Nurture, issues with transition rules and testing it

[Peeekabooo]

Hi all,
I'm working on a Nurture and I'm facing two issues:

1. the first time I tested it with three emails and it worked; I made some changes to the nurture and I need to repeat the test using those emails. before testig again I removed them from the program with a smart campaign
   smartlist: email adress is...
   flow: Nurture (NU) > Not in Program
   after doing this, those emails are not listed in the nurture members anymore but in the streams I keep on seeing the "exausted" red messages.
   If I add those emails again into the nurture stream 1 and set the cadence as normal, no email is sent... basically nothing happens.
   what should I do?
2. in the transition rule if I use as trigger opens email, will Marketo verify also the filter clicked link in email work as well? or will it go straigh to the flow after verifying the opens email? 
   

Thank you in advance!

[uditmathur]

Hi Peeekabooo,

In response to your 1st point, Nurture programs have inbuilt logic to track the emails sent lead this means any email already sent to a lead will not be resent to the same lead again. This will also be true even if the member is removed from the program. This is the reason you are not able to send the same email again during your 2nd test. 

In order to test with same email id you can try removing that lead from the Marketo Database & re create lead. 

For your 2nd Point,  Yes Marketo will check the filter as well & transition only those lead satisfying the filter conditions.

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

• @Peeekabooo, this is expected as Marketo’s Engagement program doesn't send emails in case a person has already been sent those emails previously via any of the flow/programs. In your case, your test record this person was already sent the email previously, so they didn't receive the email. Removing people from the nurture doesn’t reset the emails that they’d been previously sent. You should use a different test record for testing, and it’d be sent via email from the engagement program.
• If it’s in the filter criteria, then Marketo would only allow people who clicked a link to the email you specified activity in their activity log, i.e., people should meet the filtering criteria to be pulled into the stream. It’s like how you’d expect filters and triggers to work in a typical trigger campaign.

You can also manage the stream transitions via a smart campaign instead of transition rules. You add all the criteria you would add to transition rules to the campaign’s smart list, and in the flow, use the Change Engagement Program Stream flow step to change a person’s stream. This approach is far more versatile and allows room for customization than the transition rule approach for moving people to the engagement program’s streams. Also, with the campaign approach, you can choose to set the campaign as a recurring batch campaign that’d change people’s stream, which in most cases is fine as you don’t need the streams to be changed instantaneously- so one less trigger (transition rules are similar to trigger campaign as they also actively listen for updates). I hope this is helpful. Please let us know if you have more questions. 

[Darshil_Shah1]

Also, worth mentioning that clicks and opens could be from bots/email scanners, so you’d not want to consider them as coming from a human and change around a lot of stuff (take significant marketing decisions) based on those. You can filter out/mark activities that match the bot patterns by using Marketo’s email bot filtering feature here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/product-docs/administration/email-setup/filter...