Sending an email and activating through a smart campaign

[Anonymous]

Can someone explain why you would use smart campaigns instead of just marrying a list to an email in a program if you aren't using any triggers?

We don't have data flowing between our CRM and Marketo, I have a coworker who has set up smart campaigns to activate for her email send.  I've been sending emails by using the console in the program and marrying the email & list and then scheduling the send.

Any suggestions are welcome-thank you!

[Matt_Stone2]

There's not really a reason to use a smart campaign to send an email unless it's based on a trigger, or if you're wanting to do a drip setup.

An email program is good for a mass send, while smart campaigns are more for alerts/triggered sends. Then engagement programs are for nurturing (though you can do the old way of nurturing via smart campaigns).

[Anonymous]

Thank you, Matt.  Just curious, is there any benefit in having smart campaigns set up for reporting purposes?

[Matt_Stone2]

It again comes down to what your purpose is for the email... if you're sending mass emails, the reporting is going to be a lot better via an email program. Likewise, if you want to set up a nurturing campaign, the engagement program will be the better fit from reporting, since that's its purpose.

For emails sent strictly through a smart campaign, I believe you'd have to generate an email performance report and set up some filters to ensure you're looking at just the emails sent from that campaign... basically it'd be a lot more work than the other ways.