Ensuring Leads are only in One Engagement Program

Segmentation won't do anything for you in this scenario.  The reason being is that segmentation doesn't perform any type of flow action, such as removing a record from an engagement program if added to one.  It could however, play a role in your strategy.  You will still need campaigns that will remove leads from other engagement programs if they are added to an engagement program.  The best way to do is that is to build the removal of the leads from other engagement programs directly into the flow of the smart campaign that you're using to add records to an engagement program, completely IMO.

It's true that segmentation won't prevent leads from being in multiple engagement programs. However, since segmentations are mutually exclusive, here's what  I would recommend (we do something very similar, it works well) :

• Create 'Nurture' segmentation with  each of your scenarios listed
• Create a "Traffic Cop" campaign (shout out to Jeff Coveney at RevEngine for helping us with this one way back when!)
  • Smart list:
    • Segment Changes trigger, Segment is Nurture
    • Person is Created trigger (if you want to automatically add new leads)
  • Flow:
    • Add to Engagement Stream, Choice 1: If Nurture Segment = Special Campaign 1, etc
    • Then, you'll want to make sure you remove leads from any other stream they are already in. Add a separate flow step for each engagement stream: Change Program Status, Program = Engagement Stream, New Status = Not in Program

Hope this helps!

You need to build a Traffic Cop to manage the Entry and Exit as well as the hierarchy here. If you do a search, you will find previous concepts.

Thank you everyone for your comments.

@Rachel Noble​ This is the type of concept that I had in mind!

@Josh Hill​ I vaguely remember Traffic Cop, but didn't have it implemented in our instance. It doesn't look like the community has much left on the topic from a set-up standpoint (or I'm terrible at searching!). Would you recommend Rachel's concept of segmentation with a traffic cop program? Or should the traffic cop program be sufficient?

Hi Megan,

first of all I agree with Jim Thao that segmentations won't do anything for you just by existing. What you need to do is run a couple of "Nurture Control" Smart Campaigns that manage transitions between Engagement Programs.

The general concept would be not to remove leads from programs - doing that you'd lose historic metrics - but you could e.g. pause them. So your overall guideline would be that one lead can be member of many EPs at the same time, but only active in one.

So you would build something like this below - and Segmentation can come into play here, but you can do it with all kinds of Smart List filters as well:

Entry:

If segment = A, add to program A.

If segment = B, add to program B.

Nurture Control:

If segment is not longer A, pause in program A. If segment is A again, unpause in program A.

If segment is not longer B, pause in program B. If segment is B again, unpause in program B.

You can run these nurture controls as recurring batches or triggers.