Engagement Program Questions with T-minus 2 days till Campaign Launch

[Guitarrista82]

Hi Darshil!

Thanks so much for your help on everything. I now have yet another complication...

Thankfully, we haven't launched the marketing initiative yet, but are hoping to do so next week.

The complication that I've come across is in coordinating the scheduling times between the Wait Steps campaign and the Engagement Program stream cadence.

In my most recent test, I set the Wait Step to run after 1 day - Any Day - at 12pm MST:

However, I had run the first cast of the email in the EP to run at 4:45pm and set the stream cadence to run every day at 4:45pm. 

So what happened is instead of running a day later at 4:45pm, of course, the cast was skipped and didn't run because it was waiting to reach the 4:45 pm time-frame PLUS waiting until 12pm the following day. So everyone remained PAUSED the following day and no one received the email.

A little after 7pm last night, I manually intervened and changed everyone's EP cadence to Normal, changed the EP stream casts to send the next email at 7:15pm, changed the Wait Steps campaign to "Unpause" everyone at 8:00pm and then changed the EP stream casts again to run at 8:15 pm the next day:

Now my concern is that when everyone gets the email tonight at 8:15pm, they'll go into the Wait Steps campaign, which will pause them for 1 day (technically until 8:15pm the next day) but because I added the "wait must end Any Day at 8:00 PM MST" it won't send tomorrow but will wait until the next day at 8:00pm. Does this make sense? So it turns into an unending loop of needing to adjust the EP stream cadences and the Wait Steps times to ensure everyone gets the emails the following day, or which ever day/time we need them to.

In our real-life use case, we actually want to send the next email in each EP cast every 30 days, Mon-Fri at 5pm. So, to avoid this unending loop mentioned above, would it make better sense to set the EP casts to run Mon-Fri at 5:00pm and set the Wait Steps campaign to run every 28 or 29 days (without adding any specific days/times) to Unpause everyone? This way there's no need to coordinate the times between the EP and the Wait Steps campaign?

Or is there another possible solution that would work?

Thank you,

LK

[Darshil_Shah1]

You can set the wait step to end 29 days at a time after your stream cast time, so members have their engagement program cadence updated to normal exactly on the 30th day after they receive the last cast. Of course, if the 30th day falls on a weekend, people would not receive the next content until the next stream cast on the next weekday.

[Guitarrista82]

That is helpful, thank you Darshil.

What would you recommend I do in a situation where we want to send out an email on a daily basis? Would the Wait Step be set to pause someone for 22 or 23 hours and then keep the same send time in the Engagement Program as shown below?

Thank you,

LK

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, you don't really need to flip cadences to Paused and then Normal state if you want to send nurture emails on a daily basis. Nurture cadence cannot run more than 1x daily, so you don't really need the Pause campaign. 🙂

Also, if you're sending nurture emails to people on a daily basis, people will reach their email communication limits pretty soon, and you'd not be able to send any other marketing (and other nurture) emails to them. Even if you remove/don't have communication limits set, there are high chances you'd have increased Unsubscribe rates by sending nurture emails daily.

[Guitarrista82]

Got it, thank you so much, Darshil!

[Darshil_Shah1]

You're welcome, @Guitarrista82! So glad to be of help. Feel free to let us know if you have any more questions. 🙂

[Guitarrista82]

Hi @Darshil_Shah,

We launched the engagement program/smart campaign marketing intiative last week and it is going well. The only problem is that we set it up in such a way that when we added new people to the streams, they are going to hit the initial wait step all at the same time instead of in separate groups.

I now see that it wasn't a good idea to add that wait step in the beginning because the stream cadences are set to only run Mon-Fri, so if someone goes through the smart campaign on Saturday and Sunday they won't go into the Initial Wait Step (which pauses them for 29 days) until Monday at 12 pm.

I think I found a solution, which is to add everyone to a Holding Stream, set their cadence to Paused for 29 days and then add them to the other streams.

But I kind of want to delete that wait step in the streams...my only concern, though, is what would happen to everyone who is in that wait step? Would they go on to receive the email in the next cast after the 29 days? Or would they get the email immediately when Monday comes?

Thank you,

Laura

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, I think it'd have been better if you'd added people to the Wait step after sending out the cast (instead of before), i.e., Add to Engagement Program -> Person receives the nurture content -> Change Cadence to the Paused state -> Wait 29 days -> Change Cadence to the Normal state. Also, deleting the Wait Step does not remove people from the original Wait Step. They will continue on to whatever the next step was before deleting the wait step, also, people will not go back and complete the flow action that takes its place.

This is the expected behavior, as when people enter the wait step their wait duration is calculated, and they wait there in that flow step bucket for that amount of time. In addition to this, they're also stamped with the flow step number they should be going to when they come out of the wait step. If you delete the wait step, assuming you don't add any new step in its place, people will skip the step that takes the place of the wait step when they're done waiting.

So, in your case, people already in the wait step won't receive emails on Monday, as removing the wait step won't take them out of it, but likely their cadence wouldn't turn back to Normal once they're done with it as the Change Engagement Program Cadence to Normal step would have taken the wait step's place.

[Katja_Keesom]

In general, @Darshil_Shah1 's answers are on the mark. There is however one thing I was picking up on in your questions in general. I would always question the wisdom of creating a drip nurture (a content program that has several steps in it with email sends and wait steps) and then adding that to an engagement program. I guess I would always choose one or the other. Otherwise the cadence of the engagement program and the timing of the drip nurture would interfere with eachother.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Thank you for adding this, @Katja_Keesom! I swear I had this in my mind when I started writing the answer, but then I got into the weeds of answering all the questions and I missed it. @Guitarrista82, in general, you'd want to either use the custom nurture program setup with smart campaigns/wait step (i.e., w/o using the Engagement program) or use the OOTB nurture capabilities of the Engagement program. Although Marketo's Engagement program although is very robust and feature-rich, certain use cases such as mixed cadences, Wait steps, etc. are better set using the custom nurture setup using smart campaigns and wait steps. Mixing custom nurture and Engagement programs could make the setup difficult and complicated to build, manage, update, and troubleshoot.