Create Your Nurture Recipe

Transcript

All right, hello everyone to our August edition of the Foundations of Marketo Engage User Group. For anybody that’s been attending our last few sessions, this is our third in a five-part series focusing on nurturing today. The last two sessions have been on a variety of other topics ranging from campaigns to reporting, to personalization. So a lot of great things for you to take a look at in the past. This one today we’re focusing on nurturing, which I would say is probably one of the key value drivers of Marketo Engage. We have two fantastic speakers here today. We’ll go ahead and introduce them in a few minutes, but I’m just going to go through some housekeeping slides before we get going. First thing being is that this meeting is being recorded. We have this slide in here in case there is a need for additional updates if we’re having like a more of a group discussion. So if we can do some coming off mute later and you don’t feel comfortable with that, No worries, no need to do that for the future times. Let’s go ahead and come back and watch the recording later.

Obviously, stay in touch with this group. This is your first time joining our foundational user group meetings. We, like I mentioned, will have two more of these and you can check our past recordings as well. I will put the link in the chat when I’m done talking so you can join the chapter and share it with your friends. So this is all about helping new or inexperienced users of Marketo Engage up level their skills and get prepared to take the professional exam before the end of the year. So by the end of these five sessions, you should be prepared and able to take the professional exam.

House rules, no self-promotion.

Do not contact people outside of the user group unless they ask for you to do so. And if anyone shares anything specific or unique to their use case, keep that information as close to your chest as you can. Right. We’re all a purple loving group here, but make sure that we’re supporting each other from that aspect of friendship.

All right. Our two speakers today, Alicia Khan coming in us live from Chicago and Amanda Thomas coming at us live from Houston.

So I’m not sure who wants to introduce themselves first, but either one of you go ahead and take it away. Amanda, why don’t you go first? Because then I can just take the slides from there. I’m good. Hi, guys. I’m Amanda Thomas and nurture is my absolute favorite topic. So I’m so excited to be here with Alicia. I am a senior marketing operations manager and consultant at Iron Horse. I have previously been a Marketo champ, so I’m a Marketo champ alum and I used to be very heavily involved with the Houston Marketo Music Group and I’m very excited to be here. I’ll pass it to you, Alicia, to introduce yourself. All right. Brad, your typing is very loud. Sorry. You need to mute yourself.

Hi folks. My name is Alicia Khan.

I’m a current Marketo champion. I’ve been working in Marketo for about seven or eight years now. I was sitting here trying to count right before this call how many years that’s been.

And I’m the director of client services at Intrasphere. And yeah, so today we’re going to be talking about all things nurture.

Nurture is also one of those fun things where if you get the basics right, you’re going to go really far, right? Like this is a case where if you can just like do the few like the first half of the duck really well, you’re going to be amazing. And then Amanda is going to talk to you about some of the more intermediate and advanced stuff because Amanda has built some of the most intricate nurturers that I’ve ever had like the good fortune to lay my eyes on.

All right, so quick walkthrough of our agenda. We’re going to define what is a nurture because we need to know what we’re talking about before we move on. We’re going to talk about the parts of a nurture build. Then we’re going to get into some Marketo specifics about like what is an engagement program? What are the basic build components? And then from there, Amanda is going to jump in with how to elevate your nurture with both intermediate and advanced strategies and then some reporting basics as well.

Next slide.

All right, what is a nurture folks? Brad, it is not sending emails. Whatever you do, a nurture is not just sending emails. If you just want to send emails, there are literally a million and one tools out there that you can use to send emails.

Next up, and then an email drip is also not a nurture. I think every marketing team I have met has folks who use these two phrases interchangeably and they are not the same thing. And I think when we as marketing ops and Marketo people receive requests, it’s really important that we clarify upfront whether the people we are talking to mean an email drip or do they mean a nurture nurture? And I’m going to now go through what are some of the differences between the two of them. So next slide.

Okay, an email drip. We’ll start with that one because that one’s a little bit simpler to understand, right? The key parts of an email drip is that it is a pre-scheduled linear sequence, right? One email goes out after the other, you decide in advance, I will send an email every five weeks. And it doesn’t matter what happens, doesn’t matter what the recipient does, the emails will go out. A nurture on the other hand, it’s behavior driven, right? It is we are looking for somebody who has done an action, who has done a collection of actions, and then we are sending them some set of content to drive the next action that we would like them to take.

Next slide.

