Trigger a Customer Engagement Program

[Anonymous]

I tried using a Customer Engagement Engine program to send new customers an email every 4 weeks. What I was expecting it to do was send an email 4 weeks after they became a customer, then another email 8 weeks after they became a customer, then 12 weeks, etc.

But the Customer Engagement Engine queues everyone up and just sends an email to everyone in the program every 4 weeks, regardless of when they were added. For example, if I am a new customer and I get added to the engine in week 3 of the cycle, I'll get my first email 1 week after becoming a customer.

Any suggestions on how to make this more trigger-based? I don't want to go back to the old way of just having a regular Marketing Activity with a bunch of wait steps and no control or metrics!

[Anonymous]

This is a great example of where tokens in the cadence would be useful!

[Anonymous]

I assume you have a campaign that is adding the new customers to your Engagement Program. In that campaign, add a wait step of 4 weeks, then put the flow step to add them to the engagement program. So the first email they get will happen after the initial 4 weeks and based on the cadence, every 4 weeks after that.

Hope this help!
Sheila

[Anonymous]

Sheila - that's what I thought I could do, but the Customer Engagement still waits 4 more weeks. So even with the wait step in a campaign, the Customer Engagement Program still queues the leads until the next cast. They don't get the first email as soon as they're added to the program, which is what I want. Then they might get the first email in 4 weeks, or they might get it in 7 weeks or 8 weeks.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Hey Tracie,

I agree with Michael, add a 4 week wait to your add to stream campaign. Set stream 1 to run daily. Then build a new stream for each email your nurture. You can then create a transition rule in Stream #2 that says. Was sent stream #1 email, wait 4 weeks then add to Stream #2. Stream #2 runs daily so they receive the second email 4 weeks after the 1st. So Transition rules for Stream #3 say, was sent Email #2, wait 4 weeks then add to Stream #3.  This is not ideal because you would have to have a separate stream for each piece but is possible.

Would be cool if MKTO enabled wait steps to be added to streams just like content. So you could set cadence and send date, but MKTO would not send if the lead has not gone through the full wait criteria. <- Idea.

[Anonymous]

Hi Tracie,

For the use case you mentioned, I would recommend that you split your prospect and customer nurturing, using the new engagement engine for prospect nurture, and a standard smart campaign for customer nurture. 

In the smart campaign for customers, add a flow step for changing the prospect facing engagement program cadence to "paused".  That way, the prospect nurture will be turned off once a contact becomes a customer.

There is one other option. If you have the ability to build multiple streams within a program, and for convenience wanted to keep everything in the engagement program, you could create a customer facing stream and place all the email send steps in one smart campaign that is referenced in that stream, and in the smart campaign you could pull in 4 week wait steps. 

The cadence for the stream could be set for 1 day so that the smart campaign could be initiated daily.  Once contacts are pulled into the customer stream via a transition rule, the smart campaign would be initiated and the wait steps within that smart campaign flow will be used.

Let me know if that makes sense.

Best,

Mike