Engagement & Event Strategy

Hi Cheryl!

Welcome to the Marketing Nation :) Glad to hear that you are excited to use Marketo.

In terms of your post, think of nurturing as an ongoing background conversation that happens whenever your team doesn't have a big webinar or research paper, which are hopefully more timely and relevant. At the end of the day you want to send the right message, to the right person at the right time.

The best way to start is by mapping out your different audiences and the different communications you are sending them. Once you've done this determine what conversations are more relevant and that will operationally help you figure out when a nurture email or a webinar email should go out.

Operationally there are multiple ways to manage this:

• You could use communication limits (which define how many emails a person can receive from your organization). Engagement Programs (the programs used specifically for nurturing) automatically adhere to the communication limit rules. Other programs such as our email program or webinar event programs require you to opt in to these rules.
• You could integrate all your webinars and big papers into your Engagement Programs. Put them at the top of the content list so that people will receive those pieces the next time your emails go out (The engagement program is smart enough to know what people haven't received). 
• Or on the other hand, you can “pause” the people in nurture you are sending a particular webinar out to.

There are obviously multiple ways to execute this, but when you constantly think of how you can be as relevant to an audience as possible then you will know when to send a nurture campaign vs. when to send a webinar etc.
Would love to know what other people think as well! Great discussion thread J

Cheryl - One thing you can also consider beyond Phillip's good points...

You can add "up to date" content to nurturing emails using tokens. What I'm thinking is "Upcoming Events" or "Latest News" could be added as a Rich Text token at the top level nurturing folder. So what I mean is not on the individual nurturing programs themselves, but the top most folder you'd add a token, such as Upcoming Events. Then in your email templates you could create a section (a lot of templates have 2 columns / sidebars which I typically find get boring content.) and put in the token {{my.Upcoming Events}} ... If that token is in all of your nurturing emails, you will just have to update it once, in that top folder, then it will automatically be inhereted into all emails which contain it. Every week or few days as new things come up you can go back to that one token and update it so all your nurture emails contain relevant and up-to-date information. (Tip! If you format the token in rich text, you can only use it in one configuration. Format it in the template & you can use the token in several types of layouts)

Philip suggests adding webinars & events to the top of your stream. In general I support this idea. In practice working with other marketers to accomplish this, if invites are approved / finished late, or something obstructs a cast, it causes a lot of concern & panic. If you do add a webinar invite to the top of your stream, determine a "last date to send" and when adding the email to the stream, go ahead and schedule a batch campaign in the webinar's program. "Not sent email (Webinar Invite)" > run on "last date". This will not send to anyone who received it through the stream, but in case they hadn't gotten it through the engagement program it would ensure sure that they received it.

Your post brings up a specific concern, how to manage long-term nurturing with new, now content. I consider everything we do to be fair game for nurturing content. If it isn't good enough to be made into a nurturing email why bother creating it? So definitely big research papers/benchmarks/etc become nurturing emails.

As for webinars I would run the webinar normally through the webinar program. Then for the engagement email I'd create a smart campaign in the webinar program, batch, that looks for leads who didn't register for the webinar, and sends an engagement email to them offering them the on-demand link to watch the webinar. 

Events are a bit "on their own" as well. They typically have a targeted list of invitees. The followup emails are only sent to typically further targeted attendee/visitor lists. I leave them as their own thing. 

Hi Cheryl,

Both Adam and Philip make great points. To keep it simple and to call out a few things:

1) You could also use your one-off campaign content in Engagement Programs. If you're using the exact same e-mail across both of these campaigns, if a lead has received that content before, he/she will not receive it again as a part of an Engagement program

2) You can also set constraints on when you'd like a certain piece of content be available when you use it in an Engagement Program (example: you don't want to send out a webinar invitation after the webinar is already over).

At a high level, while you go want to have a general sense for when you're going live w/ one-off campaigns and when someone would receive a piece of content through an engagement program, it's alright to have some overlap in that you could reuse some of your content from one-off campaigns in engagement programs.

Hope this helps. Thanks!!