So, similarly, a drip campaign, the messaging is often independent of the recipient’s actions, right? So a drip that I’m running right now is they are doing, I have a client that’s launching a new product, right? So that audience is getting five emails about the product, regardless of what the audience has actually done regarding this new product or any related products, right? They’ve decided every engineer in Canada is going to be here about our product for the next five weeks, done. That is an email drip.

A nurture is about moving somebody close down the buyer’s journey closer towards a conversion point. So a classic conversion point is like scheduling a demo or scheduling a meeting, right? So in this case, let’s say you do have a new product, right? Something nurture based would be maybe we start with one email about the product. If they click into it to learn more, maybe we send them a different set of email because now they’ve shown more interest in the product. And then we eventually push them towards a demo. Or if they’re not showing interest in it, we may move them to a different stream or a different cadence because they’re showing different signs and different intent signals, right? Or if they ignore all the emails, we move them to like a re-engagement stream, right? The nurture is really listening and our logic is being used to adapt the messaging that the recipient is getting based on what they are doing, right? So it is not really like a one size fits all here. It is a, you know, we’ll try to customize it as much as possible. Next up.

Okay, so in summary of this little section, a drip is typically just about copy and calendar, right? Here’s your messaging. Here’s the timeframe. We’re going to get it sent out and adios muchachos. That’s what it is. The nurture, it’s much more strategic. It’s about the content, but also the data and logic of like, who are these people? Why are they getting this messaging? What do we want them to do? And then like a much more robust reporting layer on top of all that.

So let’s go next.

Okay, so nurture components, right? And when I say nurture components right now, I’m not just talking about the Marketo build. I am talking about like three steps back of that of like, if somebody in your marketing team comes to you and is like, I want to do a nurture, we’re going to start back up at that point because that’s going to help you lay the foundation for a better build in Marketo. So next up.

Okay, strategy and framework. The very first step here, right? Why are we nurturing these people? Back to the original point of like, you don’t want to just want to send emails in order for a nurture to be effective and for you to do effective reporting on that nurture. You have to know why you are nurturing these people, right? So some examples, is it to move MQL to SQL? Is it to re-engage cold leads, onboard new customers? What is the end state that we are trying to drive people to? Then the who is also really important, right? Because it’s not going to be everybody and it shouldn’t ever be everybody in your database is going to get this nurture. You need to be able to define these are the people we want in our database. Engineers in Canada or like all product managers at SMBs who have who are like at an MEL marketing gauge lead stage and then thus the nurturers goal is to move them to an MQL, right? Definition, structure and focus here. Then content mapping. This is like not strictly marketing ops territory, but it’s important for you to sort of apply that outside lens to it of like, you’re a third party, you’re sort of you get to bring a fresh perspective to these things, right? So is the content that we are sending them actually going to drive them to that goal and definition, that goal that you have defined, right? So I think a good example of this is like case studies are usually considered more bottom of funnel content. If you are sending case studies to move somebody to MQL, like that may or may not work, right? Or if you’re sending somebody who’s like very early in the funnel, like some very specific product tutorials, that may or may not work either, right? So you as a marketing ops person sort of have this outside perspective that you can bring to make sure that like the content you will be supplying these people will actually do what it needs to do in order for the nurture to be successful in the end. All right, next.

Content.

Now, again, this is not where like marketing ops is not developing this, but you are definitely having eyes on all this, right? So you need content asset, you need email copy, subject line, CTAs, and you need the supporting assets. Now where I see a lot of teams trip up is that you need to have both of those things together at the same point in time. So like, if the white paper landing page hasn’t launched yet, you need to get that built first. And then you can build the email sending people to the white paper. Um, and it’s sort of your job as the marketing ops person to make sure that is the entire funnel and is the entire user journey going to make sense, right? Like, from this email to this landing page, can we push the user through? Can we collect all the data? Is the form field going to make it through? Are we going to be able to pick up the form field data? That is your piece of this as the marketing ops person. Additionally, most of us have spent enough time around campaign and campaign strategy to be able to offer some commentary on like, good subject lines, good CTAs, like your email shouldn’t have five CTAs in it, it’s just not going to perform very well, right? So again, offering that outside lens based on the experience that you’ve had, is a really critical piece to play here. Because again, you don’t want to spend time building 10 emails that you know are going to perform badly and you can have an honest conversation with your marketing team up front and be like, yo, these emails, we need better subject lines or like, you can’t write an essay in every email, like, we need to do something here.

Um, okay, next.

Now, finally getting to the Marketo pieces of this, um, the operational setup. So you need an engagement program in Marketo.

Um, you can hackity sack this with duct tape and a regular default program. Do not do it. I’m just saying that if you ever come into an instance, you may find that it’s a bad idea for many reasons because the engagement program has custom built a lot of features in there that make nurturing super easy and super great.

But in case you see it out in the wild, and I assure you, you will like it’s possible with with with a default program. So you need the Marketo setup. We’ll walk through that in a bit here. You need streams and paths, right? So one of the really cool things about about the engagement program is that you can easily create different streams for people to be in.

So let’s say you have a nurture.

I actually saw this example before that is like for MQLs, right? You want to move people from marketing and marketing engaged lead to a marketing qualified lead. You can have multiple streams for different product interests, right or different industries or different departments all within the same nurture. So that way your reporting is all housed together. And like the goal definition of the nurture is all together. But then you can neatly segment out all the different content pipelines pathways that you have for people. From there, the cadence right? Weekly, biweekly, monthly, weekly or biweekly is sort of that sweet spot really there. At monthly, you start running the risk that people forget who you are and why you’re sending them emails.

Monthly is probably a better cadence for like the occasional newsletter or something like that. Weekly, biweekly is sort of really where that sweet spot is.

Next.

Okay, data. Real critical, right? This is the other place where I think people often…

If you don’t think about this step in advance, if we’re ever getting into Marketo or the Marketo build, you’re going to have problems. So to one of my earlier comments, let’s say we want to nurture all engineers in Canada. Are we even capable in our system of identifying all the engineers in Canada, right? Just because marketing has said we want to nurture this audience to reach this goal, it’s your job as the Marketo admin, as the marketing ops person, to help them understand whether we can even identify that audience and listen for that audience with any sense of like, that it’s correct, right? Like, can we accurately find all the Canadian engineers or like accurately understand when somebody fills out a form or when their product interest changes? Is the data in the system? Are we listening for that data? Is it categorized and cataloged nicely? So that way we can listen for a change. And you need that data both for the entry criteria into the nurture, i.e. when people go into the nurture, and you need it on the exit side, right? So basically, if we say the goal is to MQL, can we accurately listen for an MQL or listen for a form fill in order to pull somebody out of a nurture, right? So the data really matters and running some of these, like going through the exercise of trying to identify the audience way up front can save you a lot of headache towards the end, right? And the other key piece that this exercise helps you understand is that Canadian engineers, let’s say there’s only 600 Canadian engineers in your database. Depending on the size of your company, the juice may be worth the squeeze, the juice may not be worth the squeeze, right? So pulling those counts early on can help you also understand is your nurture going to impact a big enough audience and are you going to be able to drive the metrics you want to drive based on your audience size? Alright, next.

And then reporting.

Obviously, there’s reporting on the goal that you have defined for this nurture, right? Converting to MQL, SQLs, whatever. There’s also other metrics you want to track to ensure you have like a healthy nurture, right? So good email engagement, good velocity through the lifecycle, you want to be doing AB testing and also defining some of this stuff up front also helps you then understand how do you need to structure the build? How do you need to structure the copy? And then also like, for the AB testing, like, do we want to test out personalization? So do we need to think about that in advance, etc. Then lastly, also making sure that if you’re using Marketo measure or another attribution system or setup, you have thought about how your nurture is going to flow into that attribution model. So again, you have that additional layer of reporting, and you’re not necessarily trying to like, backtrack it in after the fact, which is, I mean, it’s always possible, right? But that’s like, it’s that extra headache that you may not want to deal with every time.

Okay, I think that is it for the nurture components.

Brad? Alright, so let’s actually get into engagement programs in Marketo here. So I’m going to do sort of the basic pieces here. And then Amanda, I’ll toss it to you when I get over to the advanced and intermediate stuff.

Alright, let’s keep going. Cool. So basic steps for all of us, you’re gonna, you’re gonna create a new program, you’re gonna make sure it’s engagement. And you’re gonna make sure it has a little tree icon, right? Little plant icon.

Um, the circle tells you that it’s on. Um, and if it’s not on, and I’ll show you that setting in a minute here, um, that circle icon will not be there. Next.

Okay, so when you create a nurture, this is a nurture from a client of mine. So there’s actual data populated in here. But this is the standard dashboard view that you get that gives you some high level, like engagement metrics and unsubscribe program statuses. So some great reporting out of the box, which Amanda will walk through in a bit here. Next.

