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Transcript

All right, we will go ahead and get started now that we’re a minute in. So thank you so much everybody for joining us today for our Marketo Champion Deep Dive series and this is all about email nurturers. We have some amazing champions to walk through this topic with us today and let’s take a quick look at the agenda. So we’re going to start off with introductions and from there we’re going to move into a discussion on tenants. So this is basically our top 10 tips to keep in mind when you’re designing and building out email nurturers. And then we’re going to jump into our subject matter expert examples where our champions are going to walk you through email engagement programs from start to finish and even give you some ideas on how to get the most out of these features from reporting all the way down to A-B testing. And we have a lot of content to go over today so we’ll try to save time for Q&A at the end. You can type in any questions throughout the presentation into the Q&A box and we will record them. This session will be recorded and the deck will be provided through the Deep Dive mug bevy so please make sure you’re signed up to that mug group so you can get the notifications. If we do not get to your question we will follow up after this for any questions that go unanswered but additionally if you have a burning question there is a Champion Office Hours coming up in May that one of our speakers, Lauren, is actually on so you can always stop there to answer additional questions if we don’t have one of these running. And they are open every single month and the link will be at the very end of this deck so if you download it you’ll have the link right there ready to go. And with that my name is Karissa Russell. I am from McGraw-Hill and I’m a Senior Marketing Operations Analyst and I’m here today hosting these amazing champs. So Lauren you want to kick it off? Sure, thank you so much Karissa. Welcome everybody. So great to see so many people here today to talk about Nurture with us. I’m Lauren McCormick. I am the VP of Consulting on Andy’s team over at Revenue Pulse and we’re delighted to be with you today. Feel free to connect with all of us on LinkedIn and let’s start a conversation I think beyond today’s presentation. Just the spirit of the conversation today will be around Nurture but we’re here for anything that you might need some help with. But yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having us Karissa. Awesome. Well I’m Melissa Day. I am the Revenue Enablement and Digital Automation Leader at the Chemours company. I’ve been there for almost six years now and I’ve served a lot of different roles from marketing automation consultant to digital marketing manager and now really focused on how do we take the marketing operation work that we do and connect it to bottom line revenue and growth. It’ll be no surprise to most of you on the line that we use engagement programs in Marketo to do a lot of that every day. And I am Andy Caron. I’m the SVP of Consulting at Revenue Pulse and I remember when engagement programs were first released in Marketo and that becoming a channel and program type that could be used is one of my favorite topics. I’m really excited to be here today to talk through different ways that you can think about the architecture of your Nurture programs and how they can be leveraged to keep the conversation going when you don’t necessarily have the time to lift each little conversation uniquely. It looks like Karissa thanks for moving ahead to the top tips and tenets. You’re muted but I know what you’re saying is that these are the top tips and tenets. Moving on, these are our top tips and tenets for developing an email nurture. These are the top 10 principles that we thought were very important to keep in mind when strategizing and building out email engagement programs. Are there any of these that really stick out to you guys that tie into those examples that you are going to walk us through? Lauren do you want to start? Sure, I’d be happy to. Setting goals for Nurture. I think one of the most often misused terms when it comes to marketing, automation, email marketing in general is nurture. How many of you in the audience have had a manager or a team member that’s super well intended approach you and say, hey, we need nurtures. Okay, what does that mean? We need to send emails. That’s different. I think articulating what your goals are for success around the nurtures and who you intend these nurtures for, those first two tenets are super critical. Everybody knows they need to and should nurture but identifying what the intended outcome like the journey you want to take the buyer on, the prospect on, the customer even on is super critical. They’re going to be at a starting point and throughout the course of your communications, they should know something, feel something, want something, be concerned about something, be considering something that maybe they weren’t at the beginning of the journey. The goals could be around education. The goals could be around retention. The goals could be around simple conversion in the platform from one lead stage to another, but be clear about what the purpose is. Is this intended to push people deeper into the funnel to increase their lead velocity across your funnel stages? Who are you talking to? I see a lot of people that when they first start out in nurture, they’re like, okay, cool. Well, it’s not just email, wait, step, email. I have an idea of what I want to talk about and here’s the conversation I want to start, but then they send it to the whole database. The real power, I think, of marketing automation is when we use it as a vehicle for a one to many conversation. You’re sending to a large audience, but it feels one to one. In today’s world, more so now than ever, personalization is going to become table stakes. If it hasn’t already been in your organization, an initiative to hyper focus your content on your audience, then when you’re thinking about how you design your nurture, this is the perfect time to get Chris on who you’re talking to, climb inside what it looks like from their desk and make sure what you’re saying is segmented to be appealing and to deliver the right kind of experience aligned with the goals that you’ve outlined for your nurture. Yeah, those are the first couple. I’ll pass it over to you, Melissa, maybe to talk about the next couple. Yeah, because that is the, that was so perfect. You were talking about personalization and how critical that’s becoming, but I think another really interesting point, and I don’t think you’ll go to a single deep dive session or a mug meeting or anything and not hear the term, set it and forget it. And in this case, it’s definitely don’t set it and forget it. You can go out of your way to personalize and you can really challenge yourself to create content and just speak to your audience in a way that you do think is going to push them towards those goals that you set. But there are so many capabilities available from reporting capabilities available in Marketo and AB testing capabilities. So many