Experiences with the New Email Program?

[Anonymous]

It''s probably not "new" at this point, but I finally got around to trying the Email Program type and was disappointed on several fronts. It's limitations proved to be too much for me. Curious to know how others are using it, maybe I'm missing something? I was sending a new product announcement, so Program structure was like:

New Release (general Program type)
   Send to APAC (Email Program type)
   Send to Europe (Email Program type)
   Send to Americas (Email Program type)

First off, there's no intelligence allowed in the email sending logic, so I had to create a different program for each timezone I was sending to. Kind of annoying, but then I read that you can embed them within other Programs which I thought would be cool. Divy up stats by region with the Email Program dashboard, but then also aggregate all of the stats in one Program.

Problem is, I couldn't figure out how to make a Change Program Status call from the Email Program. I needed to do that to add each Email Program member to the "New Release" parent program. I guess I could have triggered off the Was Sent and added them via another Samrt Campaign in the parent Program, but that's kind of kludgy and I was already annoyed with the Email Program so just gave up completely.

Also, it seems you can only send emails that are within the Email Program. That means I'd have to Clone my same email 3 times (1 for each region). Pretty easy to do, but I already struggle to find the relevant email/campaign via auto-complete so that means LOTS more clutter in the auto-complete list. This one makes no sense to me, would be curious to hear why this rule is in place. Marketo doesn't scope anywhere else that I'm aware of, why here?

Anyway, that was experience and thinking more about it I'm hard-pressed to see many uses for the Email Program. This was a simple email blast, and the timezone segmentation requirement completely hosed my ability to use this new Program type.

[Josh_Hill13]

Matt,

Some of your points are valid. It's annoying that the email must be within the Email Send.

Inside the Email Send program, you can run smart campaigns and other assets.

I usually create a new Email Send Channel with custom statuses and then set it up like an old Email Blast, but now I can also do AB Testing.

[Amy_Lepre]

I share your frustrations with those same issues. I'm hoping a later release will provide a fix; they've already been documented elsewhere on the community so Marketo Product Team does know about them.

[Anonymous]

Matt,

I agree. Since the email program was released I've only used it a handful of times.  

There are very few benefits to using it compared to simply using a smart campaign in my opinion.  I also dislike the dashboard as compared to the standard email analytics readout you can get from a smart campaign.  And also the fact that you can't kill an A/B test that is already 'in progress' even if it's in the midst of a wait step where the second half of the test may be hours away.  This detracts from the 1 nice feature I see in the email program, which is that you can schedule a winning email from an A/B test in advance (but again, you can't make any changes or cancel it once the test is in progress).

All of this is to say that I am in agreement - I struggle to find a real, solid use case for this new program type and would like to hear if any other users are leveraging this differently as well.

[Anonymous]

Bummer to hear that you don't like the dashboard thingy, that and the A/B testing are really the only apparent benefits right?

And interesting comment on the A/B test, I ran into that as well!

1. I had scheduled the Email Program and the Test part of it ran before I deleted it (probably while I was writing up this discussion thread!).

2. Then I deleted the parent Program that the Email Program was in.

3. I never got an error or any kind of notice, but it turned out nothing was actually deleted (I'm lucky I caugh it, or I would have sent duplicate emails to the database)!

4. I couldn't Unapprove the Email Program (it just sat and spun saying "Unapproving...") I guess because it was in-between the test and sending to the rest of the names?

So I had to contact Marketo support to have them kill it, then I could delete the Email Program then delete it's parent program.

It would be nice if it wasn't buggy too 🙂