Enter the Marketo Customer Engagement engine Contest Here!

[Anonymous]

Enter the Customer Engagement engine Contest this week and win a Nike FuelBand! Simply share your top 3 tips for fast implementation of the Customer Engagement engine and post it in this thread and get your friends to "like" it. Please note: Each user can only submit once. You cannot edit your submission once it has been posted, and only customers in the United States and Canada (excluding Quebec) are eligible to win.

The winner will receive a Nike FuelBand which measures your everyday activity and tracks calories burned, steps taken and more. It's also a great watch!



Click here to view the full contest description and directions.

Click here to view official contest rules.

[Anonymous]

1.     Create a content matrix/content catalog: the new customer engagement engine can be powerful, but it needs content to fuel it.  Creating a matrix of your content is a great way to organize the content you already have, and to identify where you have holes. For a template to get you started, check out the Marketo content guide, Creating Content that Sells (page 10).
 
Once you’ve mapped out all your content by industry, persona, revenue stage, etc, your content matrix now can serve as schematic for building your nurture streams in Marketo.  
 
2.       Use dynamic content for fine-tuned messaging: You’ve already got your streams created and the content you want in each, but you want to be able to send a slightly different message to a lead depending on their role at a company, or their industry. Dynamic content is the key here, and a great way of keeping your content list in Marketo manageable. Create segmentations in your Marketo database and use them in your emails and landing pages to create different versions using the dynamic content functionality.
 
3.     Don’t over-engineer it: One of the quickest ways to kill a nurture program before it ever gets off the ground is to start off too complicated. If you don’t yet have content or transitions figured out for some of your streams, relax! Get started with what you have, and build on it later. Whatever organization and structure you pick, stick with it. You’ll be constantly tweaking and adding to your nurture programs, and a logical, simple structure will make it easier for you and your coworkers to understand later. 

[Anonymous]

1. CUSTOM SUBSCRIPTION PREFERENCES: Marketo uses their own unsubscribe settings for the Engagement Engine, however if you use customized subscription preferences, it can be harder to stop people from getting the engagement emails. We have a stream called Unsubscribe. Our custom subscription preferences are a true/false SFDC field that tells us if someone wants to opt in to our email To solve this, we have a trigger that looks for the field "Email Opt-in Product information" to change from [True] to [False]. When that data value changes to [false], the flow step is to change Program Status to Unsubscribed and move them to the Unsubscribe stream. That way we still can see them as a member of the Engagement program, but they don't receive any emails from us for that subscription preference. 
2. REMEMBER TO PAUSE AND UNPAUSE MEMBERS - Once a customer has reached a lead score of 100, they are passed to our Inside Sales person so we don't want them to continue getting nurturing emails. We have a campaign that changes Engagment Program cadence to Pause, once they are passed up to Inside Sales. We also have a campaign that listens for leads that are recycled. If their lead status changes from "Open" to "Recycled", the flow step is to change their cadence back to Normal and they resume being nurtured where they left off.
3. SET UP A CUSTOM VIEW FOR ENGAGMENT PROGRAMS: Customize your view on the members tab so that you can easily see where specific people are in the Engagement program  and filter accordingly - Be sure to include Status, Engagement Program Stream and Engagement Program status. In addition to the dashboard, this can help you understand WHO specifically is at each point in the campaign.

[Anonymous]

We recently just ported over our old traffic cop nurture system on to the Engagement engine (which is awesome by the way) so here are the three tips I would recommend:

1. Draw it out before you make it - We went through three iterations on paper before we found something that would actually serve us the best. Sometimes you have this idea in your head and then when it's all laid out you find it's way too complicated, you can't maintain or scale it, or it just won't work.

2. Work two casts ahead - You don't have to have all your content from the get-go, really you're in a safe spot if you work two blasts ahead, meaning you have content to last you for the next two casts from your engagement model. This will help you get tne engagement model going in a relatively short amount of time.

3. Know that it's always a WIP - Don't worry about having a 100% be-all-end-all nurture program, the brilliant thing about the Engagement model is that it's very easy to change things as you go. You may learn something new about your customers, or the direction of your nurturing may change - you're going to be changing, tweaking, and editing this thing. Build what you need right now, and go from there.

[Anonymous]

To add to Jason C's post since we work on the same account (and vote for his comment  not mine since he answered first)

1. First you have to figure out are you going to allow multiple emails to a lead or not.  If they should only be in one nurture program at a time similar to traffic cop then its one program with multiple streams.  If they can be cause you want the leads to receive multiple emails because they are interested in multiple products or product lines, then it is multiple engagement programs for you.

2. You can use programs to do the extra stuff beyond just email sends like A/B testing, sending SMS messages at the same time as an email etc. Dont' forget to setup the program's success criteria so that it will count towards engagement score.  Secondly, you can use a campaign within an external program (to the customer engagement module) to kick off other sequences or business processes (in parallel).

