What happens to exhausted leads when new content is added?

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to figure out best practices for managing my exhausted leads.

In my engagement program, I have stream 1 set up. When the leads go through all content, they become exhausted. But what happens if I add more content to the stream? Do they get sent the new content during the next cast? Does it matter the order of the new content?

The reason is: I would like to keep adding content to my stream 1 without having to move exhausted leads away from the stream until they have progressed to my next stream via transition rules. I would like them to continually receive content in stream 1 as I continue to add it.

One more question -

If I have a lead who is on their fourth email cast and I add a piece to the top (1st cast) - when the lead finishes the stream towards the bottom cast, would they loop back to the top to receive the new piece of content that they missed? Or would they become exhausted and never see the new piece I added?

Thanks for your help!

[Josh_Hill13]

Hi Tori,

Much of this is documented on docs.marketo.com. There are a few catches though:

• Leads go through the Stream from top to Bottom.
• Content at the Top takes priority over content at the bottom.
• Exhausted leads receive ANY new content from Top to Bottom. So if you add content at the last Position, then they get that. If you add it at Position 2, they get that at the next Cast first, before Position 2+X.
• If you add new content at Position 1, it trumps all other content for the next Cast for all Leads in the Stream. So all leads get the new Position 1. I've used this effectively, but keep in mind you may actually want to put new content in lower positions to avoid sending 100k at once. Depends.
• There is no reason to move Exhausted Leads unless you want to. But a Lead can only be in ONE stream at a time. So they cannot receive 2 streams of content. You could move Leads to a new Engagement, but that seems like extra work. From your question, I'm not sure what you are attempting with Stream 2, but I'd suggest adding new content to Stream 1.
• The only real reasons to move Streams are 1) Cadence change or 2) Content Change. I have streams with the SAME content that go to different people based on their Stage and the Streams have different Cadences.

[Autumn_Mahoney1]

Josh Hill​, if you do add content/program to a/the top position, but you don't want anyone below it to go there in the next cast, can you run a campaign to make everyone below a member of that top program? then everyone would remain in the same place for the next cast, right?

[Josh_Hill13]

No, that level of control isn't possible.

Perhaps you could try a child Program and have some filters in the Choice Step to exclude people previously in the Stream. Not quite sure how to best identify though.

[Autumn_Mahoney1]

hmmm. I basically do this now to exclude folks from getting one email but make sure they get the next one in the list. rather than wait for the next cast.

Stream 1 before the Cast time

Program 1

smart campaign-exclude member: before cast, run smart campaign to add folks that should skip this program, to this program as a member-excluded status.

Program 2

smart campaign-exclude member: before cast, run smart campaign to add folks that should skip this program, to this program as a member-excluded status.

Stream 1 at  Cast time

Program 1

smart campaign-send email: program runs for all leads at the top of the stream, except those already a member from above campaign

Program 2

smart campaign-send email: program runs for all leads at this point in the stream, as well as the ones that ran through the smart campaign in the previous program 1

Now, I propose to add Program 0 at the top. If before the cast, all members of the stream are added as a member of Program 0 from a smart campaign. Then when the cast occurs, nothing should change and they get their next program email as they would if I had not added Program 0. Only new leads added to the top after the smart campaign is run would run through the Program 0 at the time of the Cast.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I'm having a difficult time visualizing the smart campaigns.  Can you include screenshots of your smart lists and flows?

[Anonymous]

Autumn, I was able to follow you.  That should work. 

You are basically adding people to the child Programs so that the engagement Program will "skip" them.  Marketo Engagement Programs don't send to child Programs within a Stream if people are already members of the child Programs.  So you are just taking advantage of that. (A child Program is a Program that is within an Engagement Program that you have added to a Stream.)

Here's a tip, if you have not done so already...To make it more evident what you are doing, I have seen people add a Program Status of "Skip Program" to the Channel tag of the child Programs.  For example...

Channel: Email Blast

Applies to: Default

Statuses:

- Skip Program

- Member

- Sent

- Opened

- Clicked

- Registered

That might make it a little easier for you to follow your own work.  (I don't know about you, but after I build something in Marketo, I plain forget what I did after some time goes by.  So the extra documentation might help you remember why those people are in the Programs.)

[Autumn_Mahoney1]

Yes, Karla. I am using a status called "Excluded" or "Member-Excluded" Can't remember what I settled on.

[Anonymous]

Josh,

Can you elaborate on use-cases for this last bullet point in your answer:

>> The only real reasons to move Streams are 1) Cadence change or 2) Content Change. I have streams with the SAME content that go to different people based on their Stage and the Streams have different Cadences.

Is this about Cadence, more than content, being very relevant to the person's Stage? And thus same content is distributed in a way that's appropriate based on stage...

[Wyatt_Tucker1]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what Josh Hill​ is saying is this:

Let's pretend you have 3 groups of people that you want to send the same content to:

• 1 for people who haven't ever really engaged with you
• 1 for people who've had minimal engagement with you
• 1 for people who've had a lot of engagement with you

You may want to send the same content to all 3 groups of people, but you may want to adjust the frequency at which you send it based on how engaged your audience is with you. Since the cadence of a stream applies to everyone in it, you can't adjust (at least easily) the cadence for different segments within a stream. Instead, the way you would do this is by creating separate streams for each segment.

For the people who haven't every really engaged with you, sending 1 email every 4 weeks might make sense, so you would put them into stream 1 where the cadence is 1 email every 4 weeks. This way, they get the content slowly over time and don't feel like they're being blasted with spam about something they're not interested in.

For the people who've had minimal engagement with you, perhaps you want to send them 1 email every 2 weeks, so you would put them into stream 2 where the cadence is 1 email every 2 weeks. This enables you to continue the conversation with them at a leisurely pace without pushing too hard.

For the people who've engaged with you a lot, perhaps you want to send them 2 emails every week, so you would put them into stream 3 where the cadence is 2 emails per week. Even though they're getting the same content as the people who are less engaged, you may be able to accelerate them through your pipeline, since they're actively engaging with you and showing they want to learn more.

Don't take the cadences I've listed above too literally as they'll obviously vary depending on your audience and business.

If you wanted to send different content to people depending on how your audience is segmented, you could also use streams to achieve this. Just split people into streams based on whatever criteria you're using, and drop different content into the streams instead of recycling the same content like you would in the example above.