Engagement Program - Reporting/Metrics best practice question

[Anonymous]

We have multiple engagement programs in multiple work spaces for multiple products.  You get the idea.  Anyway here is my question:  As leads progress through programs they become invalid (for multiple reasons of course).  The data analyst in me wants to remove the invalid email from the engagement program.

• This seems like it is or should be a best practice since we can't communicate with the record and email is our primary communication channel.
• Is there anything I am not considering from a reporting angle?
• If a record becomes invalid half way through the Engagement Nurture and is removed, how does Marketo handle that?  Like the record never went through at all or will it count all activities up until the point it is removed?
• Do I have to have a Smart Campaign for every single Engagement Nurture to achieve this?

I would really like to hear what others are doing.  Thanks in advance.

Best,

Eric

[Devraj_Grewal · Accepted solution]

When a lead who is in an engagement program becomes email invalid or unsubscribed, we keep them as a member of the engagement program for reporting purposes (especially program membership). All we do is change their cadence to "paused" and move them to an inactive stream with no email content. You can also change their program status if necessary as well, but don't change to "Not in program".

[Julz_James]

Don't remove them from the engagement program if you are still reporting and the program is active.  You'll loose the ability to report properly if you do that.  Just pause them as Devraj said and you should be fine.

[Kim_Allen]

Hey Eric,

As several have mentioned here - it's best to never remove leads from engagement programs, because then you lose that data!

If they become invalid, unsubscribe, etc. MKTO is smart enough not to send to them at that point. However, if you don't want to see them grouped with everyone else, you could:

1. Set up a smart campaign that triggers off of the change to invalid, etc. and makes them paused.

2. You could potentially set up a status in the channel for these leads. This isn't something I've seen done but if your business has a case (I think you'd want to really think through the WHY before making this change) for really wanting to see "active" nurtured leads vs. "inactive" and report off these easier, you could add that status in. Then in the above (1) smart campaign that would just be another flow step (to change their program status).

Best,

Kim