Then you have streams. So this is where the magic happens. For example, when we were talking about like, any kind of data that you can create, MQLs, and you want to send by different product lines, you would be creating individual streams under this tab. This is also where the cadence gets up. This is also where the transition rules get set. Um, and then, uh, this is also where you literally add in, you drag in your content. And then you have to make sure that that play button, the green play button is there to make sure that the content is active and will be sending out.

Um, next up.

Set up tab here, critical two pieces, that program status has to be on in order for the nurture to be on.

I’ve been doing this way too many years, and I still routinely forget that that has to be on in order to turn the nurture on. Because even if you have the cadence set to go out, it will not go out if that is that that program status is not to set to on. And then in terms of the channel, you do want to have a dedicated nurture channel. So that way, um, you’re using, you know, some separate program statuses to track things.

Next.

Okay, cool. And this is just some of the basic build components then that will be under the engagement program that you have. So smart campaigns.

Um, these are some of the basic ones that you need. Um, this is the screenshot of is, is a slightly fancier setup, but, um, if you go next, we’ll talk through some of the basic options that you need.

All right. So the add to nurture is a critical one, because you need to be able to put people into the nurture.

Um, and in this case, In your smart list, you’ll define the audience. Then you’re going to go add to engagement program, um, and then do the program, do the stream, and then make sure you’re always also changing the program status and then changing the engagement program cadence to normal. Right? So normal is the other way that people get in and are like eligible to be sent emails. Right? So, and one of the things that I don’t, I don’t know if I explicitly highlight this, but there’s, there’s a lot of checks and balances in an engagement program that somebody has to have. Somebody has to be in the program and have a cadence of normal and the stream cadence has to be on and the program has to be on, um, in order for the nurture to go out. Right. So a lot of little things to check, but also lots of ways to make sure that you don’t accidentally blast your entire database. Um, on and off chance.

So then, um, in terms of pause nurture, that would just be changing that program cadence, um, smart list filter from normal to paused. Uh, this is where let’s say somebody begins a sales conversation. So you may want to listen for that and pause them in the nurture. Um, resume nurture could be a case where let’s say they stop the sales conversation or it’s a closed loss or whatever. You may want to put them back in the nurture. So you can just switch that back to program cadence as normal.

Let’s go next.

Um, all right. So for the exit nurture, um, typically what happens here is that we will, Amanda, I might need you to take this cause I need to get a sip of water.

No problem. Yes. Our smart campaigns, um, within the flow of your transition.

Um, essentially you are trying to do a couple of things here. Uh, one, you have your exit nurture campaign from the previous slide. That was one of the campaigns there. Um, we are essentially trying to get people added to a static list. That’s just indicating to us that they have been pulled out of the nurture. Exit nurture is more used when there’s nothing left in the nurture for them. So not just that they don’t qualify for it anymore. Like they won’t ever qualify to receive those emails. Again, the very good case in point Alicia made earlier is taking those NELs to MQL. Once you’ve hit that MQL status, there’s really no reason for you to go back in. So you would use exit nurture in that scenario.

Um, do you want to pop in Alicia for the respondent to nurture? You tell me when you’re ready. Why don’t you finish the slide and I’ll take whatever. All right. That sounds good. Uh, yes. And then responded to nurture is your progression status essentially. So you are trying to change the program status for that engagement program at the very top level to say they have actually engaged with the content that we’re offering throughout this nurture. Um, so you have that program status change and transition streams. That’s what the screenshot is here. Um, you are able to transition streams through a smart campaign, so you can do it through the stream settings within the engagement program, uh, or you can run it through a smart campaign. The smart campaign standing outside of the stream settings allows you a little bit more control, um, and makes for really good screenshots too, to share what you’re actually doing and explaining the transition logic. All right. Yes, I think I’m done dying. I have a toddler who loves to sneeze in my balls. So, you know, that is what it is. I get it. So, all right. So we also recommend some smart lists that it’s really handy to have these pre-built so for easy reporting and reference, so member of engagement program, how many leads are actively receiving nurturers, if you’re doing any like AB testing, so like you can reference your control group, um, the nurture of the engagement program, which ones have been nurtured, is there overlap between nurturers, and then obviously building out whatever else that you may need, um, that you find yourself wanting to reference again and again. All right. Next.

Other way.

