Rerun Engagement Program after Exhausting Content

[sierratoman]

 We recently ran an Engagement program with 7 emails sent to 6000 people. Wed like to repeat our nurture campaign and send it to those that didn’t open the emails in the first wave of sends. Is this something that is possible? For example if 1000 people didn't open Email #1 they can be picked up again with another program. 

[Darshil_Shah1 · Accepted solution]

Well, if you have used email assets as the stream content of your original program then you'd have to clone the email assets and add them to the engagement program’s stream. Engagement programs don't resend emails to people who were already sent that email asset previously (from that engagement program, other program, campaign flow, etc).

Engagement program and/or stream could be different or the same for resend (at the very least, a separate stream is recommended as it could help keep things organized a bit).

However, nested default programs as stream content  could get trickier! When using a nested program, the decision to send an email to a person is based on the program membership and program ID.

• If the record isn't a member of a program, it will be sent any emails that are part of the program once
• If the record is a member of the program, it  won’t be sent the email
• If the record is no longer a member but received the email earlier through that program, it won’t be sent the email

When you use a program in a stream, it doesn’t matter if the record was sent that specific email before. As long as the email was not sent out before in that specific program, it can be sent again.

In any case, if you want to resend something, it’s safest to create a new program and smart campaign. As stated above if you have email assets in the stream, then you would have to create them again in case you want to resend them.

[Katja_Keesom]

In addition to Darshil's very true comments I want to caution you against using criteria like you describe. Email opens are a decent enough statistic to compare performance of emails against each other, but are a terrible filter to select individuals for your audience. An open is registered once images in the email are downloaded in the email tool of the person. Some platforms will automatically download images as soon as the email arrives in the inbox and others will only download them once the user clicks on the option to download pictures (like the default Outlook setting). As a result, the "Email opened" activity has no actual meaning in terms of the person actually having seen the content.

In my humble opinion resend to non-openers is not a practice I would recommend without actually changing something to the content of the email.

[Darshil_Shah1]

I agree! Clicks and opens shouldn't be considered as definitive metrics. False positives from bots and email scanners, as well as the possibility (as rightly pointed out by Katja) of some people viewing emails without loading images (resulting in no open activity logged in Marketo), render these metrics rather an unreliable indication of actual person engagement.