Program Status with drip campaigns

[Anonymous]

Can someone please help me understand program status within a drip campaign? I am trying to follow best practices and create smart campaigns within my program that change the lead status to 'open' if they open an email and change their status to 'click' if they click a link in an email, etc.

I struggle with how to do this if there is a series of 3 emails. If they opened email #1 but not email #2, their status will still be 'open'. I feel like there should be a way to have a status of 'opened email #1' then 'opened email #2'. Does anyone else have any ideas on how to use program status in drip campaigns? Or examples of how they used program status? Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hey Amber,

You can absolutely create additional stages to your programs, so if you want to have the visibility to *which* email was opened, it's totally possible to do. I suggest creating a new Channel tag in the admin section called "Email Drip", and add all the statuses you think you'll need: Sent, Delivered, Opened Email 1, Clicked Email 1, Opened Email 2, Clicked Email 2, etc. That said, a program member can only have one status at a time. So they can't be "Opened Email 1" and "Opened Email 2" at once. It has to be one or the other. 

For this reason, program reporting won't totally replace looking at the raw campaign stats on the smart campaigns themselves, but it can at least get your program membership in order. When I'm looking at program member data, I care less about which email was opened or clicked, but rather that *something* was opened or clicked. If I want to dig deep into which email performs better than another, I'm either looking directly at the smart campaign report, or running separate programs entirely.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

This really helps! Thanks!

Do you always use program status? Is there ever a time you don't? I am just trying to wrap my head around these. 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hey Amber,

If I'm using a program that is synced to a salesforce campaign, I generally do use program statuses, as that's the key to getting the data tied to the SFDC campaign. 

That said, I don't always use every status. For example, If I'm inviting people to webinar, I don't really care if they opened or clicked on my invites or reminders. I only care that they were either invited or registered for the webinar (and later, if they attended or no showed). But for something like a drip campaign, I may want better visibility on where my leads are in a particular drip, so I might use more of the statuses then.

In the past, I used to try to use all the statuses as much as possible, but found I wasn't actually using that information much, and was creating data for the sake of data. In most cases, I care about two things in program membership data:

- How many people overall are a member of the program
- How many people have converted/succeeded from that program

Everyone has a different opinion on the subject though. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Amber,

I had trouble wrapping my head around statuses as well, but now I find them indispensable. 

I always try to have a mirror status structure in both Marketo and SFDC and set the statuses in the same order of the emails / assets. I use numbers to keep in the right order:

01. downloaded asset A
02. downloaded asset B
03. downloaded asset C

That also helps me see how far along the lead has come.

In order to have a quick report on who actually donwloaded the asset, I also add a flow step to "add to list", each list naming the specific asset, with the same numbers as the statuses above and corresponding interesting moments.