How to Master Engagement Studio - MarCloud Webinar

Hi everyone. Thank you for joining Marcloud's exclusive webinar today on how to master Engagement Studio. Thank you for taking the time and really appreciate you joining. Before we get started, let me just start off introducing ourselves. My name is Karen and I lead up the consulting team here at Marcloud. I've had experience using Account Engagement, previously known as Pardot, for nearly about 10 years now from an end user perspective and now to a consultancy perspective. So I've seen the product evolve over time and I'm really excited to show you the powerful things that Engagement Studio can now do. I'll pass over to my colleague Ollie, who will also introduce himself.

Hi everyone, I'm Ollie. I'm a lead consultant here at Markloud. So similar to Karen, I kind of come from a marketing background. So I was, you know, doing marketing. Yeah, I don't think I'm on mute.

I can hear Ollie, but Karen, there's a few people in the chat who can't hear you.

Can you hear me now? Okay, perfect. Yeah. So I'm a lead consultant here at Markloud. I've been an end user of Account Engagements or for the last, you know, before I was at Markloud, sort for the last couple of years. So I was using Engagement Studio as an end user. So I really understand its capabilities from both a technical perspective and then also from a marketing perspective, which is really why we're all here.

The reason why I just starting with this slide in terms of what Engagement Studio is, is that I know that we have different level of experience from novice to advanced users today on our, on our webinar. So I thought it'd be great to start with what is Engagement Studio? Probably you heard all that explanation in mute. So I'll, I'll just go over it again really quickly just in case so you weren't able to hear me. So as, as you know that Engagement Studio is account engagement, powerful lead, nurturing engine. What it helps you do is automate flows and help you engage, nurture prospects and help you also support that sales pipeline even more. With Engagement Studio, the prospects can have a unique journey based on how they behave with that Engagement Studio. So as soon as someone enters within Account Engagement, there's different program logics as from triggers, rules to actions. So this allows in a prospect to go into a unique experience based on how they engage with that journey. So if they click onto an email or, or if you apply a rule within that with that program to assess where they at, let's say if they fit your grading profiles. For example, statistically it shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase if offered in a personalized experience. So Engagement Studios offers this option yourselves to personalize your experience of your prospects based on where they are in their prospect life cycle. The more personalized you are, the better engagement it is and also hopefully the better conversion rates are for your objectives that you're trying to meet for the business. In terms of best practice, utilizing checklists is something that I always try recommend to my clients to develop a successful Casper journey. Firstly is I always emphasize on being very objective led when it comes to creating Engagement Studios. So questions like why are we doing it and what is the outcome we're trying to look what we're trying to achieve with this Engagement Studio. An example could be let's say if you work in education sector and you have prospective students going through the application process and you want to support the that process, this could be an objective way you're trying to engage your prospective students to help them finish their applications better. Secondly is confirmed availability of the data required for the journey. So do we have the fields and the values available? Also are these fields that we need mapped from Salesforce with Account Engagement type allow us to create those type of lists? What type of list are we using? Are we using a static list which in Account Engagement is a one time list or are we using a dynamic list which is then based on list membership, someone matching or unmatching the criteria? Thirdly is mapping out the journey based on the defined objective. So using tools so internally we use something called we use lucidcharts but you can even map it out on a piece of paper. The idea around mapping out your journey design is it helps you clearly outline each step and the desired outcomes. For example, you might then when you're mapping out you might say if someone selects a prospect, selects a specific call to action button, then what I might do then is then want to notify our sales Sales team member John Engagement Assets based on Maps Journey Finalize the required Assets so how many email templates do you need are forms required or landing page required to achieve this objective of your program? So this is where you can actually start building your assets based on your objective and also the the map plan that you have done on the step three. Lastly, once you have confirmed the once you have completed this checklist, you're ready to now actually build that journey. So you're ready to actually go into Engagement Studio and build out what that program looks like. So this is really important imperative in terms of when you're creating Engagement Studio to have a checklist, use this as, let's say, the technical blueprint of how to then achieve a successful engagement Studio. Now I'm going to pass on to my colleague Ollie that will take you through more and more details on that second step in terms of list criteria.

