Smart Campaign vs. Engagement Program

[Elizabeth_Dack]

Hello,

I am not currently utilizing the Engagement Program feature that Marketo offers and I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to move from our smart campaign setup to an engagement program setup.

I have about active 10 separate smart campaigns for asset downloads. When someone downloads an eBook from our website, this triggers one of ten smart campaigns with about 5 emails with 7 day wait steps in between. This smart campaign setup has been working well for quite some time but I'm wondering if it makes sense to change this from a smart campaign to an engagement program with a stream and a cast to send out every Wednesday. Is it worth it to switch?

Can someone outline the benefits of changing to an engagement program vs. smart campaign?

Thanks,

Elizabeth

[Anonymous]

Hi Elizabeth,

The program that you're describing sounds like it would be a great application for an engagement program.

Some of the benefits of switching to an engagement program would include:

• Making updates to only one program instead of 10 different smart campaigns. For example, if you decide to add a new content asset to your nurture campaign, you could add it only one time in the engagement program, versus having to go into 10 different smart campaigns to add the new content asset.
• You can take advantage of the Engagement Stream Performance Report to see the performance analytics of all of the email assets within your engagement program in one centralized place. Reporting gets a bit more complicated and manual when you have it set up as you currently do with 10 smart campaigns.
• You can easily see how many members of your engagement stream have exhausted content, where this isn't as easy to track in a smart campaign. 
• Once you become a bit more sophisticated with engagement programs, you can set up additional streams and transition rules that allow you to better target your leads based on how they've engaged with your initial content. For example, say Prospect A opened your email and downloaded your e-book, whereas Prospect B just opened your email. You could create another engagement stream within your engagement program that has more targeted, middle-funnel content related to the e-book topic and push Prospect A into that stream once they filled out the form to download the e-book. Since Prospect B did not engage with your email, you can leave him in the initial Nurture Stream with top of funnel content until they engage. It allows you to better communicate to your prospects based on the actions that they take and where they are in the buyer journey.

Hope this helps.