Other way. Keep going. Yeah. Okay. I saw a question in the chat somewhere about, um, about doing AB testing. So what we typically recommend is that instead of drop, and I think my earlier screenshot was not the best example of this was not putting the email asset itself in the streams, but putting what’s called a nurture cast program in the stream, right? So this is a default program that houses both the email and its own set of smart campaigns to govern the send of that email. Right. So in this case, you can absolutely do like manual AB testing at this level, um, because you are using a smart campaign to send the email out. Right. And then, um, you have your own smart campaigns here, um, to track the conversion based on that specific email, and then to do exclusions at a more granular level, um, for that email asset itself. What this also means is that let’s say you have a really killer white paper and you want to put it in multiple nurturers. You can just create one nurture cast program for that white paper and then drop it into multiple nurturers and then still be able to edit only one email every time. And this makes that setup really modular and super reusable, um, over and over.

Um, let’s go next.

And so, uh, to the point about the AB testing and like doing fun things in, in, in, in the send program, you can do time zone sending in nurturers when you were using nested, uh, the nested nurture cast programs, because then you’re using flow logic and like region fields and wait steps to then fake time zone sending that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to if you’re just using the, uh, like stream cadence setting thing next.

Okay. So the way that these nested nurture cast programs and work is on that send a smart campaign, you’re going to make sure you have a filter that’s member of engagement program program is whatever nurturers it needs to be in. I think you don’t technically need this, but it’s always a nice filter to have just sort of like a sanity check and a gut check that this is where this nested nurture cast program is being used. And then you would just drag the, um, the nurture cast program into the streams and then make sure they’re activated next.

Okay, cool. Amanda, it’s all yours. Yeah. All right. I was typing away with trying to answer some questions right there. Um, intermediate nurture features. Okay. So you got the basics, you got the basic components built within your engagement program, I’m going to show a couple of things that will allow you to take it a step further. Um, some of the things we already covered, like how you can AB test, uh, one of the questions in the chat was very much related to that nurture cast program and leveraging that. Um, so you can, you know, use that send campaign that Alicia was just referring to to send at different time zones. Um, you can use it to send AB tests and we’re kind of going into the advanced side of it, but I’ll, I’ll back up. Um, but just to answer your question, Kay, uh, you can resend to non openers as well through that campaign. Um, I would just advise that you send all emails that full campaign is done running by the time the next cast happens. So that’s my warning when doing those types of things within that send campaign.

Um, perfect. Okay. So jumping back into intermediate, um, to take it a step further, um, pushing your records and kind of managing your cadence based on how they’re behaving. You’ve already entered your nurture. So if you have records that are, um, clicking on things, kind of moving a little bit faster than you thought, maybe move them to a faster pace, uh, stream and you can control that through those transition stream, uh, uh, smart campaigns and, um, throwing together your logic in there. You clicked, you know, this and this many emails, we want to move you to the fast lane. So you get your content faster, or if you haven’t responded to like the first two, open the first two emails, maybe we can push you to the slower lane. And that way we can kind of keep, um, hopefully keep you still subscribed to us still listening, uh, and not annoyed with how fast we’re trying to push you through the buyer journey. Uh, next slide.

Okay. Uh, personalization. So there’s a few ways that you can apply personalization to kind of up your nurture game. Uh, the first and easiest one is just using those tokens. You have a lot of data inside of your instance. Um, you’re collecting this data, form, builds events, all of these, uh, different channels, and you can leverage that, uh, data within your emails and make them personalized. So, uh, besides like first name and last name, you can work something in like the company name, um, by using tokens. So, um, good example and screenshot here, you can modify what appears in the link tokens, um, and you can also leverage tokens to build those emails a lot faster too. So to apply the same kind of information or the same link, maybe you want a promotion banner at the bottom. You can apply those with tokens and the next slide with snippets as well. Um, so you can use snippets for dynamic content or in that, uh, use case, I just mentioned that you want to like promote something, uh, upcoming, but it has like an end date to it. Um, so you only want to promote it for a certain time. You can leverage the snippets with dynamic content. You can use snippets within that, and you can also modify the copy itself there. So, uh, what you do is just choose what you want to make dynamic, like the subject line, and then how it works is it pulls off of your segmentation. So if you have a segmentation for, um, regions or, uh, countries, um, you can leverage that and, you know, say good day for Australia or hello for the U S. Um, next slide.

The snippets. Yes. So this is where you can actually change the copy, like based on persona, uh, or something again with dynamic content. So you do have to have a segmentation configured to use this feature. Um, again, the segmentation, you can build personas and then modify how you write about it, about a piece of content or how you kind of intro your big ask, uh, based on the persona that you’re targeting.

All right. Our advanced nurture features. So I covered some of this already with what you can do with those default programs. We’ll go to the next slide.

