Master complex customer journeys with Multi-Stream Engagement Programs

Transcript

Hello, I am Max Cara. I’m the senior manager here at Western Governors University. If you’d like to connect with me, here is my LinkedIn URL. Also, you’re welcome to scan my QR code and connect on LinkedIn that way. All right, so the agenda that I have today is going to be broken up into three parts. We’re going to start talking about planning first and then we will go into building followed by reporting.

So starting with planning, your boss wants you to nurture leads in Marketo. What are you going to do? There are a couple questions that you need to ask yourself before you get into the actual build of your engagement programs. So we’ll be covering those questions right now.

The first is, should you use a Drip Nurture or an engagement program? Well, a Drip Nurture is a single stream of email journey that is used when you want to send a series of emails to an audience without the need to transition. This can take place through Marketo with a series of email and wait steps in your in your flow steps. You can create it in a couple different ways. This is great if you need to use a certain token to wait between your email sends, or if you need to use executable campaigns to pull data in and wait to that next step. This is an option for that, but it doesn’t allow you to transition people from one stream of content to another.

An engagement program allows you to systematically create complex nurture journeys with ease. If you’re looking for a way to deliver regularly cadenced communications to a large audience with several different topics under one program, this is the option that you would want to consider. All right, so since you’re here, I’m going to assume that you’re going to use engagement programs.

So we’re going to jump into those a little bit more.

Starting out with the definitions that I will be using in this presentation. A cast is a single row or event from your sending program. So each one of those lines that you see in your engagement program, as somebody goes down in those, those are considered a cast. A stream is a group of content that your engagement program uses to nurture people. So that’s that single column.

Now there are two types of options that you can put in your streams. You can either put emails or default programs with smart campaigns. Both will work in your engagement streams.

And then something you will also want to consider is your cadence. How often are you going to be sending these communications? Is it going to be a daily, weekly, monthly type communication? Are they going to be different for each one of your streams? You can set up cadences that are independent from each other for each one of the streams in your engagement program.

And then lastly, as a member of the engagement program, you can only be in one stream at a time. You can be in multiple engagement programs and be in multiple streams of each of those engagement programs, but you can only be in one stream of an engagement program at a time. They are mutually exclusive. All right, so we’re going to next talk about when should you use an email versus a default program? Emails are the easiest to use. If you’re going to use engagement scores, I would strongly recommend that you use emails. It measures a little bit easier, and you don’t have to do as much there. It is a great introductory way to start those communications of just putting in your email content. So as somebody goes down in your engagement stream, they will receive every single one of those emails unless they’ve already received that email previously in another stream. Now, that email does have to be the exact same email with the same email ID in order for them to skip it. Otherwise, they will receive every single email. A default program allows you to add additional criteria to determine if somebody will qualify before they move on to the flow step.

So you can add additional qualifiers. You can add additional choice steps if you’d like to in your default program with that smart campaign, but it does require a little bit of extra setup. Part of that is the smart campaign that runs your default program must first have member of engagement program, the filter, be the first option in that smart campaign. If you don’t have member of engagement program equals whatever that engagement program is, it won’t pull up in your engagement stream when you go to add it. These are really nice too if you want to do omni-channel marketing. I’ve seen them in the past where you might be receiving email communications, and then you put a default program in, and you call a webhook to send out an SMS. Maybe it’s an alert to your sales folks to follow up because the record has received x amount of communications. So this is a great approach if you need to do some omni-channel orchestration.

And then keep in mind that engagement programs are based off of program success, not the email engagement. So if you are looking for those engagement scores, you’ll want to also add program success for each one of those in order for that to be calculated.

All right, so now that I’ve given you those two options, I want to hear from you. Which do you prefer to use in your engagement programs? Are you team email or are you team default program? All right, we’ll give it a couple more moments. Phil Hunt, that poll, we really want to hear from you.

All right, 10 seconds. Five, four, three, two.

