How to schedule an email to only x people not a

[Mark_Farnell]

I've seen a few discussions and ideas around limiting an email send, and wanted to ask the community about my specific use case.

We have a nurture campaign due to kick off to re-engage with leads who meet a certain criteria of not having engaged with us recently e. have not clicked a link in an email for more than 3 months.

If we get a good response to this camapign it will generate more call backs than my small team can handle, let's say I've got 5,000 leads and 500 respond in some way (optimisitic maybe, but it's to make a point).

My small team in sales development can't handle that many responses within 1-2 days of an email going out. Instead we want to send the emails in batches of 500 every week.  We do not believe Random sample will work here as the full number of qualifying leads may increase or decrease, and we need an even flow of absolute numbers

In addition, we'll be adding new leads to this program as they match the criteria.

Any ideas on how to handle this?  I can't see anything to dynamically manage say a list or smart campaign membership (I know about the global settings for smart campaign membership, that won't work for us here as I would have to override every single other smart campaign, not feasible)

Many thanks for any ideas.

[Adam_Vavrek1]

Hi Mark,

There's many ways to do this. This one is a bit manual but it would work: Run a Smart Campaign of everyone you want to re-engage with (the 5,000). Copy and paste all of their email addresses you get from the Qualified Leads (Schedule -> # existing leads) into Excel. Create another Smart Campaign and include 500 emails at a time using the "Email Address is" Filter. Clone that ten times and include the next 500 emails into the program.

Adam

[Mark_Farnell]

HI Adam.  Thanks - we were initially thinking about  creating lists in that way as well, but that sounds a bit manual.  Also I need to accomodate a data change that would fire an unknown number of leads in to the campaign, without having to check it.  Any other ideas?

[Adam_Vavrek1]

I see. Try splitting your leads: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000L9irCAC

[Josh_Hill13]

I'm not sure you can make this very automatic the way you want. I would be extremely surprised if you got more than a 5% response rate to a wake from the dead campaign. When you say "Response" do you mean form fill out? A request for more info? An email open?

What is your capacity to respond?

What you could try is to add 500 to a static list, then add those to nurture. See what that response rate is. Then keep putting in 500 more each week. I'd have to think hard about how to automate this, but it might involve a continual change to a Random Sample generator where new lists are created each week. Not super manual, but not that automatic either.

[Mark_Farnell]

So we have come up with a solution that is partly automated at least.  Let's say you have a list of 5000.  A new custom field is needed e.g. "Send Date".  Before uploading the list, or creating a smart list of cold data, you need to update the field "Send Date" in chunks that make sense so you can end x per week.

The data for the send needs to be ringfenced in some way e.g. we tag it with a picklist eg "cold email" and then use that in a master "exclude list" from all our marketing; thus ensuring they will only get this cold email.

There is a daily batch campaign which listens out for the "Send Date" being in the past, which then requests a campiagn to send the email/emails (only to leads stamped with the correct value e.g. cold email.