Marketo Ignoring Not In Program Status

[michellechopin]

Hi Community!

I'm supporting a team member who asked to remove leads from a Nurture Program as they will be specifically targeted/nurtured by one of our Customer Experience Reps. When I ran the campaign to change their Program Status to Not In Program (I know we lose stats that way), Marketo adjusted the leads to that status and then automatically reverted them back to Member. Any idea why this happened? Not In Program isn't a status on the Channel tag so it's not moving backwards/out of order.

As I don't usually use Not In Program for any of our initiatives, I also added a Pause on the Stream Cadence to catch these folks JUST in case something happened with the status (and glad I did now!). Would that have caused the issue? Here's a screenshot of the results in case it helps.

For now, I can see that the leads who were included in this campaign have all retained their Paused status so we won't send them any content BUT I want to be sure they don't get un-paused in the future if we were to add campaigns to un-pause leads based on any criteria (of course, we could use the specific list of people we identified to DO this as an exclusion).

Any insight is appreciated as always!

Michelle

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Technically, changing status to Not in Program removes people from the program all together, but w/o any campaign listening / flow step explicitly being ran the person should not have been added back to the engagement program as per the snapshot you shared (I am assuming that the person got re-added to same engagement program). Also, one thing I would like to lay emphasis on and likely this is what's been causing the issue is that you should either remove people from the program altogether (given that you're okay with the reporting loss) or you should pause people from the EP, removing and then pausing person from the EP would add them back to EP (for a person's cadence to be in Paused state, they would need to be in the EP, seems logical, right?)  If you could expand the Add to EP, Change program status Not in Program > NUR - member activity you should see what caused them to run through those steps.

[Vinay_Kumar]

Hi @michellechopin, As per the screenshot, first you have changed the status to Not in Program, and then you have paused the cadence for these leads. So, the pause action caused the issue, first it added the leads to engagement program, paused the cadence and changed the program status to members.

[Vinay_Kumar]

@michellechopin you can use a custom field to assign a relatable value to these leads and use that custom field as an exclusion criteria.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I’d prefer changing the cadence to Paused state instead of this. Although exclusion based on field’s value can be used in the send email campaign’s SL to skip sending emails (in case of a nested default program) but it won’t work if the email content is being sent directly by the EP (in case the email assets are directly added in the EP’s stream).

Also, with the exclusion way the content although will not be sent to people as they won’t qualify for the send email campaign, but still the EP cadence will be running for the excluded / not-eligible people and they would not receive the content that has already been skipped during the EP cadence runs when they become re-eligible for the nurture, which isn’t the case with changing their cadence to Paused state when they become in-eligible, on changing their cadence back to normal upon re-eligibility they’ll continue receiving the nurture content right from where they left off (which is normally what people would want to happen with the EP).

[michellechopin]

Hey @Darshil_Shah1 and @Vinay_Kumar,

Thank you both for your input! As usual, user error on my part and I wondered if it was the addition of the Pause item that did it.

I appreciate the clarification and explanation - even though these people ended up BACK in the program, they're all paused which means we don't lose any data associated with them in this program if they generated anything. My team member's main concern was ensuring that these leads didn't get any of the nurture emails while our sales person was starting to reach out directly, and with the Pause in place, that will do the trick.

I've not really ever used the Not in Program status before so I added the Pause JUST in case it didn't work - turns out I was the one that broke it 😋 I'll continue to only use it as a way to remove people perhaps accidentally added to a program should that ever occur but will focus on either using Pause for nurtures, or an appropriate status in other programs to exclude people if necessary.

As always, I appreciate this community and all the help you provide!

Michelle 😀