Skip logic. This is one of my favorite features to implement, um, because it really does pay off, especially when it comes to like unsubscribe rate, I fail my experience. Um, you get less unsubscribes, um, when you are giving people what they want to receive, um, and not feeding them kind of the same thing over and over again. Uh, skip logic is how you can leverage, uh, campaigns to essentially skip records from receiving content they’ve already consumed. Um, that’s probably the number one use case. Hey, I’ve already seen that white paper. Please don’t email me that white paper. I’m not going to pull out the form. I’m not going to click the link and I might unsubscribe. So what you can do is configure these campaigns to say, pull me everyone that has downloaded the white paper already. And what you’ll do is just mark them as a member of that nurture cast program. When Marketo runs the streams every week or biweekly, whatever cadence you have, it’s looking for members for those programs. So if you’re already a member of that program, that’s next in line for you to get that email, you will skip over that program and then go onto the next one. So running the skip logic before the cast actually sends, uh, each week or whatever cadence you’re on, um, just ensures that you’re forcing that membership of people that have already consumed the content and thus allowing them to skip over. Um, a couple other use cases for skip logic is where they’re at in the funnel. So if you are kind of mushing a lot together of like, we’re trying to get you right, you’re brand new, we’re trying to get you to MEL and then we’re trying to get you to MQI after all with the one stream, if they’re already past the MEL and in the MEL, you can run skip logic to ensure that they’re skipping over that top of top of funnel content and they’re going to mid funnel content.

Um, yeah. And I think, uh, you can kind of skip for whatever reason. So make up your reason. It’s a good reason. You can, you can implement it. Um, and then I think Bonnie actually has a good question that I kind of want to, I think you should address now that, uh, streams versus cast programs, because she’s asking, can’t you build transition rules for people to not get something because that they’ve already received, but that’s not really the use case for streams, I think, and I think, uh, do you want to just answer that a bit more? Uh, yes. So I would structure your streams as in this is like all of the content in the ideal situation that we want a record to receive.

Um, so what we’re building for, we want them to receive ABCD. Um, the stream structure would be more off of like those emails look a little different, or we only want to send five to this persona because they’re less likely to engage in email where we want to send 10 to this persona because they’re very active in email. Um, that’s kind of like how you would separate the streams, not necessarily trying to skip back and forth because the next one in line, they might want to get to you and the processing might just be a little too much to try to get people back and forth, back and forth from one stream to the other.

All right. Okay. Next.

All right. Okay. So traffic director is another big, it’s a big thing, but for you to understand it is available for you to use, um, especially when you start building out multiple nurturers. So if you have a nurture for each product and you have five products, uh, you definitely want to ensure that you have some kind of control over who’s receiving how many emails and what emails are they receiving, and this is what traffic director is for. Traffic director is a default program, like an operational program that you set up, just trying to manage who goes where essentially when it comes to nurture. So you have the five nurturers, you’re looking at the criteria for each of those, and then you’re prioritizing. So you’re saying this product converts the best, you know, the fastest or makes us the most money. So we like to put this product and people that are interested in that product above people that might be interested in multiple products or all these other products. Um, so it’s a one assigning priority and then two, ensuring that your records are only in one nurture at any given point in time. And that’s again, to make sure you’re not annoying people, you’re managing your unsubscribe and you’re giving people, um, a clear, concise message for that time period and not muddying it up with a lot of other messaging, um, for a lot of other things. So traffic director, um, yes. If you have more questions, let them in and we could try to answer them, but traffic director, be aware of it and definitely implement it once you start having multiple nurturers.

All right. Next slide.

Okay. Nurture reporting. Um, so for this section, we’ll just cover what basics that you have and then give you a little sneak into like what you could get out of reporting for nurture as well. Uh, so next slide here.

Okay. Engagement program reporting out of the box. This is what you get in Marketo. Um, when it comes to like, how is this nurture doing? When you look at the summary, uh, this is the information that you get. There’s a lot of documentation around which, what each of these components mean, how it’s calculated, uh, for instance, like the highest engagement. That’s not just like who’s clicking, but it’s comparing who’s clicking to who’s unsubscribing and how frequently that is happening. Um, again, lots of documentation that will tell you how. You know, far back it looks. All of those good things. Uh, when it comes out of the box and that’s in that summary, in addition to the summary that you’re seeing, like in that screenshot right there, you can pull these out of box reports as well within the engagement program, one of them is engagement stream performance. That is going to give you the email performance for the entire nurture, but like sectioned into your streams. It’s so nice to just like export and, and just send over to like people that are like, how’s the nurture as a whole, you know, performing when it comes to the emails. Um, so that’s a really good one. Email link performance. You’ll need that report as well. So that is saying what links are performing the best within the nurture.

