Ok, so you are creating nurture programs for your company in Marketo. You have created the engagement program. When you go back to check on it, it hasn’t run.

What’s going on?

How do you troubleshoot?

Below are a few quick steps to check to troubleshoot the issue.

Is the program on?

This seems like a silly question, but it can be easy to miss. If you create templates, you often turn the program off in the template. Or when you’re in process of building, you often turn the program off. But it’s easy to forget to turn it back on with so many different moving parts.

Go to the nurture program. Click on Set Up (see screenshot below).

Once in Set Up, you can look to see what the Program Status is. You will want to turn that on and then press save.

Are people in the engagement program (is your entry program working)

You need to add people into the nurture. You do this with a smart campaign. You need to check your smart list. For example, in the screenshot below someone will get added if they either fill out the blog form or visit the pricing page.

You will want to check to see if you have any people in the Results tab.

If you are not seeing anyone in the Results, you need to look to make sure your smart list is correct.

Did you add content to the streams?

Once you create AND approve the emails, you will need to add them into the streams. You will need to click on the Streams tab then click on ADD CONTENT (you can also use the + to add emails). Once you add the emails, you will need to make sure all emails are ACTIVATED.

Did you set a cadence in the stream?

This seems like an obvious one, but it’s easy to miss. You have to make sure you have your cadence set in your streams.

In the example above, only Stream 1A – Cold would send emails. The other streams do not have a stream cadence set. You need to make sure all streams have the cadence set.

How are you moving people from stream to stream?

Are you missing a set of emails (i.e. your contacts received some emails but not others)? You need to confirm that people are moving.

You can move people from stream to stream using either the Transition Rules or using a smart campaign. Below is a screenshot of Transition Rules.

You can also use smart campaigns to move people to different streams (just like you did for the entry). This is my preferred method because you have more options and more control.

Is the content exhausted?

Sometimes, you just run out of content. Each stream has the chance to be exhausted. “Exhausted” just means that for x number of people, there is no new content (so they won’t be getting any more emails in that stream).

In the screenshot below, there are 27 people that are exhausted in stream 1. That means that 27 people will stop getting emails. All you need to do here is to either move them to another stream (push them by using a smart campaign or changing the transition rules) OR add content to the existing stream.

Marketo is one of the best tools. But sometimes troubleshooting can take some time. Just remember, work through your steps. Reference the Marketo forum. Sign up for the MOps Pro Slack Channel.

Are you new to Marketo? We have a newsletter designed for the Marketo newbie! It’s our Newbie News! There are so many great resources out there. But we found that so many newbies didn’t know what to ask (so even though there’s an awesome forum, they didn’t know what they didn’t know).

Sign up for our NEWBIE NEWS below!