How to get 160%x engagement using content you already have | Community
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Level 8
September 13, 2017

How to get 160%x engagement using content you already have

Our first engagement program took four months to set up. It was our first big accomplishment after implementing Marketo, and believe me, we celebrated! It had one stream made up of seven emails that went out Wednesday mornings at 9am. We immediately saw a huge lift in engagement which, at the time, meant the same lift in the number of MQL alerts passed to sales.

Fast forward two years: we now have 9 active engagement programs through which leads and contacts are funneled based on a combination of persona and lifecycle status. These engagement programs each have multiple streams that further personalize content based on behavioral triggers and predictive data. We’ve seen continuous growth and are super excited about the results!

Here’s the problem: we haven’t had the resources to develop new content as rapidly as we are learning to personalize what we deliver. As you probably know, this is a growing problem in the world of automation. Until our most recent addition to our content team, we had to make huge efforts to stretch our content as far as it would go without sacrificing personalized, relevant messaging.

So what did we do?

Our Senior Content Developer sums it up perfectly: “we found the lowest-hanging fruit that people actually want to eat.” For us, it was nurture. We created a new stream within each engagement program and called it the “Exhausted Content” stream. Every time we add an email to one of the other streams within the program, we clone it into the same program and add the clone to the Exhausted Content stream. Give it a new subject line and exclude everyone who opened it before, and boom! 60% lift in nurture engagement.

How to set it up

They say a picture is worth a thousand words (always wished that would fly in college).

Schedule this campaign to run based on the cadence of your nurture cast.

How easy is that!

Looking for other ways to make your nurture programs more robust? Check out these fan faves:

11 replies

rachel2-2Author
Level 8
September 20, 2017

Hey Kayla,

No problem! We set up our Nurture program channel to include a (non-success) status of "Exclusion". Then, incorporate every email within our nurture streams as sub-programs instead of emails. So in the Early Stream (our default stream), someone will get this first email:

If they open this email, it triggers a smart campaign in the Exhausted Content version of the email (we call it the Exhausted Content stream). This smart campaign makes them a member of the EC version of the email program with the status of "Exclusion" we previously set up.

Then, when the nurture cast hits this EC program, anyone who opened the ES version of the email will already be a member of the program and thus will be excluded from entering the EC program (and therefore will not receive the email).

Hope this helps!

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September 19, 2017

Hey @Rachel Noble - awesome post! Love this idea.

You mention filtering out people who have already opened that email. How/where did you incorporate that logic? I've been wanting to do that with some of my engagement programs but haven't figured out how to set it up. The post you linked to looks like it was before the current iteration of the engagement program type.

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Level 3
September 19, 2017

Pretty legit. Thank you for sharing!

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September 19, 2017

Thanks for sharing!

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September 18, 2017

Love this idea! I was just thinking "hmmm. what a waste that sometimes people's email inbox get cluttered up and they never end up even seeing our awesome content, especially when it could really bring them value" this is a good way to make sure no content goes to waste when they never got their chance to be seen. Thank you so much Rachel!

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rachel2-2Author
Level 8
September 18, 2017

You have inspired a ton of inquiries on this! There might be another blog post coming soon. Keep your eyes open...

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rachel2-2Author
Level 8
September 15, 2017

Tony Yang​ wanna buy some TMA?

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September 15, 2017

Cool idea @Rachel Noble​! Care to share how you structured your 9 engagement programs and the streams within?  ;-)

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Level 5
September 14, 2017

Great ideas Rachel, thank you for sharing!

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Darrell_Alfons2
Level 10
September 13, 2017

Nice!

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