Lead Nurture / Engagement Engine Best Practices

[Anonymous]

We are trying to set up our Lead Nurture program and I'm looking for some best practices. Anyone have any best practices or examples of what you have set up for this?

Thanks

Staci

[Josh_Hill13]

Please see

• My posts on this: Marketo Engagement Program and Nurturing TestingMarketing Rockstar Guides
• Do a search here in the community.
• 2015 summit videos - summit.marketo.com

But before you do that, think about:

• Whom to nurture
• Why to nurture
• Entry points - when and why do they enter?
• Exit/Goal - when do they stop this nurture or move to another one? How do I record that?

[Edward_Unthank_]

I did a talk on this at Marketo Summit 2014, called "How to Take Intelligent Lead Nurturing to the Next Level​."

This goes through the individual engagement program setup. I use Email Cast programs within the engagement program so that you can skip casts more appropriately in order to maximize your email communications without putting your foot in your mouth.

Here's a screenshot of what our actual engagement program looks like:

And here's the rest of the folder with an Email Cast program opened up:

Take this, add to it a Traffic Director, which sorts people into best-fit engagement programs, and you've got yourself a whole machine that nurtures!

Miscellaneous note: Don't put programs within the engagement program itself. They're impossible to move afterward, and it's better to make the Email Cast programs reusable between multiple engagement programs. Put them in their own folder, organized well. When you're using Email Cast programs templates, you can tokenize all of the email content. The ones screenshotted here are all fully tokenized.

Cheers,

Edward Unthank | Founder, Etumos

[Anonymous]

I started organizing my engagement programs like this (email assets living within their own programs, instead of within the engagement engine program) after watching Edward's Summit presentation last year.  Even if you don't use tokens for your email assets (and you should), being able to re-use the assets within different nurture campaigns is critical - especially when it comes time to update the individual emails and CTAs due to a new product launch / company change, etc. so you are only making the change in one location to propagate the change across all of your nurture tracks that use that piece of content.

[Anonymous]

Edward Unthank,

I was curious how you set up the smart list and trigger for the "send email" campaign within the individual programs that are in the nurture? I'm trying to launch based on a similar set-up and couldn't determine how to create a smart campaign with the little green arrow. Want to make sure I'm setting this up properly.

Thanks in advance!

[James_Glavin]

Hi Edward Unthank,

Thanks so much for your very helpful posts on nurture programs. I have another small, specific question about how you've set up your nurture campaigns as you've laid out above. In the actual engagement program you have two Progression campaigns, called 'A - Member' and 'B - Engaged'. I'm curious what these do. Why would you need a campaign to progress someone to Member status? Wouldn't this happen automatically when they were added to the campaign? And how do you define Engagement?

Thanks,

James

[Anonymous]

Thank you everyone for your helpful comments. The hardest part is making the commitment as I keep going back and forth with various ideas.

[Anonymous]

This is great! Just one quick question to make sure I'm setting this up correctly, what is the smart list and trigger for the "send email" campaign within the individual programs that are in the nurture?

As a follow up, it would be great to see how you are setting up the reporting for this type of setup (in RCA).

[Edward_Unthank_]

Here you go, Jackie Gragnola!

Cheers,

Edward

[Anonymous]

Edward Unthank​, thanks! I was headed down the wrong trail there so I appreciate your quick follow up. Mine still doesn't show an arrow on the smart campaign lightbulb. Does that matter?