features that you can take advantage of to not just assume what’s working or what good personalization looks like, or are you personalizing enough content or the right content? Are you driving, is your messaging strategy driving the people that you’re emailing towards their goals? I think those, the tenants that stick out to me are to use all of the reporting available. So don’t limit yourself to just the engagement program dashboard or just the email report itself, email performance report, but take a look at the whole school of reports that are available to really see what’s working, what’s not working. Monitor the engagement to find opportunities to optimize. Don’t think that because you set something up once, even something that takes a little bit more time and complexity as an engagement program, it is still up for grabs once you launch it. You can always go back and make changes if you feel like there’s an opportunity to really improve that customer experience or to improve the automation that you’re building in. I think for me, the two that I’ll sort of focus on are the put the right content in the right order and the keep it short and sweet. So for me, the right order and the right content is the difference between success and if not failure, then certainly not success that is as significant. When I first built my very, very first nurture out, I actually took the time to go through because I was thinking about this and time, the amount of time it would take a lead or someone, anybody to read the content that I was going to be putting into my nurture. Was it an investment of their time that took 30 seconds, two minutes, five minutes, 50 minutes? What did that mean for the ask that we were giving them? Because I wasn’t going to put content that was a recording of a webinar and took 45 or 50 minutes of their time in my first stream where I was just trying to get them to actually trust us and start to buy in and wanting to listen and engage with our content because that ask is too big for where they are with their demonstrated level of interest or commitment. So I think thinking about your buying stages or another methodology of where their score is or other things to gauge the type of content you’re sending is really important because if the ask is too big, they’re going to opt out before you even had a chance to give them value with being part of that nurture. They gave you their contact information. They said, yeah, email me. Sure. I want to get more content. But then if you’re throwing heavy stuff over the fence, they’re not ready to catch. They’re going to walk away. And then on that, the keep it short and sweet piece, I think is really important, especially in nurture emails. You’re there to get them to pick up this one piece of content and to look at that one piece. Three sentences, a CTA and I’m out. I just want to say, here’s the thing. Here’s why it potentially matters to you. And here’s what you’re going to get out of it. Bye bye. Right? Because if that doesn’t get them continuing to explain it and try to tease it out, probably isn’t going to. If the email takes longer to read than the content itself, definitely no. And so the more upfront I can be about why you’re getting this email and why we think it matters to you and that you’ll want to receive it and then just give them the content, I think the better off the outcome is. I think that’s a great point, Andy. To kind of double click there a bit, early on in my career, I was a journalist and an editor. And one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was the words that you cut matter more than the words that you keep. Keep the machete sharp. You have a limited amount of bandwidth that you’re going to even get from attention from your audience. So instead of adding flourishes that distract from the overall call to action or your salient point, cut out the extra words every chance you get. It’s an interesting exercise. Even if you take an internal email that you’ve sent to your colleagues recently, look at what you could have left out and think about the impact of what remains when you edit down for brevity. Right? So great point there. I’ll grab the oversaturation point. So how many of you right now are thinking about database fatigue? Is list fatigue something that you’re even considering? Or are you operating under internal norms or just habit, perhaps just good old fashioned habit where you’re like, oh, we send emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 a.m. Pacific. And that’s what we do. That’s our thing. That’s our jam. They don’t like it. They can unsubscribe. And hey, presto. That’s the plan. If you’re not looking at your metrics to see if you’re oversaturating well-intended people, maybe they’re going to your preference center and saying for the love, please don’t ever send me your newsletters. I think you’re great. I want product updates. But these weekly newsletters that don’t deliver value are polluting my inbox. You can look at the feedback that you’re getting from your casts even within the engagement platform and it’ll give you some insight around frequency. And I think that’s something not to be left out of optimization. So think about whether or not you might be more effective if you said less. So definitely want to call those two out. Melissa, that’s a great point. I think there’s only something to be said about saying less, sending less often. Right. I mean, I think there’s an attitude that you want to start to develop in your audience where they are hoping to hear from you and wanting to hear from you, whether they realize it or not. And they’re more eager to want to open that message from you because they have a history of finding value and because they’re not oversaturated with content. They’re not sick and tired of seeing your email in their inbox. And there are a couple of strong ways to do that. Things that we’ve already talked about, like keeping the message short and sweet, making sure that you’re optimizing with personalization, making sure you’re keeping it really simple with one CTA and you’re getting direct to the point. I think though, and we’re getting some questions already about how do you manage nurtures at scale? How do you manage enrollment into certain streams? And then out of those streams, when do you know when the right time is to switch someone’s content that they’re receiving? That is such a specific question that you can completely make those solutions up and create the right answer on a case by case basis. But I think part of the functionality that Marketo gives you in enrollment and pulling someone out of a nurture, really finding a way to manage keeping people where they are the most engaged, recognizing when you’re losing that engagement, if you have the opportunity to opt them into alternate messaging to test and see, is this going to work better? Are we seeing that if maybe they’re fatigued from product focused messaging and industry focused message is still going to keep them engaged and interested, maybe at a cadence that’s a little bit longer apart where we can still see that engagement, but people aren’t bored of what it is that we’re trying to share.

