Throttling for an engagement program

[ashah123]

Hi Team, 

We are currently utilizing an email program that includes a smart campaign designed for random sampling or throttling to send emails.

I am seeking guidance on how to effectively implement an engagement program while simultaneously applying throttling. We have various streams that require scheduling—whether to run daily, weekly, or monthly. How can we best leverage throttling in this context?

Could you please share potential strategies or guidance on how to integrate these approaches? I would like to test them out and provide feedback to the team.

Regards,

Akshat

[Michael_Florin]

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We are currently utilizing an email program that includes a smart campaign designed for random sampling or throttling to send emails.

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Hey Akshat,

sorry, I don't get it. What is that Smart Campaign supposed to do exactly? Why do you even have a Smart Campaign in an Email Program? And do you mean: Throttling by Random Samples? As in: 10% of audience receive email, then wait, then send another 10%, and so forth?

Throttling - if by that you mean to create an audience and send emails to that audience slowly over time - is not really supported by Marketo and always cumbersome. And certainly in an Engagement Program. I suppose it'd best if you'd describe what you actually want to achieve.

[ashah123]

Hi @Michael_Florin ,

We utilize multiple emails within a single program by leveraging our current email platform to create various smart campaigns. Instead of sending all emails simultaneously, we prefer to initiate the process by reaching out to 20% of the total audience. After waiting for one hour, we then proceed to send additional emails in increments.

We aim to apply the same throttling or random sampling approach in our engagement program. Therefore, we would like to explore how we can effectively implement this strategy or by what method we could do it

Do let me know if this helps now 

Looking forward to your response 

Regards,

Akshat

[ashah123]

@Michael_Florin Any thoughts to my previous message?

@Darshil_Shah1 Have you worked on or know something related to the above ? Would be helpful as i was exploring this bit and wasnt sure about it

Regards,

Akshat

[Michael_Florin]

Okay, if you have multiple emails in one default program, you cannot throttle the sending while using an Engagement Program. 

But: If you put your emails into one program each, you can. Because then you can add programs as content to your Engagement Program and not emails. All you have to do then, is to create Smart Campaigns - which are essentially the content of your Engagement Program - split your audience into 5 lists (if you want to throttle them by 20% per send). The flow step would look like this:

Again: The key is to use programs instead of emails as content of your streams:

That brings Engagement Programs and the flexibility of Smart Campaigns together.

[Darshil_Shah1]

Thanks for explaining your use case! A bit late to the party, but @Michael_Florin's approach should work.

Just a heads-up: Pay close attention to the wait step and any changes to the Engagement Program cadence (like pausing it by nurture operational/watchdog campaigns). With this throttling setup:

If people are already in a nurture campaign’s wait step (added to the campaign by a nurture cast) when you pause the cadence, they might still get emails until either:

1. They’re removed from the campaign explicitly (using the Remove from Flow campaign flow step). Or,

2. Their email-ability is set to False (since nurture emails should be non-operational).

This could mean unintended sends, so factor that into your process!

P.S.: This could potentially be an X-Y Problem. Any specific reason you're implementing throttoling in your Engagement program sends?

[ashah123]

First of all apologies for my delay in the response

Thanks @Darshil_Shah1

Regarding the feedback, there isn't a specific reason at this moment; I am simply exploring this option. We are considering utilizing an engagement program to optimize our batch and blast email strategy, as we currently send four emails per month to the same target audience. We believe this approach could be effective. Therefore, I would like to know if there is a way to implement throttling, should we decide to pursue this direction.

@Michael_Florin

Thank you for the explanation! I have a quick question: Are you suggesting that we should create an engagement program as a parent, then establish a default program as a child? Additionally, will we set up a smart campaign where the throttling is defined as you mentioned in your comments within the default program? Finally, should we reference the default program in the stream? Is my understanding correct?

[Michael_Florin]

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Are you suggesting that we should create an engagement program as a parent, then establish a default program as a child? 

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No, not necessarily. The default program can live inside the Engagement Program or outside of it - that is a matter of taste. Advantage of the child: You can clone the whole EP while cloning all nested default programs with it. Disadvantage: Your program and email names get very long. An email in a nested default program gets the name: EngagementProgramName.DefaultProgramName.AssetName - which I usually dislike in an Email Report.

And yes to your other questions.

Regarding your general setup: An Engagement Program is ideally used if you have changing audiences but the same content. Like a trial onboarding e.g. You want to send the same set of x emails to all new trialers going forward. But your concept "four emails per month to the same target audience" which sounds like a weekly newsletter is probably not ideally housed in an Engagement Program. That is a batch and blast construction, and I'd just use a default program for each edition of this newsletter. Not an Email Program if you have that additional requirement with the throttle, but a default program with an email sending and email throttling Smart Campaign will do just fine.

[ashah123]

Thanks @Michael_Florin for clarifying the naming convention, and also advising to avoid using "EP" when targeting the same audience with different email addresses.

Now, consider a scenario where we have a list of records that we want to warm up via EP, adding approximately 2,000 new contacts each month. To manage this effectively and warm up new contacts, we aim to implement random sampling or throttling, sending out 500 emails per hour for these new records.

How can we achieve this within an EP? Is it correct that we would be creating a default program utilizing a smart campaign that incorporates random sampling. We can then reference this default program within the stream of the EP to ensure proper execution ?

[Michael_Florin]

Yes, that's right. And if you want to be really precise, you'd say that you're not referencing the default program in your EP, but in fact the very Smart Campaign in that Default Program. If you go through that dialogue, you'll see that the eventual content you add is a Smart Campaign: