Tactics for suspending people in engagement program - except when you want to send emails in the stream

[Anonymous]

For years I've used a tactic of suspending members of an engagement program so they can't receive emails other than the ones in the engagement program stream I put them into. When it's time to send the next engagement stream email, let's say 10 am on Tuesday, I run a smart campaign at 9:30 am to unsuspend these individuals send the email at 10 and then suspend them again at 10:30 am - see attached. In other words I'm creating a 1 hour window in which they can get non-operational emails. Marketo's made a lot of advancements in the past few years since I adopted this approach. Is there any more elegant way to accomplish this objective?

[Josh_Hill13]

Shad, how are you?

What's your use case here? This seems unnecessary to do. What I do is make sure the lead is in one Engagement at a time and don't let them enter another until they are done in the first one. There were some threads on using a traffic cop to manage that routing...don't think that's really what you need.

The other thing to do is leverage the Streams to send nearly all of your emails instead of sending separate blasts.

[Anonymous]

Hey Josh. I'm doing well and great to hear from you! My use case is pretty simple. We just have a couple engagement programs and we use them to nurture brand new leads, basically introduce ourselves to them. The other emails we send are one-offs with no regular cadence and they are intended to be sent to everyone in the database EXCEPT those in the nurturing engagement programs, so the engagement program option wouldn't work well. 

I had a similar business requirement at Serena and used this approach successfully - creating the brief unsuspended window. It eliminates the need for us to have to include a "not in engagement program" filter every time we do a one-off email with the Email or Default Marketo program type. It takes away the need to apply an exclusion smart list filter in all our one-off blasts. I demoed it for a couple co-workers who aren't admins and they thought it was "too complicated". I'm always interested in hearing other approaches so figured I'd get some input from the community. Let me know if you have any other ideas with my more complete use case explanation in mind.

Thanks for the reply.

[Harish_Gupta6]

Hi Shad,

The way I have implemented it in my system is, I have created a extra progression step for Nurture channel. The step number is same for extra channel. Eg. Temp Suspend  or Exit.

Change the status of lead whom you want to suspend and then change the status back whenever you want that lead to be a part of program.

Thanks