That’s great feedback. And I think inferred interest is so valuable. Right. So you can look at web behavior to determine what care you’re putting on the stick. Right. And if they change their interest over time, recategorize their inferred interest based on their web behavior. Right. And you can bake that into your nurture strategy to to help them, because as they get more familiar with your brand, their appetite for your content is going to change. Right. At first, they need to know what’s an RP.

Right. But maybe later they’re like, well, what’s the other brands that RP works with? You know, who are my peers in the industry that that trust RP with their their marketing strategy and their rev op strategy? Cool. And then maybe like a cost calculator, like an evaluation step comes later in the funnel. But the only way to know if you’re actually synchronized with the appetite is to look at not just the positive metrics, like say, hey, we upped our open rate by five percent by swapping out our subject line. It’s by looking at the negative feedback, too. Like if you’re getting crickets and people aren’t picking up what you’re putting down, you got to you got to change it up and you got to think about, are we talking about ourselves too much? Like are delivering value to this inbox? Are we not a welcome guest? Like there are a couple of communications, like the marketing dive email from marketing millennials and the Clearbit newsletter that when it shows up in my inbox, I’m like, oh, heck yeah, because I know I’m going to enjoy it or I know I’m going to find something interesting or valuable or new and newsworthy, like something I can talk to my husband over at dinner or something that I can talk to a colleague about. That’s that’s game changing. But if you’re showing up and you’re just checking the box of I have an email, it was approved by my co-workers, my content team, my legal team and my sales team all said this is a good email. That’s cool. What is what is your audience tell you about the content? That you’re delivering? Is it changing their hearts and minds? Is it improving the way they do business? And if not, the data is going to be the first thing to tell you that, you know, that is such a great point. And that relevance is so important, I think, to just understanding where we have people joining with all different types of challenges and problems and complexities and different size scale to write. I’m sure there are those of you on the line that are just looking to launch your very first single engagement program. And it could be a very basic implementation that still offers such a strong qualification model to your lead management platform, if that’s your goal or it’s just getting your customers engaged or bringing your prospects along to learn more about your brand. But I know that there are others on the line who are dealing with much larger scale programs where, myself included, at Comorz, we have four different business units that all have brands embedded underneath. We’re supporting different market application spaces. Our value chain is huge. So we talk to the people who buy our product, but we also talk to the people who buy our product from the people who buy our product from the people who buy our product from us. And it’s like Kevin Bacon, six degrees removed. Right. So there are all sorts of different ways that we like to talk to people. And I think one of the critical pieces is having a centralized nurture strategy and not letting yourself get too far away from having individual nurture programs that have localized enrollment rules or pause rules. If you know at the core of all of your programs who is receiving what messaging and why, you can build some smart lists as ways to kind of check in and say someone enrolled in too many places. You can set up recurring alerts just to see if you’re having that overlap and if that’s an automation case that you really need to dig into deeper. And to Lauren’s point, look at the data to be able to see if anyone’s oversaturated or under-saturated.

It’s really interesting because it wasn’t always this way in Marketo. These are a lot of new capabilities that we could take advantage of. And I think, Lauren, you have some of the history of what it used to be like in Marketo and how grateful I personally am to have some of the new functionality with engagement programs today to let us scale it out the way that we can. Great segue. Thanks for the layup there. Appreciate it, Melissa. So to acknowledge and extend an understanding to the audience, we know some of you joining us today are brand new to Marketo and Ă۶ąĘÓƵ Marketo engaged. So welcome. And one of our primary objectives today is to help demystify, unpack and make accessible what nurture is and why does it matter and how do you get started? Some of my illustrious colleagues here today are going to be taking the more advanced segments of the crew down some intense and awesome pivots and turns. But to get us started, let’s just take a look at what we mean by nurture. And this kind of touches a little bit on my earlier points.