All right, so we’re mostly default program here. I love default programs. I think they offer a lot more control here, and they are fantastic. Both are excellent options. It’s just however you choose to use them for your own use cases. All right, so you’ve decided to use engagement program. How are you going to transition people between your streams? Transisting to different streams within the existing engagement program allows a few different options for that, and so we’ll cover those right now. All right, so first, do you have a sales funnel that you need to align to? Are there mutually exclusive products that you have that each stream will have its own content? Do you have lifecycle stages that you’re trying to map your communications to? So this could be all the way from somebody first hitting your website to a returning customer. Do you want to break your content into a fast lane versus slow lane so people who are engaging with the content receive it as a faster pace rather than a slower cadence where you’re trying to warm people up? Or is it just that, that you are trying to warm cold leads up or trying to slowly get people into the awareness and desire phases? Or is it that somebody has already received all of the content in a stream and that you need to move them over to another stream so that they can continue to receive content? You can only put 100 pieces of content in a single stream, so if you have 101, you might want to transition them to another stream so that they can continue receiving all that communication. So which option do you prefer or transition to use somebody between the streams? I’ve seen a bunch of different options here, which is awesome.

And keep in mind, there’s no right or wrong answer. This is just to get your general sense as to how is everybody using these engagement programs.

We’re seeing lifecycle stages take the lead, which is awesome. I think that personalization and understanding where somebody is in their customer journey lifecycle is fantastic. So that is definitely an awesome one to use. And same with sales funnel, really meeting your customers where they are in that sales journey is fantastic.

All right, so I’m going to go ahead and end this and we’ll broadcast those results.

All right, so the next option we’re going to talk about is smart campaigns versus transition rules. The first option is to use a smart campaign. This is going to push people into a specific stream. You’ll have a folder with your smart campaigns that will route people to the appropriate stream at the appropriate time. These campaigns can either be triggered or batched, and they can be used in conjunction with each other to qualify and transition your leads throughout your engagement program. The nice thing about smart campaigns is we use them all the time. We’re very familiar with them, and you can schedule them off hours. So if your high traffic time is at 8 a.m., you can schedule these to run in the evening or the early morning so it’s not taking that processing power that you need when you go to send all of your other email communications.

The other option are transition rules. Now these are baked into the streams of the engagement program. These are going to pull people into that stream of content. You first have to have a trigger that is activated to pull them in. So that’s one of the gotchas on this is it pulls people in and it has to be trigger-based communications. You can add additional attributes after that trigger or additional triggers, but you have to have it starting with a trigger.

There is also a flow step option within those transition rules. So if you need to do any additional lead qualification or sending alerts or anything like that, you can. But for me, these are a little bit harder to manage, especially when I’m working with a team. I like to have everything organized in a folder with all my smart campaigns. But that is completely up to you. Which option of transition method do you prefer? We’re going to drop in another poll. All right, smart campaign team is leading strong.

And totally understandable, both are good options. And I do use both. It really just depends on your use case. But for me, I prefer to do everything in smart campaigns just because it’s a little bit more of a native functionality in my brain. All right, we’re going to end this one and move on.

Fantastic. All right, so we have a few additional questions to ask before we start building. I promise we will get to the building. But there are some really good preceding questions that we should ask before we get into the weeds. The first is, when should somebody exit your engagement program? Has that person received all of the content and they are just sitting at the bottom of your engagement stream exhausted? Do they no longer qualify to receive any of the content? Have they changed title or are they no longer at that business? Are they at a different life cycle stage? Or are they in another engagement program and you don’t want them receiving conflicting information that you’re providing in this engagement program? So those are a couple options of when should you consider removing somebody from your engagement programs? When should you determine success? This is especially crucial if you are using default programs because that program success metric is really going to help tie in how people are engaging with the content. Is this going to be a change in your funnel? So they’re moving from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead to an open opportunity.

Is that considered success in your instance or in your business? Or did the opportunity, is it one? Is it closed in one? Are you good to go? You can remove them, that’s a success. You can count those measurements, that’s an awesome one. I’ve also seen did they simply click the email or do they open the content? Do they go to the website that you’re telling them to do from the email? That is also considered a success. So you just want to consider for each email or each asset what is considered a success and then what is the goal of your engagement program with each stream? All right, now we are finally going to get into building. There are three different types of ways to start building. We’ll cover the first two really quick and then we’ll dive a little bit deeper into the third one. So there’s build from scratch, there’s clone or there’s import program. Hopefully you are familiar with the first two. So build from scratch, it’s a new local asset. It’s going to be a new program with the program type being engagement. That’s how you’re going to activate your engagement program is that program type of engagement similar to a default program or email program, even a webinar program.

