My Favorite Marketo Workarounds Pt 2: Nurture Programs

I’m back with more of my favorite Marketo workarounds!

This time, we’re talking nurture programs.

Marketo’s Engagement program type is an easy way to set up a nurture, with little intervention needed. But we marketers tend to make things maybe a little more complicated than they should be. So with very detailed nurture rules, things can get sticky in engagement programs quickly. Here are some things I like to do to help streamline those complicated engagement programs.

Nurture Traffic Director

This is a program you set up on it’s own (using a default program type) to act as your traffic director for ALL your engagement programs. So rather than having to open up each individual nurture program to see the rules for each nurture, you can keep everything in one place. This also keeps nurture audiences a lot more clear so you can set up the right exclusions and inclusions for each nurture program.

‘Converted Outside Nurture’ campaigns

If you are going to promote a piece of content in your nurture, that you are promoting in other places, you might want to make sure you don’t send it to anyone who has seen it before. In order to make people skip emails promoting things they have already accessed, there are a few steps to take:

  1. Create a Default program channel called Nurture Email, and with all the statuses you want to track on each email.
  2. Make sure you add a status called “Exclude” or “Skip Email” that is not set as a success.
  3. Create programs for each email using your new program channel under the engagement program.
  4. Create a smart campaign in each email program with logic that says “if person is a member of X program” (program of asset you are promoting) and they are a member of the nurture and have not yet received this nurture email, then change their program status to “Exclude.”
  5. By adding the person as a member of this email program, the nurture will automatically know to skip that email, and will send them the next email in the cadence.
  6. You can set this campaign to run on a batch, a few hours before your scheduled nurture cast.

Why set it up like this instead of just adding a filter to the smart list in the “send” campaign? If you do that, you prevent people from receiving the email, and therefore they get stuck in the nurture and won’t move on to the next email. By adding them to the email program, they are able to be skipped by Marketo properly.

Interested in more Marketo workarounds? Check out my post on Email Throttling.