Nurture Program with an Imprecise Stream Cadence

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Hi all,

I'm working on a Nurture Engagement Program with an imprecise stream cadence, meaning the send dates will be pretty nebulous depending on when someone is added to the program. While a typical nurture program might have recurring casts scheduled every Tuesday afternoon of every week (or every other week), this particular engagement program is asking for the casts to go out every 3 days. People will be automatically added to the engagement program just from visiting specific web pages. As an example, if someone is added to the program on Monday, then they will receive the next email in the cast on a Thursday and the next email in the cast on a Sunday. Since there are 10 email communications in the journey, after that Sunday email they will receive the next email on a Wednesday and the next email on a Saturday. As you've probably noticed, the days that the emails need to go out keep changing. On top of that, the first 4 emails will need to be resent in 2 weeks if there is no activity with that email.

I've read through the product documentation on setting the stream cadence here: Set Stream Cadence - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation - It seems pretty straightforward if you need to set up casts to go out every week or month with specific days and times to select from. How would you go about setting up the cadence for the program I described?

Is it as simple as using wait steps in each of the email program's flow steps and scheduling the streams to send out the casts on a daily basis (M,T,W,TH,F) so that new members are moving through the journey on a daily basis?

Thanks,

Tom

[Bryan_Epstein · Accepted solution]

Hi Tom, an Engagement Program would not be suitable for the initiative that you are trying to accomplish. Since typical nurture programs are set up for specific cadence on a week-to-week basis and you can't set casts to go out every 3 days (from the time something happens), your best solution will be to create trigger campaigns within a Default program. There, you would be able to add the wait step of 3 days after someone visits a specific web page or something like that.

Based on what you are writing up for your scenario, you would have to create a pretty intensive Default program. One thing to consider with re-sending four emails to those that are inactive is that if you are sending the same exact emails, subject lines, etc., they may not be engaged regardless.

In short, this would be considered more of an action and batch-based journey rather than a nurture stream (Engagement Program).

[Tom_Kerlin2]

Thanks Bryan. I guess my other question (somewhat related to this topic) is about whether or not people will successfully complete all of the flow steps and pass through if the batch campaign they're in starts running another batch for another group of people. If the batch smart campaign is recurring and starts running again-even when the last batch of people have not yet completed all of the flow-steps, will that impact the group of people already in the campaign in any way?

[Bryan_Epstein]

It really depends on what you want to do. My thought is that you would work through this by removing individuals from the flow based on specific criteria and/or setting up Smart Campaign Settings to allow people to run through the flow only once.