The second option is to clone. Easy enough, you right-click an existing engagement program, clone. This is really great if you are building similar content across the board and you need to do some some quick activation. The third I highly recommend for anybody who hasn’t used engagement program before and they’re looking for the appropriate structure of the engagement program. It is the program import library. If you haven’t used this before, what you need to do is you go into your marketing activities, you click on import program, you will select your program to import and then it will create not only the engagement program but the file structure and all of the campaign management smart campaigns as well as some basic emails to start out with. This is a great way to understand how to lay everything out in a good quick start. We’ll drop a link for the resources of all the options in the program import library. It’s not limited to just engagement programs. All right, so now you’ve you figured out how you’re going to transition people, what you’re going to use between a smart campaign and a transition rule. You’re going to use emails and default programs. We’re going to get into that adding content to your streams. So adding emails easy enough. There is a little plus icon in the top right of your stream that when you click that it’s going to ask you if you want to add an email or a program. Adding an email is easy enough. You just select the email and then you type in the dialog box below what that email name is. Now if it’s nested within your engagement program it should be easy enough to find. A pro tip that I like to use is if you have your engagement program already on your screen, like you can see your streams on your screen and if you use that left hand navigation, migrate or navigate to the content that you want to add. If you right click that content while your streams are still showing on your screen you will have the option on that right click menu to add to engagement stream. This is only present if the streams are showing on your page. If you navigate away or if you left click on the asset and actually go to that asset this won’t work. You have to have your engagement streams up and then you can right click an option to add that content to a stream.

The second option is to add default programs. So default programs very similar process. You’re going to click that plus icon in the the top right of your screen. You will then select the program and then the smart campaign that’s going to be running that program. And again it has to have member of engagement program being that first smart list filter in order for it to work. Because it’s going to be a request campaign you’ll see a little blue arrow in your default program wherever that’s that’s housed once you’ve made this connection. This is a great way too if you want to send out SMS or any other omni-channel communication using default programs for this is fantastic.

Just note that if somebody doesn’t qualify for that default program they will wait until the next step and then move on. They will still continue to receive the following communications but if they don’t qualify for that default program they they won’t get sent that information and they will just stay there until the next cast is run. All right so you’ve built your engagement program now you want to test it. What are you going to do? There is a fantastic testing feature within engagement programs. It is the test stream functionality. Do note that whatever test person that you put in there it will send out those communications. So it highly suggests that you use either your own emails or test emails that you have if you select a random person. They will likely get that communication and be a little confused. So once you go to that test stream functionality you will put in the email address and then you will put in your initial stream. If that person is not already in the engagement program the first step is those transition rules to add them to the stream. So what you will need to do is then click that refresh icon and they will start receiving those communications. Every time you click that refresh you’ll go on to the the next stage in your CAS. So you can go from top down and potentially receive all of those email communications by just refreshing that and running those CAS. So this is an excellent way to make sure that all of your either emails or default programs are functioning as expected. All right so what if you have limited time content out there? I mean we are coming on the best time of the season, Halloween spooky season. So what if you wanted to run some promotions around that but they can only run after Thanksgiving and before Christmas? What are you going to do? There’s program availability which is fantastic. What this means is you can place content in your streams and choose when to activate it and then when to deactivate it. There are both options there so if you want to hold off on activating something you can type in the activate from date and then at that date it will activate. If you leave the activate through blank it will stay on indefinitely. Conversely if you put an activate through end date and don’t have activate from it will be active until that time. So this is great for limited time offers or anything that you want to put in your engagement streams and only have it available for a certain amount of time.

All right now we are leading into reporting. First thing to note are engagement scores. An engagement score is a score of 0 to 100 and it’s a proprietary algorithm that Marketo uses to calculate how engaged is the content that you have in your engagement stream. If you are using emails each email will have its own individual engagement score. Now everything starts out at a baseline of 50 that is your average and those engagement scores aren’t calculated for 72 hours until after it’s sent and it’s only for your last three casts so those engagement scores can fluctuate so it’s really important to take special consideration to keep an eye on those if you see them spiking or decreasing that’s something to note. In the main screen of your engagement program you will see your highest engagement which is fantastic. This is a great snapshot to report to your leaders of your most engaging content. If you have optimization specialists this is a really good reference for them to use as what’s working well what’s not where improvements can be made. All right and then with reporting if there’s old content in your engagement programs that you don’t want to have in there anymore that you’re not using but you need to save it for reporting purposes you can always archive it. The benefit of archiving your information within your engagement streams is you are not losing any of that reporting or analytical data it’s not stripping all that so if you need it for reporting you can just archive it it will hide in your engagement stream but you can still pull it from your reporting if you need to see the assets once you’ve archived them you can click that gear icon in the top right of your stream and select show archived content to make that visible that means it’s there but nobody’s receiving it. It’s there but nobody’s receiving that content and you’re not losing any of the reporting functionality from it.