A nurturer is not batch and blast, right? At least not in the way that we’re defining it today. It’s not a drip. We’re not grabbing three emails. Hobbling them together and putting a wait step in between and saying, hey, presto, nurture and sending it to everybody that hasn’t unsubscribed from our communications. That’s not what we’re thinking about doing. What we’re thinking about doing is aligning our automated efforts. Right. And the whole purpose of marketing automation, I think people forget, is for it to do the heavy lifting for us in the background. Right. So we shouldn’t be constantly under the hood. And especially if you’re new, I think this is an easy pitfall to fall into. We shouldn’t be under the hood delivering campaigns under duress because people have requested them trying to scurry and meet everybody’s demands internally for product messaging and newsletters and events. I mean, all of those things are important and need to be promoted. But at the end of the day, what we’re doing here is setting up a lot of the important salient conversations that are going to drive revenue for our business by educating our audiences, whether they’re customers or prospects, around what matters most about our value proposition of business. Right. How we’re going to change their lives, how we’re going to make their work easier, how we’re going to help them stay gainfully employed in an unpredictable job market, how we’re going to help their company grow and thrive. Right. Those are the salient messages, not necessarily the product release notes sent to all random prospects in every corner of the globe. We need to think more about the most important conversations and then we build those conversations to work in the background while we level up and out of platform, accomplishing requests, but also thinking about innovation. Right. So you’re building your key core conversations and you can divide up your audiences.

And that’s the most important pivot, I think, right, is that the nurture is going to have streams. So the engagement module, engagement programs have a lexicon all their own, just like many things in Marketo, you’ll find that half the battle is learning the terminology. And the first thing that I want to share with you is if you think about it, all under the analogy of fishing, you’re going to be set up pretty well to understand what’s happening here. And the nurture engagement module allows for you to have different streams. And if you think about the streams from like a fly fishing sort of standpoint, or even just a standard Zebco rod, whatever you’re working with is what you got today. Right. Sometimes when you go to a stream, it’s not stocked. There’s no fish, right? It’s empty.

And in other streams, you might find tons of trout. In other streams, you might find tons of salmon. But the question is, what kind of bait do you use in those streams? Right. So when you start thinking about your nurture, start narrowing down audiences, refine them by persona, refine them by demand funnel stage, refine them by product. Right. But start refining them into separate streams where they can swim on a journey through the content, the bait that you’re putting in front of them. Okay. So when you’re pivoting, you start thinking about content streams and distinct audiences.

I know it’s intimidating and daunting because you’re like, my boss just told me to put together a nurture, Lauren. Right. Like, please stop making me over architect here. But what you’re building, if it’s truly effective, and once you refine it to be effective, which it will, it’s going to do heavy lifting for you from an ROI standpoint in the background as you’re executing on other daily meetings and initiatives and innovation teams. So what you’re building is super important infrastructure. And if you’re confused on where to start carving up your audience, think around demographics, think around firmographics. Company size can even be a simple way to slice like SMB, mid-market, enterprise, if you’re B2B. And then behavior, like I was saying earlier. So I built back in the stone age since I’ve been with Marketo since 2011. I’m allowed to say that.

I built a nurture once for a business that had 12 business units that were all acquired from mergers and acquisitions, and all were completely disparate. And their main task at hand was to try and figure out how in the heck do I set up nurtures for people that have nothing in common. And we built it on inferred interest. If they spent time on any particular brands, divisions, landing pages, or websites, we knew that they were probably more interested in security than mainframe. So that’s a simple division you can make just based on behavior and align to your buyer’s journey. Think about the mind shift and the journey you want to take them on. If you’re real fancy, measure lead velocity and think about increasing speed through the funnel.

Okay.

So back in the stone age, what did it look like? We had traffic campaigns.

They were brutal. This is just a little sneak peek under the hood.

And I think Marketo realized that building structure this robust was cumbersome, unrealistic. It made a system debt that was super complex and just processing how to add people into the streams, so to speak, that were appropriate for them and managing the assignment of stages and the wait steps was super prohibitive. And so Ă۶ąĘÓƵ wanted to democratize the engagement module. So if indeed you do feel like the engagement program module is too complex, I would like to speak with a little historical perspective around the fact that what we have now is much more usable. You just kind of have to get into the lexicon. And speaking of the lexicon, let’s take a peek at that.

There’s terminology here that you need to know.

The stream, as I mentioned before, it’s prioritized content. So it’s an email stream, essentially. Or you can think about it in a couple of different complex ways when you get more advanced. But to start, it’s your content stream.

You can add emails and programs. Programs can be nested within your engagement programs. We’ll get to that a little bit later.

Back on the fishing theme, a cast. Don’t be intimidated by the terminology. A cast is just simply like throwing your hook into the water.

