Marketo Lead Nurture Programs - best practices

[avaroglu]

I have an engagement program set up in Marketo for a Lead Nurture series which consists of 12 emails to a segmented audience (Monday / Friday emails sends with different subject lines to those who did not open the Monday email). 
I only have emails as part of the nurture and I'm wondering if others have included social media ads or other pieces of content in their nurture, rather than just emails, and if so, what would your recommendations be? 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Well, most users do use emails or nested email programs (with a campaign that sends out an email in the cast) in an Engagement Program because that's what they're created for, i.e., casting emails to nurture people. I'm wondering how you would send a social media ad. You can, of course, run ads on social media (e.g., LinkedIn Lead Gen forms, Facebook campaigns, Google Ads, etc.), but including an ad in an Engagement Program doesn't make a lot of sense to me (maybe because I have never thought of it that way), and how would it work? e.g., would you like the ad to start at a specific time, i.e., at the nurture cast time for the people in that stream?

Marketo's Engagement Program is specifically built to support automated lead nurturing via emails (you can only add Marketo email assets and Default program as valid stream content in its stream); it encapsulates and automates a lot of things a user would have to account for in their setup if they'd to set up a lead nurturing program on their own (there are use cases where building a custom lead nurturing program is a way to go instead of an Engagement Program, but other than that, it does a fantastic job of enabling users to set up a nurture program). Also, the upside of using Engagement programs is being able to easily line up content from first to last without the need to reconfigure any campaigns to exclude people from receiving the same email twice. As long as the same email asset is used (not cloned), Marketo will ensure that a person is not sent the same email again by verifying the email ID in the person’s activity log.

[uditmathur]

Hi,

As Darshil_Shah1 mentioned, Nurture programs are designed to deliver Emails to specified customers at defined intervals. 

However, to elevate your customer engagement you can always include specific CTA e.g. Follow on Facebook or LinkedIn (where you can display your social media Ads).

You can add Links in your emails to specific contents you want to deliver to your clients e.g. a new product launch video or a product technical details pdf download.

Possibilities to deliver any form of content through an email are immense & is solely dependent on the business needs of your company.  

[Ruchi_Lapran1 · Accepted solution]

Expanding your lead nurture program beyond emails to include social media ads and varied content, is an excellent strategy to enhance engagement and diversify your approach. But engagement program is designed to use only emails as content. It’s an interesting use case and I couldn’t stop looking for some possible approaches which may be useful here:

1. Collaborate your emails with social ads via lead gen forms. The CTAs can be integrated with social ads which further can be associated with leadgen forms and mapped with Marketo’s custom fields. This can be a long route but if we plan the workflow thoroughly, the outcomes will be easily tracked in Marketo and help segment responders vs. non-responders followed by their behavioral activities. Use Marketo's automation rules to trigger social media ads based on specific actions or engagement levels. For instance, if a lead interacts with an email, they could be automatically targeted with a relevant social media ad.

2. Using a variety of non-gated content such as blogs, case studies, etc. with an option to subscribe for social content. Think about aligning the content in your social media ads with the corresponding email messages. Consistency in messaging across channels reinforces your brand and message.

3. Using gated content linked to videos or maybe social ads is another approach you can try. It’ll also bring you leads who engaged with both email and social channels.