Engagement Streams vs. Smart Campaigns with Request Campaigns

[Anonymous]

Hi Marketo Community,

Is it better to use the Engagement Program (with Streams) or use several Smart Campaigns that hand off to each other with "request campaigns" and "campaign requested"?

A former coworker said the engagement program/streams weren't a good choice because of faulty reporting (or some other reason), so my process has always been to build out rather elaborate smart campaigns that hand off to each other. The more I learn about Marketo, the less knowledgeable I think that former coworker was...and now I wonder if things could just be a lot easier.

Does anyone else agree that it is better to make elaborate smart campaigns than use the engagement programs? Does this question even make sense?

Best,

Dana

[Josh_Hill13]

Hi Dana,

While I won't comment directly on your co-worker, I suggest reading my slides from a user group: slideshare.net/jdavidhill where I discuss some of the options.

• Drip Campaigns with Variable Wait Steps - this is where regular wait steps and/or request campaigns shine. I don't recommend doing this unless you can show me a workflow or customer journey that warrants it. I also do not think it offers any reporting advantages.
• Engagement Streams with Regular Cadences - you can move people between streams to manage changing (or accelerating) times between emails.
  • It is true that reporting takes some thought here. There's a lot that goes into a proper nurture and I can tell you already spend time on it from that screen shot:
    • Entry - trigger and batch - who gets in and when
    • Exit - Goal - when do we consider this person is done and where do they go from here? Is the goal MQL? Something else?
    • Exit - bad - did they unsub from these emails? did they become invalid? did they get recycled?
    • Reporting - you can manage this by determining the above and then creating Program Channel Statuses that match. Then you can also use Empty Streams to drop people into Goal and Exit Bad to get those counts. Some folks use Static Lists to drop in those who Exited.
    • Never remove someone from the Engagement or you WILL lose their data.

I am available to help in more detail, but that's the summary of what you can do.

[Anonymous]

Thank you Josh!  Apologies for the delay as I didn't see you had responded until now. I will check out your slideshare. I think I might keep this campaign since I set it up and it is working but I will definitely check out Engagement Streams with Regular Cadences.

Thank you!

[Kenny_Elkington]

Engagement programs were developed because a request-based structure frequently just become unmaintainable due to scale and difficulty in tracking and expiring content.  You can get the best of both worlds by using Programs in your engagement streams, allowing you to customize flow.  You can also just create individual status and tracking programs outside of the eng program, and then have the program management the direct sending of the email assets.

[Justin_Norris1]

Dana Hall​

I think it depends on your exact requirements.

Engagement programs have a lot of intelligence built in (ensuring leads don't get the same content twice, allowing flexibility in re-arranging content, etc.). This makes them quite useful for most nurtures.

Regarding reporting, if you make each email it's own program within the Engagement, you now are collecting data to enable very granular reporting on the influence of each touchpoint from a revenue perspective. So I don't see a reporting issue within Engagements - quite the opposite.

Where Engagements break down for me is if you have very specific requirements around cadence. One example of this for me was a former company where the goal of the nurture was to onboard free account sign-ups to a SaSS app and convert them to paid. Very short sale and transactional.

The cadence there was measured in hours and was all over the map depending on what actions a lead took inside the app. There was no way Engagement programs would work. Instead we had a set of tiered drip flows, and the lead's behaviour in-app would boost them to the next tier of emails as they reached certain activity goals.

It was fun to do but complicated to build. For most longer B2B sales cycles, the advantages of an Engagement outweigh the increased flexibility of building your own from the ground up.

Josh's presentation is a very good starting point. Also check out Edward Unthank​ 's presentation from Summit 14:

Intelligent Lead Nurturing (MUS 14) Edward Unthank