Time to get with the Program: Four reasons to use programs instead of outreaches

Our Journey Orchestrator Program feature has been released for a long time now. So long ago, in fact, that when it was first released, the Royal Wedding dominated the news, the Golden State Warriors were still a very good basketball team, and nobody knew who Baby Yoda was. Can you imagine? 

If you’re not using Programs for all your Journey Orchestrator needs, it’s time to fix that! Here are four reasons to convert your active outreaches to programs.
 

1. More flexibility with participant lists. Outreaches only allow participants to come from powerlists. Programs still allow power lists, but also allow bionic queries (using the same infrastructure as bionic rules), CSVs and event-triggered lists. This provides more flexibility when creating queries, such as being able to merge contact data from Salesforce and another usage data table. You can also use a CSV to exclude certain participants.
    

2. Multi-step email campaigns. Whereas outreaches limit you to just one email before ending the journey,programs allow multiple steps throughout a single email campaign, mixing both digital and human touch. with the ability to send surveys, follow-up emails to non-responders, make API calls, conditional waits and much more. Click here to learn more. 
    

3. Ability to check updated fields mid-program. By using calculated fields in a Program, you are able to check fields periodically while a participant is mid-flight. Imagine the following use case: You send an initial auto-renewal email to a contact because their renewal status is “not renewed.” After that initial email is sent, you only want to send another email if that renewal status has not changed. So if the renewal status changes to “renewed” between that initial email and the conditional wait, the contact will not get the second email. Pretty cool stuff! Here’s a more in-depth tutorial if you’d like to learn more.

    

4. This is the way of the future.

   • Outreaches are not compatible with Gainsight NXT, so when it’s time to upgrade to NXT (if you haven’t already), you’ll want to be sure you’ve moved all email communications that you want to keep to Programs.

     • Note: To keep your level of effort manageable, you might consider only migrating active outreaches to programs and leaving the older ones if you don’t plan on bringing them over to NXT.

     • Also, all Journey Orchestrator-related enhancements will only be made to Programs going forward, so going forward we recommend exclusively using Programs for future email sends.

     • All new email templates need to be built with Email Template 2.0. If you have any older programs or outreaches using Email Template 1.0, please be advised that we are planning on deprecating that feature and that templates built via Email Template 1.0 are no longer editable.

We’re here to help with this change! You are always welcome to join any of our twice-weekly admin office hours sessions to learn more about programs or to ask questions.