Engagement Program Training

[Angus_McCann1]

Our business switched from Eloqua to Marketo at the beginning of the year and we are getting around to setting back up our Engagement Series. I'm just going to be honest and say that we're having difficulty building out these programs back to the way they were in Eloqua. Mainly, the issue we seem to be having is setting program cadence - to re-construct in Marketo how and why certain emails are sent out is either a) too complicated, logically or b) forcing us to remove levels of automation that our programs had before.

Our team is trying to figure out if this is a user-error problem (do we just not understand the tool?) or if this is due to how Marketo built engagement programs, and we need to re-think how we as a business are putting together our marketing engagement series. A use case can be found in this community submission I made the other week.

I was wondering if anyone here can shed some light or share experiences they had with the engagement programs - did you take the Core Concepts 2 class or use consultations to help overcome any struggles you had? Is this a common experience users have had with engagement programs and you've personally had to make adjustments to how your org does engagement campaigns to make it fit to Marketo Engagement Programs? etc.

[Frank_Breen2]

I think you may be looking at the problem from your Eloqua eyes rather than form your Marketo eye's. Engagement campaigns are used to send a series of email over a given period, what you are describing in the above may be better suited to a Default program and then use a smart campaign for routing, etc.. 

Let's use a 30 day trial as an example, most organisations will want to Nurture a person over the 30 days so they get the most of of a trial, if you do all the training, this kind of campaign may fit into an Engagement Program, but actually it would be very hard to get it to work so that it only sent emails in the 30 days the user had the trial for, it would actually be better to set this up in a Default program with a smart campaign to fire the emails and include wait steps.

I'd be happy to explain the setup you need if you can tell me the use cases you have and how it worked in Eloqua.

[Angus_McCann1]

Actually that is exactly my concern, that we are viewing it from a "Eloqua" perspective rather than a "Marketo" one. Your 30 day trial program seems apt for our use case, actually, as we are using it for new subscribers, new newsletter registrants, and similar scenarios - to nurture as a sort.

I was wondering if a default campaign would be more appropriate for those kinds of campaigns, what example would be better use-case for the Engagement programs?

[Frank_Breen2]

I had a reply here yesterday, but it say's it is being moderated, I'm going to re-paste and remove some of the points:

A good use case maybe if a you get a new customer, you could setup an Engagement Program that nurtures them monthly on how to get the most of the purchased product, like a series of quick wins, then part of that could be up sells and cross sells, so that you can have a campaign success.

Marketo themselves do great Engagement Campaigns.

I work for many organizations and 90%+ of programs are non-Engagement Programs, most companies reserve these for the longer term communications that have a longer win cycle.

If you want me to throw a real spanner in the works, a best practice Engagement Program setup would actually have Default programs added to it, which live outside the program, details here. Please also read this chain:https://nation.marketo.com/thread/36419-best-practice-to-add-email-program-to-nurtureengagement-prog.... 

If you give me some more scenarios, I'd be happy on suggesting the best optimal Marketo setup, that may save you a load of testing on your side when doing the conversion from Eloqua to Marketo.

[Angus_McCann1]

So the engagement programs we are setting up are:

1. For new Newsletter Registrants
   1. Goal 1: Get them engaged with our content & marketing emails
      note: NL registrants are not necessarily new to our database
   2. Goal 2: Get them possibly converted to paid subscribers
      
      
2. For new Paid Subscribers
   
   1. Goal: Get them engaged with the items that is included in their subscription
      note: These people are also not necessarily new to our database
      
      
3. For soon-to-expire Paid Subscribers
   
   1. Goal: Get them to renew

Based on your comment above, it sounds like we are using them right, but it sounds like the engagement program is a little bit limited though in terms of cadence flexibility vs a Default program... which begs the question what is the benefit of using an engagement program over a default program?

[Frank_Breen2]

I think the biggest wins of using an Engagement Program are:

• Engagement Scoring
• Blocks over communication (lets say you have a 2 emails per day communication setting and the person has hit that limit, an Engagement Program is smart enough to wait until the next send before emailing the person, this is automatic, whereas in a Default program, you'd have to re-run the campaign or set it on a scheduled batch)

My comments:

1. For new Newsletter Registrants

a. Goal 1: Get them engaged with our content & marketing emails
note: NL registrants are not necessarily new to our database

b. Goal 2: Get them possibly converted to paid subscribers

>> An Engagement Program could be a good setup here, as long as you add asset expiry, though I think you could do the same by having a Default Program and nesting Email Sends for each send, something like:

You'd then have a master subscription list hosted in this program or in the Person Database, month to month, you just clone the last send, update the content and setup the send, having it in an Engagement Program may add another few unneeded steps. 

2. For new Paid Subscribers

a. Goal: Get them engaged with the items that is included in their subscription
note: These people are also not necessarily new to our database

>> An Engagement Program would work here, but you need to make sure that you have a smart campaign running that removes people when there subscription expires, ie so you're still not communicating to them if expired.

3. For soon-to-expire Paid Subscribers

a. Goal: Get them to renew

>> I think a Default program would be better here, it would be very difficult to get an Engagement Program to send exactly at a time and date before expiry  

[Angus_McCann1]

For number 3, we keep subscription information in a custom data object, so I think it wouldn't be too hard, it would just be a matter of running through the cadence to make sure, but even then, that campaign actually extends out a few weeks AFTER expiry, so I wouldn't be too worried.

But thank you for much for this! This helped a lot!

[Amit_Jain]

I have worked on Eloqua and Marketo both and I can say from a top view that we can setup pretty much everything in Marketo that you setup in Eloqua it's just one way or another. I guess the major challenge you would be facing is with the cadence where in Marketo there will be only one cadence for the whole steam while in Eloqua, you would setup your own wait step before triggering the next email. The same could be done in Marketo but for that you have to use the old school method i.e. setup using smart campaigns with wait steps.

Happy to talk through any specific challenge you are facing. PM me if you would like to discuss this further.

[Angus_McCann1]

I think the biggest issue we're facing is just conceptualizing the benefit of using an engagement program over, say, a Default program. Which, I'm sorry isn't specific, but I guess what I'm asking is what can an engagement program do than another program cannot?

[Leah_Anderson]

Have you been able to find an answer to this question? I'm also stumped on the clear benefits of Engagement programs over default programs when Engagement programs seem much harder to customize or control.