Can you send the same email repeatedly until a condition is met?

[Anonymous]

We are in the higher education business. When we have an applicant who has started an app but not provided all of hte supporting documents yet, we want to be able to send an email every week giving an update (e.g., we have these documents, we need those documents). 

This is essentially the same email going over and over again until a condition is met. 

Is there a way to do that in Marketo?

Thanks,

Greg

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hey Greg,

What you'd likely want to do in this case is set your exclusion condition in the smart list of your batch campaign(e.g. Not Clicked Link in Email), then in the schedule tab set the campaign in Edit Settings to 'Allow Leads to go throught he Flow Every Time' and then set a recurring schedule for the campaign.  Each time the campaign runs it will check to see if the condition is still unmet, and qualify the lead to receive the email on each run.

[Anonymous]

Kenny,

Thank you. This will work I think but I want to put this email into an Engagement Campaign where we have a stream for proposects who have submitted but not completed (turned in all docs) an application. My thought was to make a program that does this and than drop the program into the stream as the first item. Then the members of the stream would get those emails until they left the stream (if I understand how to do this properly). 

The problem is that I think that when you use a smart campaign in a stream, you cannot use the schedule feature. Is that right? If so do you know if there is a way to accomplish this goal. 

I suppose I could use the stream to "hold" members until a condition changes that moves them into a different stream. Then I could have the program in question exist outside of the Engagement Campaign and running so long as a condition is met (e.g., Lead Status = Application Submitted). 

I think that would work but its just not quite as organized. If its possible to include the email program inside of the Engagement Program that would make the logic of the program and the flow visible to people who might be working on this after me.

Thanks for your help.

Greg
 

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Greg, is there a certain amount of times that you'd want to send this to someone? I guess the reason I ask is that at some point you'd want to stop sending these emails. One nice thing about programs in engagement programs is that you can send the same email more than once, you just need to create it in a different program each time.

I can think of two ways that I'd consider setting this up in engagement programs, and each method has its own benefits and drawbacks. Both of the methods would rely on this being the only thing that this stream does.

The first would be just having one drip program in the stream where before each send it would look to see if the required documents had been received, and if so then they'd be removed from the flow, if not then they'd be sent the email. You'd have to add the same pattern of "wait one week, remove from flow if conditions met, then send email" as many times as you'd like the email to go. Once all of the required docs are in, you could pull them into the next stream, and the remove from flow steps would ensure that the reminder email wouldn't be sent again. The benefit here is that it's just a single program for reporting purposes. A drawback is that you can't see how many times a person was sent an email before they converted.

The second would be to create a program that would send the email to anyone not in the program, then clone that as many times as you'd like the email to go out. Add all of those programs to the stream in the engagement program, and have rules to pull someone into the next stream once the required documents were received. This should be slightly faster to set up, and one benefit is that you can see how many times someone needs to receive the same email before they provide all of the required documents.

If for whatever reason (and I can't think of a good one now that Marketo has introduced multi-stream nurture for all), you wanted everything in one stream, you could do that using exclusion statuses as discussed here.

If you want the email to go out indefinitely, then a batch campaign would still be your best bet as Kenny suggested.