Marketo Recommending Only 2 Program Steps

[Anonymous]

I was just watching the training video on programs and channels and the speaker stated that moving forward, Marketo is now recommending users only create two program (aka progression) steps per channel.

Instead of:

Send 10
Opened 20
Clicked 30
Unsubscribed 40

They recommend simplifying it to:

Member 10
Engaged 20

How does the community feel about this new approach? It certainly would make things easier, but I'm concerned about how little information it provides on the actual progresssion through a campaign. 

I'm beating my head against the wall with channels currently and how to customize them for our needs, so input on this concept would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

The reason we have recommended that you not track Send, Opened, Clicked, etc. is that as program statuses, it does not provide any benefit (except if you want to push any of these statuses to SFDC) and all the email metrics are included in the dashboard of the email program or in the email performance report. 

Can you tell me a bit more about what you want to track with program statuses?  Are you using RCA?

Thanks,
Cheryl

[Anonymous]

We will be syncing up with Salesforce in the near future.

We're just starting to get our feet wet with RCA. 

I would love to track every progression to see where people are dropping off in our campaigns so that we can improve. However, I only really need to report the major metrics (aka engagement and new names) to the team.

I completely understand email programs now providing the date through the dashboard, but what about landing pages we want to track? How granular should we really be with our channels? 

Also, I asked this question in another post, but never got a response. Can you explain to me the concept of a tie within a channel (e.g. two channel values equaling 10) and how that it affects, well, anything? lol

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

A tie within a channel means that a lead can be in either of the statuses, example, in a webinar, you can be either attended or no show, so those are a tie.  You would never be attended then no show.  Hope this helps explain.  

What do you want to track on landing pages?  When someone fills out a form, you could change their status to "engaged".  It's meant to be flexible to do what you want.

[Anonymous]

Cheryl is exactly right.
 
You are getting too granular with your progression statuses. You really want to be more strategic with regard to what you report on. 

In the email performance report you can gauge how many people are opening and clicking on each of your emails so having these as progression steps would be sort of redundant. 
 
If you can give us a scenario we may be able to provide appropriate progression steps and success criteria for your program.
 

[Dan_Stevens_]

Keller, we still use multiple smart campaigns to place members into the appropriate program status (for all of our programs).  While it's true that the new Email Program tracks all of this at the aggregate level (in a dashboard view), for example, there's no way to drill down into this data.  And that's the data that's trully important to our marketers.  So we still create separate smart campaigns for "Opens", "Clicks", "Fills out form", and "Downloads content" for all of our email programs - in this case, those that have a landing page for conversion.  Should the marketer also want to see who bounced and unsubscribed, we'll run a one-off filtered report for this data.

[Anonymous]

We do sync member status with salesforce, so inside sales an do a proper follow-up. So this already rejects the idea of only "member" and "engaged". Furthermore You wnat to trigger actions, based on the progression status (e.g. different email for "no show" versus "attended". Or automatically send an email when a marketer updates the progression status to rejected). Going to only two progression statuses is absolutely a no go.

[Anonymous]

Cheryl C - regarding the tie, that is still not making sense to me as Marketo's old default email channel had:

Sent 10
Opened 10
Clicked 10
Converted 20
Unsubscribed 30

Technically, you could be unsubscribed and sent, opened and clicked, right? Someone could have received the email, opened it, clicked a link, and then unsubscribed. You could be also be converted and sent, opened and clicked. With that argument, every step would be a tie in this scenario, which doesn't make sense for tracking progression, so why wasn't it set up as:

Sent 10
Opened 20
Clicked 30
Converted 40
Unsubscribed 50

Also, I still don't understand what affect that tie has on anything. If I make two steps tie, does that have an affect on reporting? Will people show up under both "sent," "opened," and "clicked?"

[Dan_Stevens_]

The numbers are really only used for sorting purposes within each channel.  They have no impact on reporting.  And with all program statuses, a lead can only be a member of a single status (not more than one).  Here is how we have the Email channel configured:

[Anonymous]

Cheryl C and Jeffrey - it sounds like what you're saying is simply having the progression steps on the summary dashboard doesn't really do anything for us. We can still run any report or create any kind of smart campaign we need to find out who did what throughout the campaign, but setting up channels to support those smart campaigns is unnecessary. Is that correct?

An example of a type of campaign I would normally want to track with multiple progressions steps would be:

Email is sent, so:

Sent

Delivered

Opened

Clicked

Unsubscribed

Email link sends lead to a landing page where we offer a download in exchange for more information and ask if they want a sales person to call them, so:

Visited

Filled Out Form

Requested Sales Contact

Downloaded Offer

The Channel would be as follows:

Sent 10

Delivered 20

Opened 30

Clicked 40

Visited 50

Filled Out Form 60 (SUCCESS)

Requested Sales Contact 60

Downloaded Offer 60

Unsubscribed 70

If I were to shorten the channel above to only "Member" and "Engaged," I would still get good data from the email program and I would see how many people reached the success point in this campaign (Filled Out Form). I could set up smart campaigns to send reps sales alerts, determine how many people downloaded the offer and requested sales contact, etc, but the channel does not need to track that in the summary, correct?