First Take: 7 Killer Features in Marketo’s Customer Engagement Engine

Marketo just launched its Customer Engagement Engine today in a webinar to customers and other marketers. I’ve seen the module before but it has certainly evolved over the past few months.

What’s this new module all about? Marketo has built it to help marketers keep the communications with customers relevant while providing reporting to let us know what is working and what is not. It’s the next generation of lead nurturing—engagement marketing.

For existing customers, the Customer Engagement Engine looks like a pretty big enhancement but expect some process change. For old school Marketo users, we all remember the additional work to convert campaigns to programs–one step back to take many leaps forward. I don’t expect the Customer Engagement Engine to be quite an effort investment but it does look like a game changer for how we approach lead nurturing.

First off, some new terminology. Marketo now has “smart streams” which are basically nurturing tracks that rollup into the module for reporting. Use a nurturing stream to target leads from a product set, a persona, an industry or anything else.

There’s more and I may be missing a few, but here are my top 7 highlights of the new module.

1. One Module for Nurturing. Marketers can organize all of their nurturing in a single location and get reporting insight. When you CEO asks, “what are the results of all this nurturing?”, you’ll now be able to give that answer a little easier.
2. Ability to Add Fresh Content. Have a great new whitepaper you want everyone to see but leads are at varying stages of their nurturing track? The Customer Engagement Engine lets you drop a new piece of content into the stream so everyone receives that email the next time the stream sends an email. It’s kind of like when you play a song on the jukebox and you get the option to play yours first for a dollar (except you don’t have to pay the dollar in this case).
3. Shelf Life Content. Related to the previous point, what if you have a webinar coming up in two weeks you want to promote across your streams? You can not only bump it up to #1 in the queue, you can expire it so it will never send again after a certain date.
4. Put Limits on Emails Sent. Tracking how many emails leads receive in a given timeframe has been virtually impossible. To help stop over marketing, the Customer Engagement Engine includes options to limit the amount of emails someone can receive in a given time period.
5. Know When You Run Out of Content. So your 6-week stream ends, now what? Marketo provides information on leads in streams that have exhausted content. As a marketer, you can then drop them into another stream or send them other targeted content.
6. Skipped Content. This may be my favorite feature.  Let’s say John has already downloaded ABC eBook but that’s sitting in his nurturing track for week 3. Today, you would have to write all kinds of if/then logic to make sure John doesn’t get the same content twice. On the flipside, some may argue that  repetition helps and John should receive it again. Either way, you now have the option to do either easily.
7. Slick New Analytics. The are so many nice new insights the new module offers but I will focus on one—the “engagement score.” Today you have to sort through open rates and clicks rates to analyze a piece of content’s success. This can be a very tedious process. The Customer Engagement module provides a proprietary “engagement score” that roles up click throughs and other interactions. Have that same eBook in separate streams? You can easily compare how content performs in one stream vs. another.

See the Complete Webinar as with Michael Berger, Director of Product Marketing, and Cheryl Chavez, Director of Product Management

http://www.marketo.com/webinars/lead-nurturing-reinvented-introducing-marketo-customer-engagement

The post First Take: 7 Killer Features in Marketo’s Customer Engagement Module appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.