Engagement Program: New Program or Stream

[Anonymous]

We’re in the process of making our nurture streams more targeted based on progressive profiling data. Right now, our lead nurture flow is fairly generic, with all leads receiving the same content.  We’re planning to add in “industry” on our progressive profiling forms within our generic nurture stream, and then redirect the leads to an industry specific flow once we have that data.  In addition to our lead nurture flow, we also have a few other nurture flows a person could be a part of (customer, closed lost, etc.).  I’m wondering if I should have separate engagement programs or just one.  Right now we’re currently using smart campaigns for our nurture programs, but are planning to transition to engagement programs. Originally I thought:

Engagement program 1: Lead nurturing with generic + industry specific streams (leads will need to exit program based on status (became customer, has an opp, etc.)

Engagement 2: Customer stream – streams based on product

Engagement 3: Closed lost stream

And so on…

If you think there’s a better way to do this please let me know.  Could I set up individual programs within a stream based on industry – so we could have a prospect stream and then a program for each industry?  Is there an easy way to have people exit an engagement program (i.e. prospect becomes customer, exits lead program to go to customer program).

Thanks,

Mike

[John_Clark1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike,

I think the way you described setting it up will work well for you.  You can have up to 15 streams in a single engagement program, so you could possible put everything into one program, but separating the streams out by by Prospect, Customer, and Closed/Lost makes a lot of sense.  That will allow you to customize the streams to where the lead is in their life cycle.

You can also have 100 active engagement programs, so you could have as many as you want going, but keeping them consolidated based on commonality makes more sense.

John

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, it is far better to separate these out in Engagements, rather than Streams.

Streams are best used to control the Cadence - say accelerate emails if someone is engaging. They are also useful if you are selling ecommerce products because you could run Engagements by Product and then use the AIDA framework to build the Streams.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Josh & John.  Would you set up separate smart campaigns with flow steps to pull customers out of engagement programs when they qualify for another engagement program (i.e. become a customer, have an opportunity, etc.)?

Thanks,

Mike

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Mike, yes. You would want to create a gatekeeper that will control the engagement program that someone is a member of. It's important to remember that someone can only be in a single stream of an engagement program, but they can be in multiple engagement programs at a time. So you will need to pause and pull them out of an engagement program, and ideally be "reevaluated" to see which program they fit into after any changes occur.