Email Marketing and Marketo’s Engagement Program

Using email in your marketing strategy can lead to powerful impact. As your leads come into Marketo, it’s nice to have a way to continue the conversation and build up the trust of your company. You can do this by creating nurture programs with Marketo’s Engagement Program. Marketo simplifies the process with dynamic features.

With Marketo’s Engagement Program, you can create nurtures that drive your prospects to the next stage of your funnel. Before this function was in place, you had to link many programs together to accomplish the same effect. This led to many complications. In the meantime, building out a nurture program required a lot of experience on the platform. Now, with the Engagement Program, we can use drag-and-drop features along with embedded flows and smart lists in one application. The process of building out your nurturing programs is seamless, with no need for a lot of experience on the Marketo platform.

Let’s take a look at why email marketing is essential to have in your marketing plans, as well as how Marketo’s Engagement Program can help your execution processes.

The Power of Email Marketing

We can send many types of emails to our prospects. Some email types are operational, drip, and nurture. The goals of your campaign should guide which type of emails to send. For example:

1. Operational emails are great if you’re using a lead magnet to collect prospects’ information or complete sales. These emails serve a couple of different purposes: One is to thank the person for filling out the form or completing a transaction, and the other is to verify the email provided.
2. Drip emails are for time-sensitive campaigns, like webinars and tradeshows. A drip is a simple way to have a short conversation with your prospects about the topic at hand.
3. Nurture emails are a series of emails that drive the prospects through the funnel while keeping them engaged with your business. We see this most often with newsletters, and a combination of relevant marketing emails tied to sales emails over time.

Building a good email strategy into your campaign can yield great results. According to Mailchimp, we see an average 21 percent open rate and a 2 percent click rate across all industries. We know that strategy is important, as overloading your audience with daily emails can lead to a high unsubscribe rate. That said, sending a simple weekly email or monthly newsletter can be beneficial to keeping your audience engaged with your products or services.

Marketo’s Engagement Program

Marketo’s Engagement Program allows you to do sophisticated nurturing easily. The program is built out using streams. These streams enable you to add your content and create flow rules to set the criteria determining which prospects will receive the emails. For example, if you have the flow criteria set for when someone engages with an email, you can move them over to another stream that has emails dedicated to the next stage of the funnel. You can create engaging email templates in the template library and each email under the program itself to keep everything organized and in one place. From there, you can drag and drop the emails you created into the engagement streams.

With the content and program in place, identify how the leads will enter the nurture sequence. I like to set up a gatekeeper so the prospects must flow through specific requirements before being added to the email program. Specifications can be as simple as filling out a form and receiving a thank you email to make sure they’ve provided a valid email address. At the top of each stream, you can set the days and times you would like the emails to go out. Setting the automation will put your nurturing on autopilot, allowing it to work in the background while you spend your time acquiring new leads to keep the machine filled.

A couple of things to keep in mind before pushing the go button:

1. Make sure the emails in your program have approved status. If not approved, the program will skip over them and deliver the ones that are.
2. If you use the same email in different streams, when a lead opens one and is set to go into the next stream, make sure they will not receive the same email again.
3. Always double-check the flow steps and email copy/links. It’s embarrassing to have hiccups in front of a broad audience, so it’s always good to get another pair of eyes on the setup.

Email marketing can be a powerful tool, and when done right, it leads to great success. Marketo’s Engagement Program helps marketers create nurture campaigns with ease.

Marketo makes your email marketing process as intuitive as possible, but you may still run into complications. If you need help setting up your nurture program for success, we’re here to help. Happy marketing!

Originally published at www.smartbugmedia.com.