Um, look at that one and then active members, all those smart lists that we were kind of looking at at the start, um, that you can add into your engagement program. You want to see all of the active nurturers for product one stream. You’re able to kind of configure those smart lists a little bit more to get those counts for your reporting.

Oh yeah. Last three stream casts for engagement score. See, the documentation does wonders.

So, uh, keep that in mind when you look at that engagement score, it’s a mix of things. Uh, it is like an algorithm, uh, from Marketo. So, um, it’s not like detailed specifically exactly how it’s calculated, but that’s how it’s weighing it is your engagement versus your unsubscribe.

All right, next slide. Okay. You can create fields and create processes within Marketo to track even more so you can track everything you want to track when it comes to nurture and engagement programs. And one of the things I like to implement is nurture tracking fields. So it’s, it’s a cute word for a lot happening to just make sure that you can do this type of reporting, uh, when speaking to how your nurture is performing as a whole or for one specific nurture particularly. Um, but custom fields, um, those column headers right there in that, um, that table will kind of give you an insight into the kind of custom fields that you can create. And then upon your entry and exit within the engagement program, those smart campaigns, you can populate those fields. Um, so a current nurture field, um, your last nurture field, the program name, um, what was your status when you entered the nurture and what was your status when you exited? Uh, all those different data points will allow you to present, uh, good information about people and what people are doing within the nurture. Uh, out of the box, there’s a lot of good email performance when it comes to like, how are the emails performing? This will tell you like, how are your people actually progressing when they enter the nurture and then when they exit the nurture? Um, another one I like to pull as well is the score. So like, yeah, your, what was your actual score at the time you entered and the did we see the score go up? Are they getting more engaged with your brand and with what you’re trying to get them to do? Um, all of that kind of stuff can be captured with your custom fields.

Um, and I think the actual, I think that’s it. Is there one more? That’s it. But I think we have a lot of really great questions.

Um, so I’m going to start with one and then I’ll toss it back to you, Amanda, cause there’s a few traffic director good ones. So Bonnie Seaman was asking about, uh, whether the AB testing that happens via smart campaign and the CAS programs, like true AB testing. So in the sense that like, is it like what you do when an email send program? No, obviously we’re like hacking it together. And the key part of this that I’m glad you asked this question. Um, you do, you will always need to email assets in order to do AB testing in the nurture CAS program, right? In the email send, you can just configure, um, you can just configure the center program to do your AB testing. In a nurture CAS program for it’s like subject lines for any body copy, you will literally need two assets, but it is still true AB testing. Because you can use that random sample filter to send it equally to 50 50 to send it 90 10, um, to do it, to do that random sampling piece. Cause that’s the important part, right? The important part is like, have we sent the two types of emails to two different groups of otherwise equal people and have they, have we seen different numbers? Right. So I think the setup is a bit different, but we’re still running true AB tests in, in that definition of category. I think from there then, um, Marc, Marcio had some great questions about traffic director.

Um, Amanda, do you see those or Jimmy to read them for you? I think I see can traffic director be kind of used for best next action system. Yes, definitely. Absolutely. So I have actually implemented a version of traffic director where we have a weightless system. So we’re, you were already assigning the priority at the beginning. Um, but then, uh, with, with traffic director, you also leverage segmentation. Um, and your segmentation will already set that priority, right? So you automatically will fall into the next line. Um, if that next line is kind of up for debate, um, with the team. So like, we actually don’t want you to fall in the next in line based off of the traditional criteria we use to target, but me, me mainly based off of like your last interaction. Right. So if the last interaction, the last white paper you downloaded was actually related to a different product than what you are in line for next, you can kind of override it with a weightless system. Um, yeah. Um, more to that, I’m sure. Yeah.

His next question was about delaying the cadence. And I think this goes back to an earlier point. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t be like monkeying around with nurturers too much. Like your show should be like, I don’t want to say set it and forget it, but in some ways your nurturers exist. You are doing refinements and modifications, but Marcio for cases where like you have a regular newsletter or a drip email, ideally you’d schedule that around the nurture touch points and then make sure your communication limits are in the right spot to allow those multiple touch points to go out. This is also why typically I recommend to clients that they nurture on like third Wednesday or Thursday. So that way important emails can get out at the beginning of the week. And then your nurture touch points come out later in the week. So that way, if somebody does have some, like they could, the compliments will let them receive some more emails. They can get the nurturers as after that. Right. Um, and then Fridays always like a possible, whether people engage or not.