All right and then the two main reports that I like to use are email performance reports and then stream performance reports. Hopefully you’re familiar with an email performance report that’s going to be your opensends, clicks, delivers, bounces, pendants, and unsubscribes. The stream performance report is all that plus your engagement score. What’s really cool about the stream performance reports is it actually groups all of your emails by the stream so you can see your stream on the very top the pieces of content that belong to that stream and then if you’re using emails the engagement scores that are part of that that stream and associated to each email. If you’re using default programs you’ll want to make sure that you are using your program success and then those would be calculated later on. All right so my key takeaways here are decide what stream categories are you going to use. Are they going to be by product? Are they going to be by lifecycle? How are you going to set up multiple streams of content? And then when will you transition people in your content? Will you use smart campaigns or transition rules? It seems like most people here are team smart campaign which is fantastic. Maybe give transition rules a try. It’s worth a test. And then emails versus default campaigns. How are you going to set up your content? If you’re planning to restructure or rebuild your emails in a different template I would suggest that you use default programs because it’s going to save you from anybody exhausted or lower in your engagement stream content from going back up and getting new content if you’ve replaced it with a new email. With a default program that won’t take that won’t happen because they’re already a member of that default program. And then how you move people in your streams? How they move and exit? Do you have success metrics? Are you going to hold on to exhausted people for a while or are you going to boot them out as soon as they’re done? And then how will you determine success? Is the goal to just get email clicks and people to your website or is this based around your opportunities? Okay it looks like we have a number of questions coming in for Max. The first question coming in from Nicole. Max what do you mean by transition content? Yeah excellent question. So when the benefit of an engagement program is you can move people from one stream of content into another. And so like I was saying that could be based off of your life cycle stages and it could be on multiple different options but basically you’re moving from one stream one to stream two or stream three and that each stream of content has its own level of email communications and is targeted to a specific either audience or stage. And so when you’re moving people you’re transitioning them from the previous stream of content into a another stream of content that’s more focused where they are. Yeah thank you so much for sharing and great question Nicole. Our second question coming in from Carlos. Would you recommend using an email program over an engagement program for a drip nurture? So an email program are email programs are meant for single send campaigns. They do have a lot of functionality and we do use them a lot for all of our ad hoc type emails where it’s just a single send. If it’s a recurring communication I would definitely recommend either using a smart campaign or consider it an engagement program.

Now something I have seen in the past is people will build engagement programs with just a single stream of content. To me that’s like having a sports car and only going 45 miles an hour.

The beauty of engagement programs is the ability to have multiple streams of content. So it’s just a single stream. I would build it in a default program with a smart list and a series of wait steps. Yeah thank you so much for breaking down the pros and cons of the different program types Max. Next question coming in. What is your program success metric? Yeah so a program success metric could be anything from an email click of the email in that program or a website visit. It’s a membership status as well as the additional field. So if you are familiar with webinars where you have your registered, attended, not attended, there are certain success metrics in those stages. So if somebody attends a webinar that’s considered a success. If you’re not the Marketo admin I would definitely recommend working with your Marketo admins to really understand how they’ve determined success in those different channels. But it can be based off of your program membership. We have one for all of our form fields. If we’re trying to get people to fill a form and they fill that out, if that form was in a specific default program we consider that a success because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. And then we can measure how many people we’ve sent there versus how many people did the thing that we were wanting them to do. Yeah thank you for breaking that down based on goal. How do you manage different languages within an engagement program Max? Oh that is a fantastic question.

