The ability to have a prospect repeat an Engagement Studio program is one of the best Winter ’19 Pardot feature releases. Now you can leverage the power of automation in exciting new ways.
Here are 3 ways to get creative with repeating Engagement Studio programs:
1) Create an automated annual renewal reminder.
Do you have an annual renewal cycle? Now, you can easily make an automated series of renewal emails for your customers.
Let’s assume you want to send reminders 90 days before expiration, 30 days before expiration, 7 days before expiration, and 1 day before expiration.
To pull this off, you need a custom date field, which tracks the date their subscription expires.
Make a Dynamic List for each of those time periods (4 total lists). For example, here is my dynamic list for the 90 day mark:
Now make an Engagement Studio Program, add all of your annual renewal lists to it, and set it to repeat every day for an unlimited number of times.
Create your Engagement Program to detect which list the prospect is on (the 90 day, 30 day, 7 day, or 1 day lists), and set it up to send an email template immediately.
And that’s it, you just made a repeating Engagement Studio Program!
If you want to take it even further, you could add additional lists, logic, and emails for prospects who are past-due on their renewals.
It’s important to ensure that the Dynamic Lists are set up so Prospects will only stay on them for a single day. Make sure everything you need to do with the Engagement Program can happen in one day.
If you want to add a step to look for an Email Link Click, then you will need to adjust the Dynamic List to allow prospects to stay in the list longer than one day.
2) Tailor content based on the number of times someone repeats a program.
If you’re using Dynamic Content today, you’re probably customizing content on prospect field values like “Industry,” “Job Title,” “Country,” or maybe even on the prospect score. With repeating programs, a new opportunity to further customize your content and get more value out of repeating programs is to create Dynamic Content variations based on the prospect’s number of program entries.
To do this, you would start by creating your email template and repeating Engagement Studio program. The first time you send an email to a prospect in a program, they will receive one message. When they meet criteria to repeat the program, you can send the second email with the same email template, but leverage Dynamic Content to send it with a slightly different message.
For example, the first time you send the email, it may say something like:
“I wanted to make sure you saw the great follow up white paper that will explain how to make this product work for your company. Click here to download it.”
But if someone were to receive the same email over and over… they would notice, right? And your emails would get flagged as a robot sending them!
Instead of sending the same email with the same wording over and over again, customize it with Pardot’s Dynamic Content feature. You can still use the same email template in the same (repeating) Engagement Studio Program, but send them a customized message like this:
“I know I mentioned the great follow up white paper that will explain how to make this product work for your company. Click here to download it.”
And if they still haven’t engaged with your content, maybe you send them a third customized message like this:
“I few months ago, I mentioned the great follow up white paper that will explain how to make this product work for your company. Click here to download it.”
Each email looks unique and customized – but behind the scenes it still only uses one email template!
Implementing this approach requires just a couple of things:
- A repeating Engagement Studio program
- The Dynamic Content feature from Pardot
- A Prospect Custom field of type ‘number’ – I called mine ‘Repeated Engagement‘ for this example.
The engagement program looks like this:
This is a very basic Engagement, but it does so much for you!
It starts by sending your nurturing email (which includes Dynamic Content). Once sent, the next step is an immediate action for Change Prospect Field Value.Here, you will choose to Increment your custom number field.
Once the prospect has been sent the email, the Change Prospect Field Value action is configured to add +1 to the custom field named Repeated Engagement.
This custom field is used by the Dynamic Content to determine which text to insert into the email template at send.
The Dynamic Content setup looks like this:
Note how the Variation is configured – the content in the grey box will be used when the value of the field named “Repeated Engagement” is greater than or equal to 1.
That little bit of Dynamic Content makes the whole email nurturing program go further. This setup allows you to:
- Re-use the exact same nurturing program and email template
- Send all of your emails automatically
- Personalize your email!
And we all know that personalization makes the difference.
Not only does this work with new repeating programs, but you could also probably find ways to update existing non-repeating programs and make them repeat with Dynamic Content, too.
3) Use repeating Engagement Studio programs for more than just email.
Fun fact – Engagement Studio does not need to send email. Leverage it to do advanced logic for you. Think of how you can make Engagement Studio work harder, without sending any email.
For example, a common question for Pardot users is: “How can I make sure my Automation rules run in a certain order?”
The standard answer is to chain them together with each rule applying a Pardot tag, the next rule looking for the tag and applying a new one, and so on. This does work, but you have a limited number of Automation Rules, and this sort of logic can use up too many depending on that limit.
A great option is to have Engagement Studio do the logic for you instead! When you allow the program to repeat, prospects can continually meet the criteria, be added to the program distribution list, and run through the automation logic.
Take a look at how I can set this up in Pardot. I made the recipient list of this program a Dynamic list with base logic of ‘Prospect Score is greater than 25.’ Next, I want to determine if the prospect qualifies for any of my Scoring Category nurturing – if they do, I want to add them to the recipient list for the appropriate nurturing program. If they do not qualify for a particular Scoring Category, they will receive my general nurture.
I built my Engagement Studio program with a series of steps detecting if the prospect has 25+ points in any of my Scoring Categories.
If the prospect has more than 25 points in Category 1, they will go down the ‘Yes’ path of the first node, and will be added to the relevant static list. This static list is the recipient list for Category 1’s nurturing program. The prospect will receive Category 1’s nurturing program, and at the end of the nurturing will have 25 points reduced from both their Scoring Category and overall Score. This reduction in Scoring Category could let them join a different Category nurturing program next time they are eligible for nurturing.
This Repeating Engagement Studio program does not send any email itself, but by leveraging the ‘repeat’ function, I can direct prospects to the correct nurturing paths and not use any of my limited Automation Rules.
Repeating Pardot Engagement Programs will change everything.
Now that Engagement Programs can repeat, the sky is the limit to what you can do. Can you imagine nurturing programs that never end, and always stay fresh? If you can imagine it, Engagement Studio can help you do it!