Marketo Engagement Programs

Engagement Programs are what email geniuses use to nurture their leads.

These programs automate emails sends based on activity from the lead.

Engagement Programs are the in general the most complicated portion of the Marketo certification exam, but it is a powerful tool that if used correctly will be a lead-generating machine. While made up of many components, it can be tailored to suit your company’s nurturing desires.

In this post, I will discuss the following about Marketo engagement programs:

What is an engagement program
How do you create an engagement program
Why use an engagement program over the other programs

What is an engagement program?

Engagement Programs are a series emails set to send based on certain actions performed by the lead. For example, the engagement program can be automated so that if the lead opens or clicks an email, he or she received a different set of emails more tailored towards his or her interests.

How do you create an engagement program

Engagement Programs can be created by setting the following aspects:

Engagement Program Body

This is the main program were the other parameters are set. A best practice is to pause the engagement while you are building it out.

Stream

Each stream is a section of content. You can separate you content into top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel content or through other means. Each stream should contain rules for transition to transfer a lead to if he or she engages in a certain way

The order of the emails within each stream is important as the lead always receives the top email first and then moves on to the next email that he or she has not yet received. No lead will receive the same email twice.

Cadence

This is where you set when you want the emails to go out. You need to set the first date and then the regular cadence (daily, weekly, monthly).

Transition Rules

These are the rules to transition the leads among the streams. You can also set this using smart campaigns. Most common are to transition leads among streams using lead engagement with the emails (opens and clicks), yet you can also transition using score changes, form fills, web page visits, and opportunity changes.

Availability

You can set the timeframe that you want the asset to be available on the asset within each stream.

Setup

Besides pausing and starting the engagement program, this is also where you set your tags, sync campaigns, and period (program) costs.

My Tokens

This is where you can put the tokens (mail merge fields) for your program.

Member

This where you import you email list. They will start in stream one. You can also import them via a members smart campaign when you add them in the flow step, change their engagement program cadence, change their engagement program stream, change their program status. The leads can also be added if they fill out a form within the program. You can also add them by adding them into a synced Salesforce campaign.

Smart Campaigns

It’s also important to set up you smart campaigns to measure success and pause disqualified leads.

Reports

Lastly, while emails performance reports are always good to use for email-related programs, these programs have the Engagement Stream Performance Report shows how each stream’s emails are performing. There is also an Engagement Dashboard where you can quickly view the summary, exhausted content, engagement over time, and highest engagement charts.

Why use an engagement program over the other programs?

Engagement programs are there to accomplish one main goal: nurture your leads over time. They also have the following benefits:

Update your email content over time, based on performance
Schedule set cadences to send each email, and easily remove them if needed
Create specialized nurtures with event and default nested programs

To best organize your smart campaigns, create multiple folders under Marketing Activities. Put your operational smart campaigns in an operational programs folder and your other smart campaigns in the other folders.