Marketo Multi-Stream Nurturing on a Single-Stream

Marketo’s Customer Engagement engine offers great technology for marketers that want to mass-qualify leads using nurturing. The technology lets marketers focus on content instead of the programming logic that delivers it. Instead content is dragged into a Smart Stream that delivers it at a steady pace.

Think of a stream like a conversation that is directed at a specific segment of your target market just when they are ready to hear it. Marketo’s Select and Enterprise editions support up to 15 streams in a single program, so each stream can automate a different conversation to a different audience type. For example, one stream can contain beginner-level content, and another could offer more detailed content to an advanced audience.

Marketo’s Select and Enterprise editions let you define when a lead should transition from one stream to another in the program based on their engagement.

While Marketo’s Standard edition offers a single-stream, with a little extra configuration, you can mimic some of the functionality of the multi-stream version.

For example, here is how you could automate a 3-stream nurture using 3 different programs:

1. Create three separate programs.
   1. Educate – targeted at early-stage prospects that are just learning about the problem that your company can help them solve
   2. Discover – directed at mid-stage prospects that are aware of the problem, but trying to scope it out for their organization
   3. Engage – directed at late-stage prospects that are searching for solutions to known problems
      
2. Next, create a series of Smart Campaigns that let you transition leads from one stream to another. Your Smart Campaigns may look like this:
   1. Enter Nurture – This can be a Smart List, change in Lead Status, or an incoming lead from another program
   2. Set Progression to Engaged – When your prospect clicks on the first offer, you can set their status to Engaged
   3. Switch Program-Stream – Educate to Discover – The trigger here could be a score threshold. For example, Lead Score > 25 could cause the prospect’s lead to exit Educate and enter Discover
   4. Switch Program-Stream – Discover to Engage – the prospect would now receive more advanced content at a higher frequency
   5. Exit Nurture – your exit might be a Lead Score above 50 points, or Lifecycle Stage changing to MQL
3. Add the right content to your three streams and start communicating.

You can get pretty sophisticated with your nurturing too. Consider adding alerts that provide advance notice of fast-moving leads, or Smart Content that allows you to selectively send industry-specific offers by embedding them in Programs, which can also be added to streams.

For additional information on Smart Streams, check out the Marketo Community, or send us an email.