So definitely like, don’t like the, like lit, like don’t fiddle too much with your nurturers, especially at that traffic director level, because those can get really intricate. And, um, Amanda just gave you a really quick sneak peek, but it’s like segmentations plus smart lists, plus smart campaigns, plus all the other nurturers. So that kind of fiddling is not going to go well in the long term. Yeah. Yep. Um, yeah, exactly. I would say the same thing. Um, yes, the nurture length and average days. Okay. You just need a date field. It’s literally like nurture entry, custom field, nurture, exit date, custom field. So they’re just date fields. So in the entry campaign, you’re in the flow, you just stamp it. It’s system date stamp as a token. And so it will just automatically pull the date that they entered and put it in that field. And then the date that they exited and put it in the field. Then right when people exit nurture, you can pull that information and then report on how many days they were in there.

Yeah. So it’s, yeah, it’s essentially, it’s not like a calculation field. It’s funny. Yeah. So you do have to like manipulate the data when you export it. Yeah. And then, uh, yeah, get your own like, I mean, manipulate the data or like, I strongly suspect if you threw it into chat GPT, it could do the math. Yeah, that’s true.

Add the number of days column. Yep. Yeah. Um, okay. We have a question about how user journey is different from the nurturing. Um, I’m going to answer this. I think I get what you’re asking, but again, if I’m wrong, feel free to drop another comment. The user journey is really about moving somebody through lifecycle and like the stages of awareness towards buying your product, right? Nurturing is just like one of the tools you have in your toolkit to accomplish that in a really like targeted and intelligent sort of way that acknowledges the fact that somebody is in point A and we need to move them to point B and not just like blasting them with random content.

So that’s really the difference. It’s like a concept versus a tool, but if that’s not quite what you’re asking, feel free to drop another comment there.

Um, let’s see, Brad, did we miss any others? Oh, I was just gonna say, I think that might be the last question unless anyone else has anything else they want to have these two amazing folks answer.

Okay. We’ll give it a second. Thank you both so much for your time. Uh, before we leave, uh, I did want to highlight one other thing that’s happening inside of our big. Campion slash user group slash community advisor slash experience maker award programs, which is applications are now open through October 17th for the experience maker awards. So Lucia and Amanda, I think you guys have great content to apply yourselves, but I’m just thinking also, but I have some members that are part of this call that also have some great use cases, uh, on one of our major categories, uh, for us to be awarded. Uh, this is going to be, uh, and if you haven’t heard of this before, this is the red carpet experience, uh, of Adobe DX, uh, full content productions, uh, tuxedos encouraged, plated meal. Uh, you get to come to this entire experience right before Adobe summit in Las Vegas. So it is an awesome, awesome, awesome award, uh, show. And we have actually have had the last three years running a member of one of our user groups or champion programs has been not, uh, definitely finalists, but we’ve also had three winners in a row. So I would love to see that, uh, continue, uh, for the years future shout out, uh, who did we have two years ago? Oh my gosh. Brooke Bartos was on the winner.

Yeah. Yeah. I’m a couple of members of the program, Kyle, I think in the past, um, Lakeesh, uh, was last year from the analytics program and Katie two years ago. Um, so just some fantastic, fantastic folks that, uh, get the opportunity to get recognized through this. So, um, I will include, um, this in the slides. So in case you know, but obviously it’s going to scan the QR code now, uh, but I will definitely include this in our followup deck as well.

Uh, all right. Last other thing I mentioned is our next meeting. It’s going to be on September 16th. Uh, I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a flashed up my, uh, message that I’m working on to James and, um, uh, Jeremy who are next speaker. And I realized I was sharing that wrong screen there for a second. Uh, but that’s going to happen on September 16th.

Uh, it’s gonna be all about scoring. So that’s going to be our second to final session. Um, it’s gonna be our first one led by a couple of Adobe folks, but, uh, James is also a part of the alumni program at the champions. Um, and Jeremy Evans, who I don’t know if many of these folks know, but, uh, one of our lead, uh, internal enablement folks for Marketo down under. I based on this didn’t he? So, yeah.

Yeah. Um, this has been super fun folks. You can find me and Amanda on LinkedIn, um, and in various Slack communities across the internet. Um, so if you have more questions, just come and find us and we will very happily talk to you about this stuff. They will nurture you to success. Yes, we will.

All right guys, enjoy the rest of your Wednesday and we’ll see you all soon. Thank you. Bye. Bye.