To my surprise I found today that you can nest event programs into event programs. “Nesting” means that you can place programs underneath or one level below other programs, so that they
- inherit program tokens from their parent program and
- can be cloned with the parent.
I knew that you could nest certain programs into others, like Email Programs into Default Programs or Default Programs into Engagement Programs, but I didn’t know you could nest programs of the same type.
If you search the Marketo Community on that topic you’ll find that even very knowledgeable people didn’t know that.
So why is this interesting at all?
Well, there’s a certain situation that Marketo can’t deal with well, and that is a webinar series or one webinar topic that has more than one date. By default – and with the standard webinar integrations – a Marketo program can always only be integrated with one webinar session. (I’m not claiming to know everything about all potential webinar integrations, but this is at least true for GoToWebinar and Zoom).
So here’s a solution for this specific task:
The parent Event Program “CAD – Blueprint Webinar /w two dates” holds the invitation email and the landing page/form with a date selector field. The parent itself is not connected to a webinar provider, but the programs “Date 1” and “Date 2” are. Form submissions in the parent program need to set the Program Statuses in “Date 1” and “Date 2” to “Registered”, so that these programs can register persons in GoToWebinar/Zoom. These programs should also send the Registration Confirmation emails as only they have access to relevant tokens {{member.registration code}} and {{member.webinar url}}. But mostly your content should be in tokens local to the parent program which are inherited by the webinar date programs.
There are a couple more things that are up for debate here: Which program should send the Attendee/No-Show emails – parent or children? Should the parent program have a “Registered” program status as well, although it’s not necessary for the registration process? This might be a matter of taste, but I guess my answers would be:
Yes, the parent should have a “Registered” – and an “Attended” and “No Show” – program status as well, just for program reporting purposes. And I think I would send the follow-up emails for attendees and non-attendees from the parent program as the selected date no longer matters.