One question we get asked a lot at Marketing Automation Canada is “Why wouldn’t we just use smart campaigns to nurture leads? They’re more flexible than engagement campaigns and less complex to build out”.
It’s a fair question, and in some circumstances, smart campaigns are a good way to go, but they’re not always the best choice, and it’s a myth that they are more flexible and less complex to build, especially when you start accounting for scale.
The reasons engagement campaigns often have an advantage over smart campaign drip nurtures can’t easily be summed up in a few words, so let’s take a deeper dive!
A Superior Organizational Structure for Scale and Extensibility
While a basic engagement program with emails in the associated streams is somewhat flexible, the real heavy hitter when it comes to extensibility is the ability to use programs in streams. This allows for additional actions along with sending your email and is useful for stream management, data updates, and lead management.
In our opinion, this is the main reason engagement programs can be a better choice, but there’s much more to it. As you read on, you’ll see what we mean.
Cadence Vs. Wait Steps
Engagement programs control email deployment times based on a consistent cadence, whereas smart campaigns use the more flexible wait steps.
Wait steps, for all their flexibility, create issues. First, they make it difficult to pin down exactly where leads are in your journey. For example, leads caught in a 3 day wait step could be 1 day though the period or 2.5 days though the period, and you’d have no way of easily knowing and/or identifying these leads.
Second, you can’t pause leads in wait steps. If you deactivate the campaign, the leads will continue though the journey as though it’s active. Instead, you have to manually remove the leads from the flow, and re-adding those leads at their proper location in the flow would be unnecessarily complex and difficult.
Engagement programs on the other hand make it easy to see exactly where leads are in your journey, exactly when they will receive their next email, and allow you to easily pause/reactivate without disruption.
This is especially important when it comes to accuracy in reporting based on period costs. Obviously you always want to be as accurate as possible when it comes to reporting, but at Marketo Automation Canada we know this is especially important when attributing real dollars to your marketing efforts.
Having an exact date to report around, and knowing the exact location of leads in your journey provides the most accurate reports for determining ROI.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch with us today!
Exhausted Status
“Exhausted” is a status unique to engagement programs used to identify leads who have completed a given nurture stream. While it’s true you could identify leads who have completed a journey in a smart campaign, it would require building out smart lists with rules that could become more complex as your instance scales.
Engagement streams can show you the same data at a glance, and provide a single status that gives superior control and accuracy. This goes back to our initial point that engagement programs provide a superior organizational structure that is not only convenient but also essential to scaling!
Adding Content to your Nurture
No complicated workflows or configurations are necessary when you want to add new content to any position in your engagement program nurture. Simply drop it in the stream and you’re done! You know everyone exhausted in the stream will get the new content without the additional configurations a smart campaign drip would require.
Membership Assignment
Smart campaign drip nurtures only allow you to assign membership status based on the channel for which the associated program was created. Engagement programs on the other hand can include programs based on a variety of channels, so once again we come back to the superior organizational structure of engagement programs.
Period Costs
Once again, in the spirit of keeping organized and efficient, wouldn’t you rather assign and report on period cost in one place? If you’re repurposing content from a variety of programs into a smart campaign, and each has it’s own period cost, you’re just making things harder on yourself for the initial setup, and for analysis in the future! With engagement programs, you can assign the period cost to the engagement program and be done with it.
The Engagement Program Dashboard
This dashboard contains a variety of tools to help you monitor and assess your engagement program performance that smart campaigns don’t have. The dashboard relies on a unique metric used only with engagement programs that has many potential uses. Here’s a break down of this unique dashboard and the superiority it can provides over smart campaign drips.
Exhaustion Reporting Tool
Just as the exhausted status is unique to engagement programs, so too is this helpful tool for tracking leads as they approach, and decay in, an exhausted status. Smart campaign drips can’t show you at a glance where leads are in your nurture, or how many are at a given stage in the nurture. In a smart campaign you could still gather this information but with a lesser degree of accuracy, and it would take a lot more time and effort. Especially when working with multiple nurtures! The exhaustion reporting tool on the dashboard allows you to quickly filter based on stream to gather this information.
Exhaustion Reporting Tool
Just as the exhausted status is unique to engagement programs, so too is this helpful tool for tracking leads as they approach, and decay in, an exhausted status. Smart campaign drips can’t show you at a glance where leads are in your nurture, or how many are at a given stage in the nurture. In a smart campaign you could still gather this information but with a lesser degree of accuracy, and it would take a lot more time and effort. Especially when working with multiple nurtures! The exhaustion reporting tool on the dashboard allows you to quickly filter based on stream to gather this information.
Engagement Program Reports
Rather than configuring and digging through custom reports for all your smart campaign drips, you can easily get an all up report for in your engagement programs broken out by stream, that also includes the engagement score metric. Useful!
As you can see, engagement programs are powerful. They provide a lot of benefits and efficiencies that are lost when using smart campaign drips. The next time you’re building out a nurture, consider the benefits an engagement program could provide!
