Single Engagement Stream -- Skip content?

You should be able to achieve this by using programs instead of emails in your stream. However, instead of doing that, you might want to wait a few days as Marketo's May release is removing restrictions on engagement programs: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoArticle?id=kA050000000LIx8CAG#enhanced-engagement-programs

Hi Scott and Matt,

Thank you both for your help! I can't believe this is the first month I haven't looked at the upcoming release notifications...wow, how exciting! 

Scott, I think the smart campaign/program workaround will do the trick -- I was using single emails in the nurture stream and forgot about using programs. 

Thanks again!

Good luck with your engagement programs, Kate!

Kate, one thing to keep in mind is that for each cast of an engagement stream, Marketo basically looks from the top of the list and says "has this person received this email?", or "are they a member of this program?". If you want them to skip from email 2 to email 4 and never receive email 3, then you'll need to manually exclude them from receiving email 3. I can't tell from your description if you want to avoid email 3 altogether, but that's a concept that's sometimes overlooked.

Edward Unthank has a great way of excluding people by creating a program status of "Exclude" so that you can run a batch/triggered campaign to add someone to (in this case) the email 3 program, so that they will never receive it. It's in this replay from Summit at slide 17.

Dory, this is great (and thank you for the sldies; I've been wondering where they were from Summit!).

The exclude program is probably what I need. Essentially for this engagement program we have three emails per stage: awareness, interest, purchase. If someone takes the call to action in email 2 for example, we want to send them to email 4 (interest) and exclude them from receiving 3 altogether. It will be this way throughout the series, with the hopes of taking people to the purchase stage quickly if they show a certain combination of interest (take call to action in email 5&6, then they go to straight to email 9, for example). 

I'll take a stab at it and hope that we didn't make it too complicated. ;) I'm hopeful that the release tonight will help as I'm currently limited to only one stream. 

Thanks!

Hi,
Using this process of programs in streams instead of emails and skipping emails due to consumed content, does this mean that the contact will not receive the next piece of communication (email 4) for 4 weeks if the cadence is 2 weeks? If this is the case, is there a way of sending email 4 instead of email 3 if the content from email 3 has been consumed?
Thanks

Hi Tim -- if you use programs, the engagement program will run through all the programs in the stream until it finds one that the lead is not a member of. That will be the piece of content sent for that cast.

So to answer your question--no, the lead/contact will not have to wait longer to receive the next piece of content, as the engagement program will essentially keep looking for a piece of content they haven't already received to send to them.