**Featured Discussion: Tips for transferring your old nurture track into the new Marketo Customer Engagement

[Anonymous]

Re-imagining your nurture tracks using the new customer engagement model is a prime opportunity to up your game and really push the envelope but planning comes first. In our  case, we have multiple personas, and multiple potential customer types (products, new/existing, internal/external etc.).  It can lead to a large number of nurture track permutations.  [Remember your high school factorial and combinatorial math]

So the question becomes how to lay this out using the new customer engagement module? One thing I have learned about Marketo is keep the logic simple otherwise you are in for a maintenance headache in the future. We have gone for the Keep It Simple approach and actually dumped a lot of complexity from our nurture programs.

• One customer engagement model per product line/family – just because you might have bought one product does not necessarily mean you are ready to buy a different one and it aligns to the business financials.
• One stream per lifecycle type (early, middle, late, customer, lost). Already this is too many, but we are pairing it down to lead/customer/lost.

When you want to add timed events into streams, the least amount of engagement modules/streams the better. Think hard before you add another whole chunk because when you want to add events or webinars to all the streams, it becomes its own busy work.

We have a further problem with fixed selling periods means we have to consider using what I call a compressible message map.  I.e.  Someone enters a nurturing program on week 12 of 26, how do I make sure that someone entering on week 6 gets the most pertinent information.

All that being said, how are you thinking about implementing your customer engagement?

Cheers,
Eric

PS: Can’t wait for the communication limits feature, it is going to be awesome on top of an already excellent customer engagement module.

[Anonymous]

It looks so easy I COULD CRY! I've been putting off re-working our nuture flows since this was announced at the user summit and now I'm frantically trying to clear a day (or maybe just an hour?) so I can dive in and call it DONE!

Our nurturing currently revolves around reaching out to prospects that are mid-funnel (based on their actions like requesting a demo) and pushing them towards other high-value content. We'll keep this but be able to better manage it so some poor soul who expresses interest in multiple products today is no longer hit with 3 or 4 emails this time tomorrow.

We'll also launch some higher funnel nurturing for "cold" leads that show no activity for 90 days with the hopes of reactivitating them.

Definitely looking forward to simplifying and cleaning up a lot of overthought chaos!

[Josh_Hill13]

If you have an existing traffic cop system, I think it'd be fairly straightforward to migrate the Programs or even campaigns into new engagement systems.

You could pull over the emails in the order you want, taking Eric's suggestion to keep it to one product line per Stream.

Or pull in Programs wholesale and manage those too.

I wrote a quick summary on the engagement system here:
http://www.marketingrockstarguides.com/how-to-use-marketo-engagement-programs-850/

[Anonymous]

Those of us with Marketo Standard will have limited capabilities but I still lke everything I see with the new program. With only 4 active engagement programs and 1 Stream in each (and no transition tools) I need some tips or suggestions for moving leads from one engagement program and stream to another program and stream. I’m assuming I can do that with Campaign is Requested filters, but that’s almost like the old Traffic Cop and I was hoping to move away from that.

Thanks
 

[Anonymous]

Can't wait to try it out, have yet to dig into it yet. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the tips Eric!  I understand your point about trying to limit the number of streams in a given engagement module so as to make adding timed events easier, but I'm curious how you are able to address different personas and stages in the buyers journey by only having one lead nurture stream?  For example, we have practitioner and executive early stage nurture programs, a mid-stage nurture program and a late-stage nurture program.

[Anonymous]

Hi Elliott,

We are using dynamic content/segmentation for the personas within each email. Secondly, someone else asked about A/B testing so we use programs instead of straight email to add some extra logic capabilities

Cheers,
Eric

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

We do the same thing with our emails - dyanmic text per industry and location - so that it's more customized for our leads.

I also completely agree with Josh - after playing around with the streams, it seems that it would be relatively easy to deconstruct a traffic cop nurture and just pull (or clone) all of the assets into the Engagement Engine and set it back up. I know I was able to work through set up and development (still working...) much faster than I originally estimated.

Finally, Barry, we were in your shoes too with the 4 programs, 1 stream each and it was awful. I was considering using the programs like streams...so the first program/stream would be early, the second p/s would be mid and the third p/s late. The final one could be for customer communications, I suppose. Obviously, there's some more logic that needs to go into this to prevent leads from being in multiple programs at once, but maybe that'll spark some ideas for you?

I was lucky and my organization decided to buck up and pay the extra $300/month for additional streams. It's really a shame that Marketo makes such amazing additions to their program and then sets it up so that it's nearly impossible to use without paying extra...

[Anonymous]

Learning about this at yesterday's Jump Start Tour in Santa Monica couldn't have been more timely. I was just talking to our Account Executive about our company's need to address our natural tendencies to blast out mass emails. I have yet to try out MCE, but I'm definitely excited about it.

[Anonymous]

Seems very powerful based on what I've played around with it so far. Looking forward to tomorrow's webinar to learn more and really start leveraging them. This is definitely going to change the nurturing game.