When you send out an email or have a program deploy, that’s your cast. So you’re casting into the stream. Each of the casts is determined by a stream cadence, at least from the built-in out-of-the-box functionality you can set to the stream cadence, where you pick how frequently you’re going to send out your cast. So for instance, in this example, they’re looking to set up weekly every two weeks on a Tuesday at 1130 CET. And once you’re done fishing at the end of the day, if it’s been a long day out in the hot sun, maybe with a couple beverages, you’re exhausted. Right? This is not exhaustion around the marketer. This is exhaustion around your audience. So when we hear in the engagement program the terminology of being exhausted, that’s a person in your program that’s gone through all the content that you’ve made available to them.

And then here’s a couple more terms to know. The next slide.

I think we can figure out what the audience is. Engagement would be open, click. Look at opens kind of dubiously and clicks a little bit more dubiously with security software these days. But know that you’re still comparing apples to apples within your database. So it still is a relevant measure. Your streams, as we talked about earlier, are your content.

Your cast is the send. Your cadence is your frequency. There are transition rules where you can move people in and through and from one stream to the other. So kind of like we talked about earlier, if you’re nurturing to the funnel and someone proceeds from one funnel stage to another, you can use transition rules to push them into another stream.

Program status lets you know about behaviors and responses.

You can pause people in the nurture. That’s one of the greatest things about the engagement program that was so difficult to do when we had our traffic cops back in the day is that if someone comes to you in your department and says, hey, I need to slide in an invite for a webinar to this particular audience or I have a newsletter coming out, you’re able to easily shift around your content and slide in new pieces of content or even pause content completely. And like we talked about, exhausted means they’ve gotten all the content you have available. The engagement programs make it super easy to see how many people fall into that category.

And then just a quick glance and then I’ll turn it over to my peers. At the reporting, it’s proprietary for the engagement module.

It offers up a proprietary kind of hybrid matrix that offers up based on interactions and a little bit of Marketo secret sauce around engagement for each of your assets. This is super handy, right? So you can look at your assets and how they’re performing within your program to see at the asset level which are getting the best engagement across the board. Don’t feel like this is a zero to 100 grade scale like you had in school. I never see 100. I don’t even see 90s or 80s, right? So benchmark against yourself as you always should. But anything, you know, 40s, 50s, 60s, that’s a passing grade here. So as you can see too, you’ll also see the amount of time that’s going to pass between sends so you can see when your next cast is going out. You can also see how many people on your list are exhausted.

Great, cool. So a couple of few tips for success. There is a cap, 100 active engagement programs at a time.

You can customize the sends to be in your local time zones for your audiences. As I mentioned before, you can nest programs, default programs even to provide additional flexibility and latitude when you’re building your architecture. You can change up your cadence nurture to pause or you can leave it normal. And when you’re exhausted leads start to aggregate, put them in a list, right? Keep those people all in one handy place so that you know that you’ve taken them on the journey. They’ve gone with you for the ride.

But that you’re planning an off-ramp for them so they have a place to go after they ride down the highway with you, right? So on-ramps and off-ramps and managing how you build that infrastructure will be addressed by my awesome peers and with that I shall turn it over to them.

All right, so let’s dig into the mechanics here. So before you get started, I think it’s really important to actually make sure you have the pieces that you’ll need going into it. Otherwise, your timeline for architecting and deploying the nurture is going to be extended as you realize you’re missing pieces. You have to go back and get those. So the first thing I recommend doing is creating a content inventory. Now, if you have a lot of content, you don’t necessarily need to inventory all of it. But I think it’s important to understand what content you have that’s going into your nurture and where potentially you’re looking at slotting it. Early, late, it’s across the board, it can go everywhere, etc.