I think there are multiple ways to do this and it really depends on your use case. What I’ve seen work in the past is using default programs in your engagement programs and then within that smart campaign that you’re using the choice steps that you have to send an email. So you have a single flow action to send an email but you have multiple choices in that email flow. If language equals English then send English version. If language equals French then send the French version. That’s an easy way to do it. You can also use dynamic content in your emails if you have your segmentation already established within your instance. You could also have separate streams that are mutually exclusive for each language. That is an excellent use case that I didn’t even think of for those individual streams. Maybe it’s all the same content but they’re broken up into different languages. So it really depends on how you would like to use it for your business. Awesome, thanks so much for sharing that on languages.

Question coming in from Betsy. How did you get to the engagement score feature Max? Yeah so the engagement score feature, if you click on your engagement program it’s on that main tab. Once you have engagement metrics coming in you’ll see in the bottom right hand side in the bottom right hand side of that first tab of your engagement program those actual scores. I believe it’s on the summary page if that’s the right term but it is on the right hand side of that first tab of your engagement program. And then for reporting if you do any engagement stream performance report that will be a column in there as well of each email’s asset, each email asset and its engagement score. Now something that I didn’t show is you can change the view when you are in your streams of content. So if you’re on your streams tab there is a view option where you can see how many people are at each cast or each level of your stream. You can also see their engagement which is a fantastic one just if you want everything all at once in a very visual way you can click on the engagement view within your stream tab and you can see it there as well. Awesome I think those are both really great tips and I’ll try to find some documentation or a tutorial on experience league on how you can get to the engagement score feature as well as change the view. I’ll share that in the marketing nation community thread after.

Question coming in would you recommend using dynamic content within the emails of an engagement program or creating separate emails instead? Yes and the reason I say yes is it really depends on what you’re trying to do. Dynamic content is fantastic so are default programs so there’s no right or wrong way to do things. If you are trying to localize your languages and you already set things up in a dynamic content way then use dynamic content. If you are wanting to measure the success of emails independently then I would suggest using a default program with those flow steps in there. The nice thing about dynamic content is it’s all one email but that gets really tricky if you’re trying to do reporting against that dynamic content. So if you do want to do some multivariate testing or have mutually exclusive emails for different audiences and see how they’re they’re behaving independently then use separate content.

Awesome thank you so much for breaking that down. I love the questions that are coming in. We still have five minutes so keep the questions coming and yeah these are all very great questions. Our next question should I have one nurture program with many streams based on lifecycle stage or is there a scenario where I would create multiple engagement programs with single stream? Yeah that is a very smart question. So it really depends on a lot of factors. What I’ve seen with multiple streams is maybe you have complementary engagement programs where your main engagement program is running two or three times a week and that’s giving you or your audience general communications and then you have complementing engagement programs that might be running on Tuesdays or Thursdays or something like that that are providing more specific content. So you can have multiple engagement programs running in conjunction with themselves. So maybe it’s like your your core communications Monday Wednesdays and Fridays and then you have product specific communications running on Tuesdays and Thursdays so that each they’re receiving something every day and it’s on that regular cadence.

Yeah thank you for breaking that down. If someone didn’t get qualified for a default program early on in a stream and they re-qualify much later on the same stream will they still get that default program email? They would only get that email at the time of that cast. If they were lower in the funnel and then qualify later on they would not receive it. So that’s something that you would want to factor in. Maybe it’s you put the similar default programs in to qualify people at multiple stages or you’ve duplicated content to see if they’re qualifying as they’re going through that the content. But at the time that they’re at the that cast is the only time they would receive that content. Yeah thank you for sharing that order. We have multiple products or product families with very different cycles in terms of time to buy. How would you set up or make use of nurture programs to build multiple product-based streams without interfering each other? How can you start and approach product-based marketing? Yeah this is a fantastic question. So what I would look at is first are these products mutually exclusive? Do you want to make sure that if somebody’s in product A that they’re not getting any communications for product B? And then I would set up my engagement programs to be around those specific products and their own respective stages. If you have a really long buying stage for product A then building out multiple streams for each one of those milestones in your product stage to deliver content and hopefully move people to the very end. If the product life cycle or the stages for product B are very short then maybe consider quicker cadences of your content but fewer streams so that they’re not having to move through the different milestones because there’s not as many but you can still provide content to them so that they’re not exhausting or it doesn’t feel like they’re being dropped with communications. But I would set them up most likely as separate engagement programs entirely. We still have a ton of great questions coming in and we’re going to continue to conversation on marketing nation community and get your questions answered. So thank you so much everyone.