Email Program Status of Engaged on open or click

Personally I think clicks is a much better measurement of engagment.
It's easy for someone to open an email, look at it for a few seconds and then close it but if they bother to click a link that for me is a good indication that something in your content caught their eye.

Scott, your expectation of the "consultant" answer is correct :-) Depends on the goals of the campaign. Sometimes a click is the desired result, other times is an action on your site, etc.

I've actually seen some clients have multiple engagement steps on an email and assign success to each one.

I would do it upon clicking. If they open the email, it doesn't mean they actually read it. More important, opens are not a really metric because if they don't "display images" then Marketo cannot see if they opened the email even if they did (Gmail is an exception due to the recent change).

Definitely depends on your specific goal. For example, your end goal might be for the recipient to click the link and then fill out the form on the following page.

Thanks. We are leaning to clicks now too. In some cases like an alert, just an open is all we care about, but the general rule we are going with are clicks.