Default program and Engagement membership

[Kayleen_scott]

Hello,

I've been using Default Programs to send emails in a cadence series. I'm now creating my first engagement program. How do you manage record membership to ensure a record can't be active in both a default email program and in an engagement program at the same time?

[Grace_Brebner3]

Hey Kayleen,

You'd have to have rules in your smart campaigns between these two programs that control which program gets priority, and when. E.g., "Add someone to this nurture unless they have program status "X" in program "Y"."

You may want to consider (if it makes sense for the use case) wrapping your cadence series into a new stream in the engagement program, as this will make it easier - a person can only exist in one stream of a single nurture program at a time.

[Kayleen_scott]

Hi Grace,

I like the idea of leveraging a new stream in the engagement program for the email cadence. Any tips on how to go about that?

Thank you!

[Grace_Brebner3]

Have a search through community & docs on the subject of nesting default programs in engagement programs. Many of us almost exclusively run engagement programs with nested default programs instead of email assets because of the additional degree of control & flexibility it allows for.

Effectively you just drag a default program into a nurture stream. It gets triggered for send much like an email does, but does require a specific smart campaign set up to process the send. You can see it in action by importing BP-NUR Advanced Drip Nurture v3 from the Marketo Program Library

[Grace_Brebner3]

I should also highlight ^ the description of the program template is a bit misleading; the nested programs are Default programs, not Email programs, but they are built for the sole purpose of sending emails. So they're email in purpose but not email in type...