To think through what your audience will be and how they’re going to progress through that content, right? And then finally, what are your KPIs or maybe even OKRs that ladder up around what success looks like for this nurture or nurtures at large if you’re kind of thinking about this holistically. So to create an engagement program, there are a couple different places you can click to do this and pardon the old interface here. Some of these are a little bit older graphics, but you’ll get the gist in the system. So first, you create the program, you decide if you’re going to sync this to your SFDC campaign. So if you are syncing the program over, you can sync it obviously at the program level. You may choose not to sync it since this is actually in most cases an outbound interaction. So you may only pass over just the actual successes, the engagement, or you may not pass anything right over to SFDC. You want to make sure you go in and turn the program off. I always say if you’re doing repairs on your car, you’re not going to leave the key in the ignition or the car running because bad things could happen. So the first thing you want to do is set your program to office. The program status shows here so that that way as you’re building, if you accidentally have everything turned on and it hits go and you’re not ready, you’re not sending out emails to people that you didn’t intend to actually have go out yet. And then you also want to determine if you’re going to use the notifications here. So notifications essentially ping you in the top bar to tell you, hey, you have this many people exhausted or you’re at this level of exhaustion for this. It often does a person by person so-and-so’s exhausted, so-and-so’s exhausted, which if you’re running at a smaller scale can be useful, but larger scale maybe you don’t want to clutter your notifications with that. I like to leave them off. You’re going to create streams. You’re going to create smart campaigns for your statuses and I’m also going to stay for your stream transitions. So the transition rules exist in the architecture of the streams, but you can also use a smart campaign to do it. I personally find that they’re a little bit less black box and more controllable as smart campaigns. So that’s what I advocate for. You’re going to add your content and you’re going to set your cadences. So those four things sound really simple and straightforward and they kind of are, but they’re also not. So let’s dig into what some of the nuances of those look like that you need to think about. So the first thing is let’s talk about content. So the nurture programs are super nifty in that you can add content across multiple streams and that email or content, if you’re using a single asset, will only be sent once. So this gives you confidence to use that content in multiple places if it’s relevant across the various parts of their journey and know that the nurture program is not going to continue to bombard them with that same piece of content. It’s going to go once and then they’re not going to get it again. So emails can be added by using the little plus and then add to stream functionality. So this is the basic you built out 10 emails. They’re inside your nurture program, add, happy, end of story, done. Now we’re going to talk about other ways to add content. So as Lauren mentioned, you can put nested programs inside your nurture. So you can either build nested programs inside the engagement program itself, or you can have them built elsewhere. But what this allows you to do is have a sub program that tracks just that one email and uses automation to send the email. This allows you to potentially differentiate different emails based on certain things, or to have an additional wait step in there if you want to pause it, all kinds of different things in here. But the beauty of this is that you can put the email in there and have it deliver and it will deliver just as the other emails deliver, but it provides some insurance policies. First, if you change out your emails because you rebranded and you had to redo everything on a new template, this will future proof you because it’s sending based on members of the program and not the specific asset itself. So it saves you from future engineering. It also provides you with potentially some additional insights at a click on who your opens, clicks, et cetera, might be from a program membership level. And it also allows you to exclude additional people maybe from the send. If there’s something about like, I only want a subset of people in this nurture to get this one email, those types of things, you can layer that in here. So this again is done by hitting that plus and adding it, but instead of adding the email asset, you’re going to add a program. Okay. So we can go to the…

The layer beyond this is the idea of a nurture library. So this would be a standalone program, potentially an engagement program or a default that houses all of your nested content programs. But from this, it allows you to pull them into two nurture, 10 nurture, 100 nurture programs, and know that you can track how that content is doing at large across the entirety of your inventory of nurture programs. And also if you have a scenario where you’re using something, which I like to call a sorting hat because I’m a nerd, where you’re putting people in one program and then pulling them out and putting them in a different nurture program and pulling them out and kind of sorting them into different places at different times in their journey or based on what they’re currently potentially in a buyer stage for, what have you, that that content used across 100 programs will only be delivered once. So that that way you’re not tone deaf and continuing to send across multiple places. This also means that if you want to have that content tailored in three different ways for very different industries or very different roles, and you’re not using dynamic content to do that, that you can have three emails or 30 emails and different send campaigns in there, right? The smart campaign that’s associated with sending going to different programs, but it’s all contained in one place. So again, you’re still, have they been sent this? Yes, no. Where they sent the content, not the email. It allows you to track in that way. So there are different ways to think about how you add content is really at the end of the day, what we’re getting at here. And you can go as complex or as simple as you want, but think about future proofing and scaling and build accordingly. Any way you add this content, it’s still going to be treated in the same way. Did you put it in the top? You pour the leads in for the next cast. They hit the first thing that they haven’t received. They get that. They receive the first three things. They get the fourth thing, whatever that is. That architecture works with emails or with nested content. Let me go to the next. All right. You can also use champion challengers on existing emails to force a template change if you didn’t build like this. So if you’re in a scenario where you’re freaking out because you’re going to rebrand and it’s going to kill your nurturers, no. You can use an AB test essentially to force it to 100% deliver the B all the time and run your nurturers that way. So there’s always a way to figure out how to make your content continue to be evergreen as you’re going forward. Okay. So let’s talk about, once we’ve added the content, you can actually schedule availability. So this allows you to say this content is available for this amount of time or that amount of time or whatever the case may be. Maybe it’s forever. Maybe it’s for a year. Maybe it’s for two weeks. This future proves you having to remind yourself and put something on your calendar to go in and make it no longer available for casts.

