Best practices for Engagement Program Status

[Anonymous]

Hi Marketing Nation,

We're working on our first engagement program and we're running into some unknowns regarding program status. Here's the set up:

• Engagement program set up with program status (defaults): Not in program, member, engaged (success)
• Engagement program channel is set up as "Nuture Parent"
• We have child programs set up underneath and inserted into streams as we need to better control who gets which email, etc.
• For the child programs, we set up a new nurturing channel "Nurture Child" with standard program statuses like: Not in progam, member, clicked offer link (success), downloaded paper (success), playback webinar (success). 
• We set up a campaign to track success status within each child program and then update the Parent Engagement program status to "engaged".

For purposes of reporting and success attribution to the channel, does anyone have best practices for setting the program status for the engagement program? I'd love to hear from anyone else's experience in setting up the engagement programs. Thanks. 

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

Usually this depends on your goals for nurture. I usually recommend:

• Member
• Opened
• Clicked
• Engaged (did X good things)
• Achieved Goal (MQL? Opp? Contact Request?)
• Unsubscribed

So a lot of this depends in you. Some clients have asked to do this as a mini sales funnel and we include a list of lifecycle stages. I'm not super thrilled with that because it conflicts a bit with the sales funnel.

[Rich_Miller2]

Josh,

Are you recommending those statuses at the engagement program level? I think so, but want to make sure. I think that is right, but you also need some tracking at the individual email level. I do not like doing manual roll-ups of email programs to a engagement program snapshot. I would rather just report at the engagement program and then drill down for deeper analysis.

I know there are a lot of people that just use member, engaged, not in program.

The post before yours said something about setting up a nurture in a nurture program. Not sure if you can even do that. Can you?

Any other thoughts?

Thanks,
RM