When to retire/refresh engagement programs

[Anonymous]

Hey Nation,

We implemented Marketo about 3-4 months ago. We create a series of segmented engagement programs and 2 of them are A/B testing type variations of a similar program.

I'm wondering if people just keep adding new content when streams become exhausted; when do you draw the line to stop and create a new campaign? How often do people refresh these campaigns? I have been adding new content for a while but it gets to a point right?

Our main campaigns have been designed with early, middle and late stage streams. If a lead's score is going up to a certain point, they'll be taking from early to middle stage. Once they request a demo we freeze automated communications. If they get a demo and proposal and go quiet, we stick them in the late stage stream which is more hard-hitting content designed to elicit a specific response and to reignite their original interest.

So if people are sitting in the first stream a long time it tells me their score isn't going up and maybe the content isn't engaging enough. We are currently writing a hyper-segmented campaign for the job title of our audience which has resonated more than any other job title (e.g. by our sales, engagement levels etc). But we can only put new leads in there because the emails will be somewhat similar to the old campaigns.

What do you do with people who have not progressed in lead score or have exhausted all content etc? Is there ideas or a strategy? Am I making sense?

Thanks y'all.

-Kim

[Josh_Hill13]

You need to consider a lot of things here, so it is ultimately a call on how complex you want your system to be.

• New Stream vs New Engagement - i try to keep the overall Engagement based on the Entry Persona and type of people I am trying to work with and what the Goal is. So if your Engagement is about reaching MQL, then I would have another Engagement for Trialers. I might also separate out the unresponsive folks eventually.
• Unresponsive - If they are still in Stream 1 and still subscribed, then maybe we need to look at these folks - are they engaging at all? Should we move them to a Wake from the Dead? Should we put them on a newsletter only track until they revive? Should we just push them to an Empty Stream and let it go? You don't want to keep sending email to people who don't engage.
• Adding New Content - the system is intended for you to add new content forever - but you can turn off content that's old.
• New Content and Old Leads - if the leads are unresponsive, they may not realize they are getting the same content or similar content.
• Engaging Content or Not - the only way to judge this is by the email deliverabilty report and/or Engagement Score (which is similar). If they aren't responding, you can turn off content that has lower than 50 engagement score or AB test upwards. The thing is it may not be the Content - it may be your list. Are they opted in? Are you sending them highly targeted items? If they don't care enough to open or click, it's time to put them out to newsletter pasture.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

To add to Josh points :

• I concur with the fact that adding new leads or new engagement program if the objectives and the targets are the same is not efficient. Adding content to existing stream is so easy to do with Marketo that it should be privileged (unlike other Marketing Automation system, in which adding content to a nurture flow is a nightmare, similar to the previous "traffic cop" in Marketo).
• We tend to take the 50 engagement score with some flexibility. If your stream is targeting cold leads that have been unresponsive for a long time (we call this "Activation" streams), a good score will start at about 35/40. On the other end, if the target of your second stream are leads that have been already responsive in a previous stream, you should consider that an engagement score of 50 is not good enough. 65 should be considered as a target.
• When you add some content to an existing stream, pay attention to the behavior it will have on leads in the stream that have exhausted content so far, some of them for a long time. They will suddenly receive that new content, while they may have not received anything for a long time. and it you are not ready to add more than one content rapidly, they will receive this new content and then... nothing again for a while. We recommend that you pause all people that have exhausted content and, once you have added enough new content to last some time, you "un-pause" them.
• Not only you can turn off old content but you can even archive it.

-Greg