every other week.  logic being if they're active, let's engage with them quickly.

Question is whether it's a good practice to put all of the same assets in both streams only to have the cadence difference.  should i do this another way, or is this best practice?

[Anonymous]

Sam:

I'm interested in hearing other people chiming in on this as well.

Right now I'm setting up an engagement engine that has a few streams mapped to stages in the buyers' journey. When someone shows enough interest in the next area of the journey (awareness, research, consideration, decision), we push them to the next stream. The point being, we send different types of content based on the stream, and some emails are used in multiple streams (to gauge their point in the buying cycle).

For example, a new lead might get nurtured with a "decision" piece in the first stream (Awareness). If they show activity in "decision," we send them to the appropriate stream, and they get more "decision" pieces. In the Decision stream, they'll get lots of "decision" pieces.

The short version of this to summarize: we have all of our emails housed in the engagement program separated into appropriate folders. Some emails get used in multiple streams. As long as the emails are housed in the same convenient location (to make sure the same email is added to separate streams, and not cloned), leads won't get the same email twice.


Best,
Edward Unthank
SEO/Web Specialist
Yesler

[Josh_Hill13]

Sam,

That's a great idea. You can run two parellel streams that way to speed up the flow. 

You might want to do this:

Stream 1: Slow, with a Transition to pull in Stream 2 leads that stop responding.
Stream 2: Fast with a Transition to pull in Stream 1 leads that hit 2 opens in a row (or other engagement).

You may want to consider some of the issues Edward brought up in regard to the buyer journey - are these emails setup in that way? Would making them go faster work well?

Would it be better to have 3-5 streams to reflect that journey at some point? I could see migrating the existing nurture to the system you proposed, but then building a new Engagement mapped better to their buyer stage.

[Anonymous]

Great ideas, and thanks for your input. @JoshI really like the idea of pulling them both in and out of the streams depending on their activity.

I was also thinking of starting off in the first email with a message essentially introducing them to the nurture, and explaining that we're going to be sending them useful information that they might not otherwise find on their own, and then offering a link in every email that would allow them to change the cadence.  I'm thinking i'd make the link say something like: I like these emails your sending me... or I don't need the help, just keep me posted on significant announcements.
depending on where they click, it would trigger a Smart Campaign that would add them to the appropriate stream.

Thoughts?