Thank you, Karen. So just for those people that maybe don't know the types of lists that you get in account engagement, I'll just briefly run over them and then I'll kind of explain the advantages and disadvantages for each so you can decide what kind of list you want to use to, you know, send your Engagement Studio program emails to. So the first type of list is a static list. This is as it says in the name, it's just a static list. You add and remove prospects manually or through automations. But the idea is that a static list doesn't really change that much, it just stays the same throughout. Now with a dynamic list it's different because what you're doing is you're dynamically updating the list based on criteria. So you're not specific picking out specific prospects and saying, okay, I want this prospect, I want this prospect. What you're doing is you're building the list based on criteria. This could be based on field values or activity within account engagement. And the idea is when they meet the criteria, they go into the list and then as soon as they stop meeting the criteria, they lead the list basically. So what I like to use dynamic lists for is more for those always on kind of, you know, top of mind Engagement Studio programs that are evergreen and they're always going to be running. The reason for this is because, you know, the content is probably going to stay the same and you can, it's not really that time sensitive because it's just a top of mind program. You're most likely just emailing them just to kind of see stay top of mind. Just stay, you know, keep them engaged with you and keep your brand in their head. So I like to use dynamic lists for that. Now where I don't like to use dynamic lists is where the Engagement Studio is kind of time sensitive. And a good example of this might be an event invitation Engagement studio. So obviously with event invitations, you know, things are quite time sensitive. You need to make sure that the prospect gets the invitation email on time. You know, you don't want them to get the email two weeks after the event has happened. You know, and then you want to make sure they get the subsequent emails. You know, the follow up after the event. So I would use a static list for that because, you know, you can build your invite list and it's not. There's no chance of them just suddenly leaving the program if they stop matching one of the criteria. So, yeah, just a tip for dynamic list, ensure you have solid criteria to avoid prospects kind of entering the program if you want them to stay in the program. Now, if you're using static lists, the considerations really are just how are you going to build the list, Are you going to import them or are you going to use automations? So that can include things like automation rules or completion actions and then just on the next slide. So a lot of clients, what they'll do in order to build a dynamic list in account Engagement is they'll build a Salesforce report and they'll say, okay, build this as a dynamic list in Account Engagement. And they'll almost kind of be expecting there to be an exact match in terms of the numbers of leads and contacts on the Salesforce Report and then the number of prospects in account engagement. But there are quite a few reasons on why the data will never match up. Well, they might do sometimes, but it's a very rare occasion. The number one reason that I see is simply that the leads and contacts on the Salesforce report on an account engagement, and this most likely happened because you had Salesforce before you had Account Engagement and those leads and contacts just weren't included in the initial import. The other reason I see is things like sync errors. So that will just stop the correct data syncing across and that could affect your dynamic list. Another reason could be that the prospects you're expecting to see on a dynamic list in account engagement are actually in the Recycle Bin. So on a Salesforce report, there's not really an easy way to be able to tell whether prospects in account Engagement are in the Recycle Bin or not. So that could be another reason why the data doesn't match up. So you might want to check your Recycle Bin. But yeah, just to summarize, you can use a Salesforce report as an inspiration to build your dynamic list, but don't expect there to be an exact match because it's almost never going to happen.