3. For all you RCAers out there, remember to set the cost periods for your engagement programs

Cheers,

Eric

[Anonymous]

1. Don't get matrix-phobia. It can be really intense to imagine a complete nurturing dream. Don't wait for perfection to get started. Create a first email & add it to the stream. See how it does, create a second one. When you have a rhythm create 4 or 5 at once. Don't get paralyzed by option fear. Just get started. If you don't have a more complex nurture then start with Early, Late, Customer. 

2. Add some randomness into your engagement cadence. Create a special Program containing a smart campaign with only a wait step. "Skip a Week" will help people not get bored with your messaging.
 
3. Use Dynamic content in your emails. Keep it personal. Keep it targeted. It may be an engagement program but it doesn't stop your ability to create targeted content. Like always, keep everything in a program. Your traditional email statuses can still be tracked on an email by email basis, tracking in the engagement program is more focused on the engagement score. Let go of individual statuses here. 

[Anonymous]

In the spirit of Nike, JUST DO IT!

[Anonymous]

1. Take time to plan - The nurture campaign will likely be foundational to your marketing program from here on out, so don't do this step halfway, get it right from the get-go! Pow-wow with posters and paper, or hog a whiteboard for a day or two and map out the entire funnel and nurture program plays in there. Get down how/where the content, the triggers, the scores, etc. all fit in. (It took a pretty big whiteboard for us!)

2. Know your tools and use them - the nurture campaign is where you can take all of the tools in Marketo and bring them together - emails, landing pages, forms and more. Once you dig in, you'll find the opportunity to use tokens, segmentation, smart lists, alerts, etc. I also am constantly grabbing data and adding it to my lead's info through the change data value flow step. As you whiteboard and plan your nurture program, get creative and try to use all of the tools at your disposal and start to weave them together in beautiful marketing synergy.

2.5 When you think you've got it all down - throw in the complex stuff that Eric is talking about - A/B testing, SMS, etc. Someday, I'd like a step where I get an alert to send a direct mailer piece to the lead.

3. Be transparent with your organization - know that what you're doing is awesome! See if you can send the nurture emails to your fellow employees to share the awesome content with them and particularly facilitate sales-marketing fusion. Once your colleagues grasp what you're up to, they should be amazed. When you have their support, you'll be more motivated, the rest of the company will be excited for this, and your program should be more successful because your inside and outside sales team will be better prepared for the hand-off of leads.

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree with all of the above!

Here's how I might think of Engagements:

Plan Out Your System in Advance with a Single GOAL

You can sketch this on paper or in something like Visio or Gliffy. A white board will do just fine. Remember to ask "What do I expect them to do and what will I do once they've done that?" If you can take some of the advice above, add content over time. Setup the system to be flexible (since it is!). I might start off with a goal of getting the lead to request a Demo, or perhaps taking 1-3 "call me" behaviors to become an MQL.

Use My Tokens to make life easier

Life is easier if you use local tokens from the folder or Engagement. You can change all sorts of content on the fly and even import other Programs easily if you're using same nomenclature.

Ask What Would I Want if I Were My Target
In other words, use the Golden Rule here. Don't send out content just to force an action. Help people! That's what content marketing is about. As you add content and then more streams, you can gently nudge people to your way of thinking, leading them to your solution. But don't just setup 6 emails that end in "Ok, so buy now!"

[Anonymous]

This is good timing. I logged into the Community site to get feedback and corrections to my blog article on 10 Steps to Your First Customer Engagement Programs for Spark Edition customers.

While everyone is welcome to review and add comments on my blog, here are my 3 tips from that article.

1. Stop fretting about Spark limitations, and map the available four Engagement Programs (single-stream) to your Buy stages. 🙂
The most typical way to think of your leads is to divide them into four buckets - Latent leads, Mid-Stage Leads, Late-Stage Leads, and Lost Leads (to be recycled back into Latent Leads). 

2. Create “Request” and “Trigger” Smart Campaigns that “Add to Engagement Program”.
Create a “Request [Program]” Campaign to batch assign leads in bulk to the engagement program. This Campaign should typically check for membership in the pre-defined “Members” super smart list mentioned in the previous steps. Add a “Trigger [Program]” Campaign with the triggers (transition rules) for dynamically assigning leads to the Engagement Programs (Buy stages). This smart campaign should use the same triggers as the filters used in your corresponding member smart list(s).

3. Use “Helper Campaigns” to correctly pause only those Previous Programs (streams) that were servicing the newly assigned lead.
For single-stream Engagement Programs available to Spark customers, if you assign the lead to a new Engagement Program, any previous stream(s) from another Program remain activated, thus risking over-sending of emails from multiple content streams. If you want your leads to be an active member of only one engagement program at a time, you will need to “Pause” the previous Stream (Program) whatever that stream is at the time.

To accomplish this correctly, use “helper campaigns” that use the trigger, “Added to (Current)Engagement Program” and the filter, “Member of (Previous)Engagement Program” to correctly disable only those Engagement Program (stream) of which the lead is a member. You will use the “Change Engagement Program Cadence” to resume the current Program (Stream) and Pause the previous Program (Stream).