When you retire content, you don’t want to remove it out of the stream. If it’s had audience, if it’s been sent out on a cast, you want to archive it instead because that’s going to retain the data from those casts and you want to keep it in there. Removing the email removes the data. For your cadences, in addition to considering how frequently you want to be sending out to your audience, you also want to think about holistically what the cadences mean with each other. So if there’s a chance of having multiple streams where someone’s moving downstream and qualifying to receive content in the next stream after certain actions, what does your cadence look like? Have you set it up so that someone could potentially receive an email on Tuesday morning at 9am, open that, engage with it, download content, get a score boost, move into stream two, and then receive another email at 9am on that same day because of the way that your cadences are scheduled. So thinking about what the impact of your stream cadences are, the frequency of those against each other, and when they’re scheduled. Are they all going out at the same time? Are you varying it as one happening later or earlier? Making sure that you’re not potentially putting yourself in a position to accidentally oversaturate audience because they engaged and scare them away is important when you’re thinking about the times that you’re going to be sending, in addition to optimizing for opens and clicks and so on and so forth based on date and time of day and those types of things day to day a week. Okay, so with your smart campaigns you can use these to add your membership. You can use these to change your program statuses. I like to follow a member sent, delivered, opened, clicked, engaged with CTA, bounce, unsubscribe status structure personally, but there are different statuses and structures that may work best for your organization or for the purpose of that specific nurture. So you may have several channels for nurture that have different statuses based on the outcomes that you’re looking for for success. But I always think of this as its core of ultimately actually being an email program where I’m outbound sending. And so the goal of that program is do they engage? And then the goal of the content programs is to track whether or not they digested that content specifically. All right, so to roll your content live, you want to make sure that you have your audience in the streams, that you’ve approved your content, that your cadences are live, and that the program status is turned on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people put their audience in, approve the content, send the cadence, and then they come back two hours after their first cast and nothing got sent because they hadn’t turned it on and they freak out. So those four things will get you to actually go, and the reverse of those will mean that you’re not sending. So if you expected something to send and something didn’t, check those four things because maybe you didn’t actually process in your audience or what have you. But that’s a very quick deep dive into the pieces I think that ultimately drive the Nurture engagement engine forward. That’s awesome. Thank you. I might have to print out all of your slides and hang them all over my office. They’re such good reminders, although I have never launched a Nurture and it not been on and freaked out. It’s never happened to me ever. Just kidding. I was thinking about how to talk about Nurture optimization and what really is capable beyond the basics that Lauren shared in some of the history and then the deep dive tricks and tips that Andy was sharing, how to manage Nurtures at scale, and all these different things to keep in mind. Something that I just think is so great about Marketo is the flexibility and the customization of what’s possible. There are so many features in Marketo and really it’s like building blocks. If you can find the right pieces to pair with other pieces, you can build something really, really unique. That to me is something that is so atypical from other marketing automation platforms. So I really wanted to dig into how we can use a functionality in Marketo that you may not always think of. So AB testing, I’m sure a lot of us have heard of and have tried and experimented with. Basically, if you don’t know, AB testing is the process of comparing two different variations of an element. So when we talk about this in marketing automation, it’s typically an AB test of a landing page or an email trying to see what version of one of those assets can drive further engagement. So on a landing page, it could be putting your form at the top or the bottom in an email. If I change the subject line, do I see a stronger open rate? More if I use an image or just text, do I see stronger click rates? In Marketo, we have an AB functionality that’s provided to us in email programs and landing page programs. There are other ways to experiment with AB testing within nurture programs, more on like an AB test across streams. And this could be as simple as an email subject line test. It could be testing the order of emails that they’re, the order in which they’re sent, excuse me, in a stream. It could be the length of content. I know we open this up talking about keeping things short and sweet, but sometimes we need more words and we need more calls to action to get our point across. Does that actually resonate? It could be a lot of different things. So in the example I want to share, we are running a subject line test in one of the first emails that we have in one of our streams, not just to tell if the personalization in the subject line in a, hopefully a more engaging subject line drives higher opens, but what we really want to see is if it drives engagement, stronger engagement through the full stream. So it’s not as simple as just one AB test. So how could we carry this out? Well, we decided to AB test the subject line of an email, and there’s a lot of different ways to do that. And I’ll show you the way that we ended up going with. We wanted to make sure that we randomized the participation here. So as opposed to trying to pick and choose who would be enrolled in which version of the test, we wanted to leverage Marketo’s random sample capability, and then follow metrics through the stream to be able to tell as people are getting through and exhausting these nurture streams, are we seeing higher engagement based on their initial engagement with email one? We also knew that we wanted to take a look at lead qualification rates to see if there was any impact in how many MQLs we were generating. So one way of doing this would be leveraging what Andy was sharing in Champion Challenger testing using the AB test functionality on the email itself. You do have to go in manually to determine the winner once you use this, and this would be basically used on the email alone that you were leveraging in your stream. So if we were only testing the subject line AB test, this would be a really great way for us to measure that result and then keep people moving through the stream. But in our case, we automated this a different way. So the automation we built, Karissa, if you go to the next slide, thanks.