Nice. Thank you. Thank you, Ollie. And now let's dive in into what's the most commonly used engagement studio and why. So these are some of the ones that we recommend in terms of when you're starting with your engagement studio. Maybe you might be at the start of that journey and you need inspiration on Your first automated campaign. Some of the lists and ideas of how to help you get started. The first one is the lifecycle stage. So is your pipeline looking like you need a little bit of a boost? This will recommend to start automated communications to help your prospects to allow them to flow through the customer journey much easier. So an example I gave earlier in regards to if you work in education sector, you might then create a journey around supporting application process stage within that lifecycle stage because you know the next stage will be enrollment. The next one is upsell and brand Evangelism providing existing clients with information or incentives to expand the list of product service that they currently have with yourself. So this year do you have an objective of creating more opportunities so new business, new products or services? This will be a great way to then support that initiative to create a program around upsell and brand evangelism. Customer Retention do you have customers that are due up for renewal very soon? This is something that we also take into consideration internally. Renewal programs are really great way to communicate with prospects that might not be aware in terms of that renewal is coming up and also helps you close those renewals much sooner as well slowly nurture your customers who are due to leave soon. Again if slow nurture campaigns are a great way, let's say if you have prospects who want to call back within let's say 612 months, I have clients who have a longer sales cycle. This journey is great for that where you can send out emails let's say every 30 days that in an automated flow this helps keep your brand at the forefront while the client is still in the decision process making. So this would be a great top of the mind program in terms of slow nurture campaigns. Customer boarding so we know that welcome emails really generate are really effective. Statistically it's proven to be 86 more effective than actual standard emails. So welcome journey emails are a great way for your signups to get introduced to your business. So step by step emails onboarding those customers through the process is another great program that you can get started with setting up a nurture program to promote attendees and different send different emails. Like today you have graciously all of you guys have graciously signed up for our webinar and attended our webinar. So for us as Mark Cloud we endeavor to also follow up with a campaign recording and also keep you updated with anything in relation to my cloud new developments and what we're doing right. So if I delve into more of the most commonly used programs, one of these is a Top of mind program. So ideals for leads that might not be sales ready yet. An example scenario could be you can have John, the sales rep engages with Sally on the phone and said a new lead that has come through that has been marketing qualified. Sally expresses hey, you know what, I'm not yet ready to buy. I'm still in the research phase. I'm window shopping. So then Sally prefers to be contacted in the couple of months. So then okay, John, what can he do then? He can't contact Sally anymore. Further however, John knows that he can add Sally to an account engagement nurture list and then for marketing to follow up with him to send follow up communications to Sally. So this allows Sally to receive targeted marketing communications and also most importantly keeps the brand at the forefront. So ensures while Sally is window shopping with competitors that your brand is very prominent in her mind because she's receiving consistent information regarding the services that you're able to provide to her strategically. Again it helps build a good consistent long term rapport with that, with that prospect. And also until they're ready to purchase, your brand is always at the forefront. Another one is an event follow up. Again like I said today, if you do in person events or webinars like what we are doing, this would be a great way to follow up with those leads that have attended your webinars or your in person events. Just grace to see how they have how they have felt in terms of with the event that they've attended. Nurture them, keep them educated with your business, what's happening for ourselves, we'll keep educating you on everything about my cloud, what our developments are and what is new, what's coming, what's new updates coming with account engagement that you need to be aware of as well. Again the event follow up is a way to keep on to nurture those prospects that are warm leads because they have actually attended your event so they are keen in your business or your products that you're offering upsell. Again as mentioned, if you are looking to do any, let's say expand your product offering this year or services, this is a great way you already have those contacts in your system. This is a great way to communicate with those existing prospects with contacts with information or incentives based on what your new product offerings could be or cross sell different items that prospect might be interested in great way in terms of that database you already have that database. You're not looking for new leads, you already have them and it's a great way to sell different products or services to them. Nice. I'll pass over to my colleague Ollie on my cloud Expert tips when you're setting up those engagement studios.

