Engagement Program-Transition Rules (best practice question)

[Ande_Kempf4]

I am currently setting up an engagement program to re-engage leads who have not had an interesting moment in, well a long time.

My goal is to re-engage a specific industry of leads with specific business challenges they may be facing.

I have 3 streams -  each stream contains 3 emails with content for a specific business challenge.

Plan 1: Put everyone into the engagement program and send them an email from stream 1 about a business challenge. If a lead did not open that email they would be removed from that stream and sent an email a week later from stream 2 about another business challenge and so on.  However, if a lead does engage with email 1 from a particular stream, they would stay in that stream and continue to get the 2 other emails (with resources and such) about that business challenge.

Plan 2: Send an initial e-mail asking the lead what business challenge they are facing. The email would contain a list of 3 business challenges, and based on the link the lead clicked on, they would then be pushed into a stream with the content that is relevant to them.

What do you guys think?  Which plan is better or could both be improved?

[Phillip_Wild]

I'm a tester by nature, so I would suggest doing both and seeing what performs better! You could accomplish this by using the Random Sample flow step with 50% going to Engagement A, and 50% going to Engagement B.

In terms of moving between streams, it's nothing too difficult, assuming you aren't deploying the emails within a stream at different times (to account for time zones). What you would need is a smart campaign for each stream you are working with, which fires weekly about an hour before the second email is to be sent. If the lead has not opened the email, then move them to the second stream. If they have, do nothing. This assumes all streams deploy at the same time.

This means you give each lead the maximum possible time to open and engage with the email, and move them around appropriately. If you are running many thousands of leads through these engagement programs, I would suggest waiting longer than an hour to ensure there is time for Marketo to process them all.

Hope this helps!

Phil