Should pre-tradeshow and post-tradeshow email blasts be a separate program from your tradeshow event program?

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Question:

Should pre-tradeshow and post-tradeshow email blasts be a separate program from your tradeshow event program?  How are people doing this and what is your reasoning?  Would you actually add everyone that opened the email to the Invited (Member) status?  Etc........

Background:

Here are our Program Statuses for our Tradeshow channel:

Invited (Member)

Registered

No Show

Attended Show

Visited Booth (Influenced) - Success

I am thinking about whether or not we should have the emails sends as separate programs or not.  On the one hand I think they should because then we would be able to track that email programs performance in Multi-Touch metrics.  I am thinking of them as separate marketing initiatives since we have an email channel and a tradeshow channel.  A tradeshow event program is the actual event whereas the pre-show and post-show emails are an email marketing initiative.

I am trying to gather opinions.  Thanks!

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nate,

This again a question of choice. I prefer to keep everything in 1 program, because it makes ROI computation so much easier.

I do not consider that someone opening an email or even clicking it is really a touch, as these are easily wrong anyway. On a tradeshow, the real touch is when someone is visiting the booth or attending my breakout session, if any.

If I really need some more details on the email part, I will use nested email programs in the master tradeshow program, but then I'll allocate no costs to them.

-Greg

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Second thoughts:

At the end of the day, it really depends on the attribution model you want to set up. The basics of the attribution model is the offer-channel modelling. So:

1. You can decide to have 1 program per offer and track the channels otherwise (keeping only first and last with dedicated fields, or using SFDC Campaigns if SFDC is your CRM). In you case, this means one unique program for the tradeshow
2. Or you can decide to have 1 program for each offer-channel combination. In your case, you would have to have 1 program for tradeshow-email and another one for tradeshow-linkedin and a third one for tradeshow-twitter. This second option makes for very detailed reporting, but also for a quite cumbersome setup each time you want to create a new offer.

But my point here is that your program structure depends on this choice and then needs to remain consistent throughout your Marketo instance.

-Greg

[Dory_Viscoglio]

I agree with Greg that you really should think about your end goals with reporting and attribution, before you make any decisions on this. The program structure should be dictated by your reporting goals. Often we will do nested email programs inside of an event program. But the email program statuses are not set to "success" by anything. The email was just one tactic within the larger program of the tradeshow booth.

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Thanks for the input.  If you were to do nested programs within the tradeshow event program for the pre and post-show sends how do you determine if someone is invited?  In other words who should make up the Invited (Member) Status?  Would it simply be who ever opens the pre-show email?  Technically if they were delivered but not opened they were not really invited correct?

[Dory_Viscoglio]

We can still see membership in the email program, but we aren't normally adding those people to our top level campaign that syncs over to SFDC. Again, sort of a personal preference.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

It's more a matter of preference and consistency of your statuses across programs and program channels. If "invited" in anyone who was delivered the invite email, then this definition should also be true when you invite people to webinars and seminars.

We usually set up as "invited" anyone who was delivered the email. Honestly, at the end of the day, this is not so important as this is typically a vanity metric that matters only to Marketing. The sales and general management will only be interested into the number of successes (and the link to pipeline and revenue) and again, you will have to define clearly what is a success and keep it consistent across your program channels.

An example of common inconsistencies:

1. On a tradeshow, people will set a contest to win an iPad and collect a large number of business cards. They will register all these in Marketo as successes, since these people came to the booth.
2. In the same time, on a gated content, they will consider as successes only people who downloaded the PDF file from the floow-up email
3. And on webinars, they will consider as successes people who registered

The 3 represent in fact 3 very different levels of involvement. The 1st one (business card to win a iPad) does not really represent any involvement from the leads, only brand exposure. The second one means the person has been going as far as we can track to check they consumed the content, and in the 3rd, it's in between, since the lead shown some interest but did not consume the content.

-Greg

[Nate_Oosterhous]

Thank you for the replies.  This was really helpful.  I will have to take brainstorm to see what will be best for us moving forward.  One thing I wish is that you could create a nested default program within an event program as I am hoping in the future to send out multiple pre-show emails.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Nate,

Yes, and this is unfortunately not possible. But you can still add smart campaigns to the nested email programs.

-Greg