Account Engagement Campaigns vs. Account Engagement Lists

Account Engagement campaigns  are thematic touchpoints (similar to “source” in other systems). Campaigns are used to track a prospect's first touch. A prospect's Account Engagement campaign is set when a prospect first hits an Account Engagement tracked link or Account Engagement tracking code. Once a prospect becomes associated with a campaign, they remain associated with that campaign. Each prospect is associated with only one Account Engagement campaign. You can change prospects' Account Engagement campaign . Note: Changing prospects' campaigns will alter reporting. Often a prospect's Account Engagement campaign is similar to their lead source. Here is more information about the differences between using Account Engagement campaigns vs. Lead source.

Account Engagement lists resemble the more traditional definition (or CRM definition) of a marketing campaign. These groups are prospects that you wish to contact with marketing or sales information.

- Account Engagement lists are used to send bulk emails or drip program emails to prospects.

- Prospects can be added to an unlimited number of lists.

- Once a list is created, you can add prospects to the lists .

- You can also create a dynamic list to automatically manage your list's prospects.

- Any static or dynamic list can used as a suppression list during an email send or when building an Engagement Program or drip.

- Lists can also be used to segment your prospects to create more granular views of your prospects. You can export those lists to view and analyze the prospects' data in a .CSV file.

Using a campaign: You are creating a new series of pay per click ads and want to track where a prospect originates when they arrive at your website. In this scenario, you are tracking new visitors and you want to record the first marketing campaign they interact with — this is when you will create an Account Engagement campaign.

You can create a custom redirect for each pay per click ad. You will select an Account Engagement campaign for each custom redirect (using a different campaign for each redirect, or several campaigns across many redirects). If a new visitor arrives at your site by clicking the custom redirect link, they will be associated with the campaign that you selected for the redirect. Later, when the visitor completes a form and identifies themselves, we create an Account Engagement record for them and add their record to the custom redirect's campaign — all because their first tracked activity was associated with that marketing campaign.

You can also auto-set campaigns through tracking code or when prospects complete forms or landing pages .

Using a list: You want to send out a monthly webinar email invitation to your prospects. It does not matter where the prospects originated, you want everyone who is interested in that webinar topic to receive the webinar invitation. In this scenario, you will create a new Account Engagement list of the interested prospects. You do not need to take the prospect's campaign into account when creating this list. Once the list is created you can add prospects to the list via automation rules, segmentation rules or manually through any prospect table.

Please note that when you send an email to your prospects, your email will need to be tagged with an Account Engagement campaign. This doesn't affect the recipients' campaigns, nor does it filter your recipient lists and only send to recipients with that campaign. Selecting a campaign for an email is for reporting purposes. This allows you to group together emails by  campaign and filter your reports to see all emails sent from a specific campaign. So although there is no need to create a special campaign for the recipient prospects of the list email, you could create a campaign for your email or set of emails. By associating all of your webinar invitation emails with a "Webinar" campaign, all of the emails could be found easily in reports to compare opens, click throughs, etc.

A campaign and a list: You just returned from a trade show. You have 100 new leads that you met at the show and you want to enter them into Account Engagement and send them a follow up list email. In this scenario, you will want to create both an Account Engagement campaign and an Account Engagement list for these prospects. The prospects originated at the show (so you need an Account Engagement campaign) and you need to send an email (so you have to create an Account Engagement list). During the import process you can both create and add the prospects to a new campaign (step 3) and a new list (step 4). Now you have the prospects segmented by their original campaign called "Trade Show" and they are on a list called "Trade Show Follow up" that will be used to send them a follow up email.