We kept our smart list really simple. So we based this on the appropriate business that would be most relevant into the nurture. This is obviously an oversimplified version. We have a lot more criteria. But what I really wanted to show you on the next slide is the flow step that we created. So we use this random sample functionality in Marketo where it’s a choice in your constraint step there in your flow. If you haven’t tried this out before, it’s not a field that you would pick from. This is out of the box Marketo functionality that’s allowing you to randomly select a certain percentage. We wanted to do a 50-50 split. So we built the flow to say random sample is 50%. Put them on a list representing stream A versus the default stream B for the other 50%. There’s a lot of other ways you could do this. You could do three lists of 33-33-33. You could play it safe and have 75% go into a standard stream with only 25% test if you’re doing something really wild. But we kept this 50-50. Then we used the list membership to control our enrollment. Then it was really important to measure what happened after we saw that automation.

We created a lot of different reports, like I said in the beginning, around our tips and tenets. There’s a lot of different reports that are available to you, not just the dashboard report. That is so great and different from what we had in the beginning with those traffic cop nightmares that Lauren was sharing. But you also have the ability to measure email performance categorized by engagement stream or email link performance to see which links in your emails are driving strongest engagement. At Comorbidz, we have our own dashboard reporting as well that allows us to be able to connect our email metrics with our lead stage funnel so we can see things in that way. You can always export these reports into Excel and slice and dice them. There’s all different ways to manage your reporting and different reports can be used for different purposes. As we’re sharing our tips today, please don’t feel like one size fits all. There’s always benefit in looking at all of these different versions of your reports because a lot of the times you’ll find a piece of data that looks a little confusing, even if it’s enough to make you ask a question and go dig to find an answer. That’s the value for me in looking across these different reports. We saw just that in our result. After looking at the stream engagement, it didn’t surprise us that we saw a stronger engagement rate with the subject line that was personalized with a company name token as opposed to a more standardized subject line. You see that in the open rate at 52% versus 44%. But what we did see in the following email and email two, there wasn’t a much stronger engagement rate whether email one had that stronger open rate or not. That was our hypothesis that we were going to see continued strength in engagement over time if email one had a stronger engagement. We were surprised to see that the open rate wasn’t very impacted, but even more surprised to see that by the time we got to the end of our stream where we had a really high value CTA, so it was to reach out to our technical team, that’s where we saw the biggest change. In this random split 50-50 where we had higher engagement in email one, we saw higher click-through rate engagement in that final CTA to get in touch with our team. It was a really weird way to dig through the data to find this answer and it took all of the different reports available in Marketo to really get there. That’s awesome, Melissa. I think you guys shared really the highlight of engagement programs because yes, there is a lot of options when you’re building them out, but we have that rich data. We have that ability to use all of that to pivot and really be intelligent in the way that we implement these strategies. Thank you so much for giving us such a comprehensive overview of what email nurtures are. I wanted to round up here with the tenants. I know that we talked about them a lot at the beginning, but I think over the course of these examples, we’ve really driven some of these things home. We only have a couple minutes left. We did have a lot of questions and I think most of them got answered. Is there anything else that you ladies would like to share to wrap this up? Sure. Feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn. Reach out. Any kind of questions you have aren’t silly, no matter how far along you are on your journey with marketing automation, the CHAMP program, and this particular bunch of humans in particular, we’re here to help with anything you need. Be sure to reach out.

Yeah. I will tell you right now that some of the slides that I covered earlier, I had a few more slides and I spent a full hour talking about just those a couple of years ago. I think that my very first CHAMP webinar was on this. There’s a lot more to dig in and we did go through a lot to dig in today. If there are areas where you could use a double click on, there’s a lot of great content online. We’re always open to answering more questions or even hopping on a call and looking at you like something in your instance where you’re like, this is weird. What do we do here? Why is this like? I get those all the time. Always happy to puzzle through something with someone. I love a good mystery. That’s awesome. I would just share, don’t be afraid. I think the concept of a deep dive and signing up to join us here today, whether this is your first time learning about engagement programs or you’ve been doing them forever and you’re looking for that next level set of advice or just a showcase and other things that you can do, don’t stop trying things out. Always turn them off before you’re trialing things like Andy shared, but take the opportunity to get your hands dirty, to dig into the data, to go revisit emails that maybe you haven’t looked at in a while and take that time to just refresh what you have built.

Yeah, it’s excellent. I think we all become champions because we love to talk about it so much. Definitely don’t be a stranger. We also have a lot of Sweet Monthly Deep Dives coming up, so make sure you guys are signed up to the deep dive month so you get notifications of when we’re going to have another really comprehensive webinar like this. Again, you see up on the screen here, Champion Office Hours. We have the lovely Lauren repeating her performance for this one. If you have any of those questions after you stood around with all this great information on a nurture, join there. There’s a lot of great information you can get from Office Hours every month as well.

Thank you so much today, everyone, for joining to share your knowledge. Thank you for just being excited about nurtures, and I am really excited to see what you all create. Thank you, and we’ll see you guys on the next deep dive. Bye. Thanks.