Engagement Nurture - multiple engagement programs or multiple streams?

[Anonymous]

I am building nurture programs for our non-customers, current customers, and customers who've cancelled.

Within the non-customer streams, I want to have different content based on 3 segments (A, B, C) as well as their place in the buying cycle, Suspects, Prospects, Leads.

So each of the segments will have their own content in each cycle. Segment A will have content for Suspects, Prospects, and Leads; Segment B will have yet another set of content for Suspects, Prospects, and Leads, etc.

My questions are:

1. Do I build THREE different Engagement Programs for 1. non-customers, 2. current customers, and 3. customers who've cancelled or do I just use streams?

2. If yes, to #1, then would it make sense to further split up the audiences, and build THREE different Engagement Programs for Segment A, B, and C, or once again do I use streams?

Thanks so much!

[Guy_Goldstein6 · Accepted solution]

Hey Natasha,

What a great question! I think I've been playing around with different approaches to this question since about the time engagement programs came out!

The easiest way I've found to explain it is as such:

An engagement program represents a series of related messages with a goal of driving a lead from one point to another in the funnel.

An engagement stream represents a part of that journey.

In a "standard" scenario where you're talking about early, mid, late stage content I'd suggest that a single program should house that content and the transitions between streams should move people along the lifecycle.

My personal preference (largely due to a lack of effective reporting when using dynamic content) is to separate the engagement program by segment (so in your case you'd have 3 engagement programs A/B/C and each program would have 3 streams (suspect/customer/ex-customer).

That said, I also like to be able to align programs with business goals, and it would potentially be worth spliting suspect -> Customer; Customer -> Repeat customer; Ex Customer -> Returned Customer into separate tracks with sub-sections (after all a customer is just a new kind of prospect )

One thing that I have learnt from experience is that using streams in parallel (such as having a stream for each segment) doesn't leverage the strength of the engagement programs as much as leveraging the transitions to move people within a program.

If you feel like discussing it in a little more depth, I'm always excited to have a conversation about nurturing!

Guy

[Anonymous]

Would love to, Guy! Let me know if Aug 13th or week of Aug 17th works for you. My email is ndolginsky@hq.bill.com so we can coordinate that way.

Thanks!

natasha