Exhausted Stream in Engagement Program

[josephgomez]

Hi there,

I'm in the process of cleaning up a nurture stream and was curious about best practices with exhausted members. Recently, we added new content to our stream and it caused a spike in unsubscribes due to a lot of exhausted members receiving the new content. That said, I created a smart campaign to run weekly that updates the all of the exhausted members status to Paused so they won't receive new content, but I've also seen methods where exhausted members get added to an "Exhausted Stream" in the engagement program. I was wondering the pros/cons of each approach? Thanks!

[Phillip_Wild · Accepted solution]

Hi @josephgomez ,

You say that "it caused a spike in unsubscribes due to a lot of exhausted members receiving the new content." But isn't that what was intended - that they receive the new content?

Exhausted members are simply people who have received all the content you have to send in a stream. So typically you wouldn't see it as an issue that those exhausted members received any new content, that would be the whole idea. The problem instead is likely the amount of time that passed between when they received the "last" emails and the next one you added to the stream. If several months passed, and they didn't receive any other emails during that time, likely that spiked your unsubscribe rate.

Related to this, pausing people in an engagement stream wouldn't do anything if people have exhausted content in a given stream. Unless you change their stream, they won't receive any new content anyway, whether paused or unpaused. 

With regards to new streams, what I have personally seen is one of two approaches:

1. The engagement programs themselves are grouped by lead engagement level or prospect/customer: so when a person becomes MQL/SQL or becomes a customer from a prospect, they are moved into another engagement program altogether.
2. When "success" is achieved, that's when someone is moved into a "Success" stream, which is blank, so they don't receive any other comms. If they are merely Exhausted, but haven't taken the action you would like them to take, then they should generally remain in the stream, and receive any new content you push towards them.

Likely that regardless of whether you sent that email to that group after not contacting them for a while you would have seen a spike in unsubscribes anyway - the key thing is the time between communication has created the spike, not the fact they had a status of "Exhausted".

There would no doubt be other approaches to this sort of thing too, but that overall is what I've seen. I hope I've interpreted the question correctly!