Yeah, so the first tip that I want to give is to not begin a program with a trigger step. So the idea of a trigger is you're waiting for some kind of activity on the prospect side. But obviously as the program is just beginning, there's not going to be any activity. So just avoid putting a trigger step. Just wait till you've got some some kind of actions in there like an email send, etc. Before you use trigger steps. Another thing is to avoid zero day waiting periods. So you need to give account engagement and the prospect enough time to react to the content that you're sending them. I don't know about you, but it sometimes takes me two, three days to get to an email that was sent two, three days ago. So it's just a good idea to up those waiting periods to just avoid that activity being missed in the engagement studio. Another tip that I'd like to give is to capture the engagement with lists and tags. So just an example of this, if you send an email and what you can do is if they take a certain action on that email, you can add that prospect to a list and that you can use as a record to say when you're reporting on your engagement studio, you can look back and say, okay, this person did this specific action and you can pass that on to sales or you can put them into another nurturer or send them a different email. It's just really good to capture the engagement. Just so you know who did what on the engagement studio. Remember as well that there are no off days for triggers. So with your emails you're likely only going to send them, you know, Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm, you know, whatever your time zone may be. But with triggers they check 247 so they're always going to be checking for activity on the prospect side. So just bear that in mind. Another tip that I give is to use copied steps. So embarrassingly, I didn't know about this until a couple of months ago, but this is just a really great way to save time. If you've got different strands of your engagement studio that are very similar, what you can do is just copy from the previous strand and then just amend the little details. And it's just a really way to boost your productivity and move on to other things. I'd also recommend taking note of inactive programs and also leveraging form handlers in your engagement studio, which we have more information on the Next slide. So one thing I like to use form handlers for is it can be very easy when you're tracking lots of different activities on your engagement studio, it can be quite easy to have loads and loads of different branches. Checking for this email, click Checking for this form submission. Checking for this file download. But a great way just to keep the engagement studio really clean and capture the data that you're looking for is to use form handlers. Now with a form handler, what you can do is when you link to it, you can basically add a little query on the end as long as you only have the email field. On the form handler you can add the merge field, which is recipient email. And what that will do is that will immediately submit the form handler. And then if we just go to the next slide, I've got a quick example of that. So on this example, there's an account engagement on demand trial. If they click that button and we link that to a form handler, what we can do as soon as that form handler is submitted, which will happen as soon as they click, we can then redirect them to the actual destination that you know, they need to go to. But off the back of that, we can also use completion actions to, you know, update their campaign member status. And we can even set various prospect fields as well. I've got an example of that on the next slide. If you could, if you could. Karen, thank you. So yeah, on this slide, you know, I'm going to send them to example.com that's going to be the success location. But that can be wherever you want to send them. And I'm also going to add them to my campaign. I'm going to set that status as responded and I'm also going to set their product interest field to product day. So if you know, there's various, like if, for example, in an email there's a button and if they click that button, it would indicate an interest in that product. You can capture that data on this form handler you can set the custom field and then that's extra data that you got for the future. For the future, for when you really want to personalize your program. So that's a great tip that I give you there to use form handlers.

Nice.

And then I'll touch quickly on reporting. So the aim really with the reporting is not only to see how the overall program performed, but then also to see the results of your individual emails within your programs, just so we can see exactly what's working and what's not working. So what I'D recommend for that is to set up a parent campaign for each of your engagement studios. If you don't know what that is, it's basically a campaign that sits at the top. And then each of your emails will be kind of like child campaigns. And then if you're using form handlers and you're using triggers, you can add them to each email campaign and then that way you can track the performance whether they clicked on the email, they downloaded some piece of content that you're sending them, or they filled out a form.

Nice.

And then.

This is just an example of an engagement studio that represented the parent campaign.

Yeah. So here, sorry, my screen only just refreshed. So here at the top you have the top of mind campaign that represents the engagement studio and then underneath that you have each of your emails that make up that engagement studio. So that's just an example that you can go away and use to take when you build your other engagement studio programs.

Nice. Thanks, Wally. So, yeah, so not sure where to get started in terms of engagement Studio. Here at Markloud February we got a special offer. We're offering two for one pre built email templates that can help you support when you're creating those engagement studio. So this month only we're offering that two for one for any of the attendees that have joined today to help you along that journey. We're really passionate about engagement Studio. We, we know that the power, how powerful they can be when customers use it. So these templates we got pre built menu of templates that could be perfect for top of mind program, upsell event, follow up or industry specific programs that you might look to do based on what we have learned today and what we have taken you through. So on your screen here you can see there's a QR code that you can actually scan and contact us if you have attended today again you have that offer 241. So yeah, feel free to contact us and get in touch and we can help you along that journey. What I'll do is now is just come back on screen to see if there's any questions that we need to take to the floor. Demi, is there any questions that I have come through from the team? Yes, yes Karen, there are three questions that have come in. So can you. I'm not sure if you can see on your end, but two questions. Emails used in engagement studios must be published templates. Correct. And the second part to that question was in the scenario or when we have a global customer campaigns with country filters where we need to also contact output since it's legal updates on accounts, can we use engagement studios for such an audience? Oh, I think your audience echoing a little bit to my side. So email user engagement shooters must be published templates, correct? Yes. So you create the email templates within account engagement and they have to be published in order for them to come into the program. In a scenario of when you have a global customer campaign with country filters where we need to also contact. Also contact, opt out since it's legal updates on accounts, can we use engagement users for such audience? So you want to know whether for those global customer campaigns with country futures where we need to also opt them out, what I'll recommend is probably automation rules from Ollie. Would you recommend anything different leverage automation rules when it comes to opting out those customers?

