Email Program or Smart Campaign to send email for Web Content?

[David_Mason1]

I have good web content, like a white paper. It sits on the web waiting for people to come to the page and download it. The Web Content Program works great.

Let's say I want to promote it to a targeted audience via email. Should I:

1. Create a brand new and separate Email Program and reference the landing page in the Web Content Program?
2. Create an email and send with a Smart Campaign within the Web Content Program?

Pros or cons to doing either? How will each of these affect email reporting?

[Jenn_DiMaria2 · Accepted solution]

I typically create a separate Email Program (I have a folder for just email campaigns) and link to the asset in its own Program (within another folder I have for content only). I include UTM parameters in the link to the asset's landing page, which are then captured in hidden fields on the form. Based on these parameters, I can then set up a Smart Campaign to update their Status in the Email Program, and they're automatically attributed to the content Program, as well.

For reporting, they're then credited to the Email Program for tracking success (in this case, maybe you've set up Success as "Clicked Link" or "Inquired" - not sure how you've got that set up), as well as the content Program.

[Rachel_Egan]

Hey Jenn, why wouldn't you embed the email program within the web content program? Is there a benefit to having the email program completely separate from the web content program?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Hi Rachel - we too use separate Marketo programs to promote our content via email.  In our case, since much of our content is aligned to an overarching marketing campaign, we create campaign-specific engagement programs to centrally house those emails that promote our core campaign content.  And yes, we also have separate "content" programs that get credit when the conversion takes place on our content LPs (downloaded).  This allows us to then keep the conversation going by moving users into longer-term nurture streams - all within the single campaign-specific EP.  If using this approach, you wouldn't be able to use Email Programs since these aren't supported in EPs.  Here's an example of our "Digital Customer" engagement program:

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

Depends on the type of email being sent. So if it's an email dedicated to JUST that content, then yeah, I'll add an EP within the content program to send it out depending on how I want it reported. The way the instance I had was set up so that all email communications were in one folder, customer communications in another, etc. Multiple ways to go about that, but for our purposes, that worked best. Looking back, at first blush, I probably would have just put the EP in the content program and created smart campaigns within the EP for resends, etc.

[Anonymous]

I would create a separate program so I can track both the email and the content.  You may want to create a special program for the content itself or groups of content so you can track how they are performing

[Alex_Stanton1]

Agreed on creating a separate program.  And if you set up tags for the type of content, you can also group reports leveraging tags.