Can engagement streams be cast every x days instead of weekly on same day/time?

As far as I know you would need a smart campaign. Why are you dealing with dupes though?

Christina,

No, you cannot send every 5 or every 8 days using a Stream Cadence. You will need a campaign. I doubt very much anyone notices if you are always sending on a Friday.

The problem with smart campaigns isn't dupes - those will be filtered if they all qualify at the same time - it's that you can send the same email twice to the same person, unless you handle that using a smart list or a Was Sent Email filter.

See: http://www.slideshare.net/jdavidhill/marketo-engagements-and-drip-nurturing-boston-user-group-dec-10-2013

UPDATE: what you can do is set different cadences:

Stream 1 = Every week on Wed
Stream 2 = Every week on Thursday.

Then you can move the leads back and forth between the streams after every cast.

Dupes happen when we have multiple records with same email in Marketo. They all qualify for the smart campaign because they have similar/same characteristics but enter the system at the same time. So the same email can be sent your email 1 and email 3 of your nurture because Marketo doesnt see them as the same person (kind of confusing but it is what it is and support confirmed the only way around this is to use an engagement program).

So for the smart campaign, I would need to add a 'was sent email' filter to the smart list? And then add all emails in the nurture that appear on the flow? Im not exactly clear how this lays out.

If you send to people every Monday at 11am, they will certainly take notice. Our audience is already skeptical about marketers so I dont want anything to look 'robotic'. 

Hey Christina, there was a thread a while back about how to make engagement streams happen on more 'randomized' days. The idea of it was that as soon as a cast happens (in your case, maybe when a specific email is sent), there is a smart campaign that pauses someone's engagement stream for x number of days. After that wait step, they are unpaused. The engagement program is set to do casts on multiple days of the week, so that they'll receive the cast shortly after they're unpaused.

Example: Engagement stream is programmed to send casts on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday... Cast 1 for record A is sent on Tuesday, and then a smart campagin pauses the user for 1 week. After 1 week they're unpaused, but at that point, Tuesday's cast (where they would have typically received email 2) has already passed, so they wait until Thursday when the next cast happens. Record B enters the engagement program on a Wednesday so he receives the first cast on Thursday, is paused for a week and unpaused after Thursday's send so he will receive the cast on Friday.

Edward Unthank also did a great presentation at Summit about how to ensure that someone doesn't receive the same piece of content or an email that they've already received using Exclusion program status. You can view the recording here, and he gets into the exclusion status around slide 17.

Hope this helps a little bit!

Here's an idea:
Set your cadence to every day. Then set up a campaign that pauses a lead every time they get an email from the program and unpauses them after 5 or 8 days depending on what stream they're in.