Engagement Program - Skipping Unused Smart Campaign? | Community
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A
Anonymous
July 7, 2017
Question

Engagement Program - Skipping Unused Smart Campaign?

  • July 7, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 2679 views

Hi. I have set up an Engagement Program using nested programs with smart campaigns. I've set the cadence to run daily (Mon-Fri) but in order to limit communications I have added a criteria to the smart campaign of "Not Was Sent Email - Is Any - In Last 3 Days". The behaviour I expected was for this to be skipped if they had been sent any emails in the last 3 days but the net time the cast ran Marketo would attempt to see if they qualified again. What appears to be happening is Marketo is treating it as though the email was sent and is skipping to the next nested program.

Any ideas?

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2 replies

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
July 7, 2017

I believe that's the desired behavior if the Lead doesn't qualify for the nested Program. I thought it used to just ignore it or get caught in Purgatory (though that part was fixed last year).

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
July 7, 2017

Why don't you use Comms Limits to control that? That will work as intended.

Alternatively, why are you setting it to Every Day?

Veronica_Holme4
Veronica_Holme4
Level 9
July 10, 2017

Hi Mike - this is a common misconception about nested programs. At each cadence the engagement program doesn't send an email, it executes an action. It just so happens that in engagement programs the only two available actions are send an email, or run a smart campaign within a nested program. the very action of checking the smart campaign to see if the lead qualifies and then running the flow is the action that happens on that cadence. If the lead doesn't qualify for the smart list within that smart campaign it does nothing for that cadence, and in the next cadence it moves on to the next piece of content in the stream. It will NOT check again on that same smart campaign. As far as Marketo is concerned it has executed the action as defined.

I have to echo Josh's question - can you use communication limits to help you not overcommunicate?

If not, something I've used before is a separate scheduled smart campaign within the engagement program that checks every 24 hours for the numbers of emails the person has received - when they get to the limit it marks them as paused in the engagement program for say 24 hours (wait step) - and then unpauses them. You have to be VERY sure such a smart campaign checks and executes that flow at least 2 hours before the scheduled cadence of the engagement stream otherwise the engagement program has probably already added them to the scheduled send for that day.

    A
    Anonymous
    July 11, 2017

    Thanks for all the helpful responses. Veronica I might try out your scheduled smart campaign suggestion. The problem with communication limits is that they're global and "one size fits all". Aren't they?

    Veronica_Holme4
    Veronica_Holme4
    Level 9
    July 12, 2017

    Yes. At the smart campaign level you can override global communications limits, but you can't customise campaign by campaign. But that's by design. If you did these limits ad hoc at the campaign level it would be almost impossible to control. Marketo sets globally and if you want a particular send (smart campaign) to be exempt from the limits you can. Email and engagement programs always obey the global limits.

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