Yeah, yeah, 100% automation rules.

Yeah. Nice. Another one. You can also apply this with a form forms hosted in. So in part in case you don't use form handlers. Right. So we will probably say yes. Gone. Ollie.

Sorry, I think there's a little bit of a lag. Yeah. So the, the purpose of the form handler, the reason why we use the form handler is because it will submit. Now I haven't tested it, but I don't think the same applies with the form. So you don't want them to know that by clicking the link they're submitting a form, basically. So that's why you would use the form handler.

Okay, Another question here is if you create a power parent child campaign hierarchy, do you manage the. How do you manage the fact that the engagement history dashboards don't roll up information? That's a great question. So what I'll probably say is you leverage more in terms of if you have the ability to have B2B to create custom dashboards to be able to actually report on those campaigns and those engagement studio journey. Could you please explain again the difference between wait and up to when setting up timings for engagement studios? Ollie, do you want to take that one?

Yeah. So the wait step, let's see if you're checking if a prospect has, you know, clicked a link in an email a wait and you know, let's say you give that two days a wait. Step will wait that whole two days and then check if they click that link. Whereas an up to step will wait up to two days. So if I click the link after the first day and then that trigger step will activate then. So it doesn't need to wait the whole two days, it will just check up to the two Days and then after that it will stop checking.

Nice. Thanks, Ollie. We have a question here. Do you guys have a webinar on B2BMA? That's a good question. If you want the webinar in regards to B2BMA, we'll welcome the challenge and we'll also create a webinar on that. So if there's demand for it, we're always looking for new webinars that we can do. So that's a good shot. We can add that on our list of webinars to do in the future. Thank you for that. And Sandra's asked how can we see like with how can we see like we have for list email a report of who opens. So how do we see in the list email a report of who opens, who clicks and so on? The data is very limited on Engagement Studio compared to list email report. Yes, that's very true. In terms of list email report, you have limitations in terms of what you can see versus Engagement Studio and I think that's something that we're also aware of. That's why we say leveraging reports outside of engagement studio. So B2BMA dashboards is a great way to go about that. Nice. Ollie, question for you. How how we import role based email addresses such as admin at support at in engagement studios.

Import role based email addresses. So does that mean on the recipient side there's role based email addresses? Yes.

Yes. So technically with account engagement we they in terms of importing role based email address is something that it's not best practice. And I know that there is a way that you can maybe contact support to be able to support you with that input. Trying to see if there's any more questions coming through. Someone says BTBMA sounds powerful, but I've never found how to unlock that value. A webinar on that will be amazing. Okay, great. A few people have been asking for B2BMA, so I guess that is something that we can look into to do as a next webinar. So thank you for that insight. In terms of as btbma, that would be something that you would likely want to do for us to tackle next. Nice. I'm going to see if there's any more questions coming through. Is there any more questions around Engagement Studios that you'd or anything that you want us to reiterate on this? Q and A. We have a few more minutes left of this webinar? No, we don't have any more questions. Okay, that sounds great. Thank you all for joining today and taking that time to join today's webinar. What we'll do is share the recording for all the attendees that have joined. And if there's any more questions that might creep up or any support that you feel like Mark our CL my Cloud consulting can help with, please feel free to send us an email. You have my details here. Karen, Ollie and Demi. Also, you can feel free to get in touch with us on LinkedIn or add us. But yeah, any questions that you have, feel free to get in touch. And remember that we have those two for one templates that we're offering for this month. So if you want to take advantage of that opportunity, please get in touch on our website and contact us. Thank you and have a lovely rest of the day. Thanks.