Newsletter Program or Engagement Program?

[Anonymous]

We are starting a newsletter program that will be sent to our members once every two months and are looking for best practices on how to set this up. We have not contacted this group of people before, however the majority of our existing Marketo programs are set up as engagement programs so this is the program type we are most familiar with.

I looking for advice on best practices for newsletter programs and the best program type to use to set these up. We are still fairly new Marketo users so the more information the better! Thanks.

[JD_Nelson]

Will people ever get the old newsletters if they are new to the program?

We do all of our newsletters as independent programs to be monitored as such. IMO, assuming you don't want to send past newsletters to people, the only reason you COULD want an engagement program for this would be for reporting. I would still probably vote no.

Also, I believe there's a max number of engagement programs you can have in an instance, so that might be something you want to look into before creating too many.

[JD_Nelson]

limit of engagement programs is 100. You'd have to be pretty aggressive to hit that, so might not be as much of a blocker as I thought.

[Anonymous]

These newsletters are seasonal so they would only ever go out once. But yes, the main reason for this question was reporting and I have seen other comments in the community suggesting engagement programs for newsletter sends, but it might not be the right option in this case.

[Matjaž_Jaušove2]

I'd say it depends on the content of the newsletter and what is your aim with it. However, in general for newsletter type of emails, batch email programs are better choice. Especially if newsletters are of more informative nature, as oppose to engagement programs, that push leads more strictly leads through the funnel/some goal.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Hey Sarah,

Engagement programs are great for content that is not specific to time, like nurturing leads with the content shown below.

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Engagement programs are not limited to this content, but the value of an engagement program is you can drop people into them at any time and they start at the top and work their way through the content depending on your specified cadence. In your described use case, it sounds to me like you are sending an email 1 time during the quarter to your database, and simple want to track standard email metrics. For this, I would recommend a Email Send or Email Blast Program. I like the Email Send program type as it is very user friendly and does not require you to build smart campaigns to append the program status' of opened, clicked, etc.

Email send programs also give you a nice dashboard summary of your send results once the email has been sent. So again, Engagement programs are really designed for nurturing with assets that are not necessarily time sensitive and will send whatever the next email is for every individual prospect as opposed to sending the same email to everyone at a time that you specify, like an Email Send program will do.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

You could use the newsletter type program as well as it sounds like that channel was designed by your admin specifically for this use.

[Spencer_Philli1]

Hi Sarah,

I'm curios how you ended up proceeding here. My company is planning to add a newsletter subscription to our site, and the goal is to send only the most recent content to those who sign up (so someone would never get "old" content that was published before they registered).

Thanks,

Spencer

[Grant_Booth]

We have non-time-sensitive content in our engagement programs, just reschedule the casts to skip a week when our newsletter is supposed to go out. It's not as automated as I'd like it to be but it's worked well. I strongly advise against ever using an engagement program to send time-sensitive content. Just set up a "Newsletter Template" program that you clone from each time you're getting ready to send the next newsletter.

[JD_Nelson]

agree with Grant. An engagement program is best used to continuously send a set of content to people -- the content can be modified or deleted as needed, but shouldn't be used as a one-off or process to simply send at the same time every week -- you'll likely forget once and end up duplicating emails or something worse.

I like to run our leads through my nurture before dumping them into our newsletter program, so I just have a weekly newsletter that suppresses anyone with a engagement status IS exhausted.