So you’re ready to set up your first marketing automation campaign, but you’re confused about where to start. You understand the basic concept of marketing automation. You’ve read as much information about it as you could find, but now it’s time to move out of learning and into doing. Where do you start? What type of campaign do you need? Here’s what goes into marketing automation campaign setup:
There are three types of campaigns we use in marketing automation: drip, nurture and event campaigns. Depending on your business goals, you may use one type of campaign or even all three.
Drip campaign
A drip campaign targets known and previously exhausted leads. These are leads you contacted in the past, but were unable to convert. They are sitting in your lead database collecting dust and growing more disinterested. It’s now time to bring these leads back to life and create a campaign targeted specifically at them. The campaign is highly targeted, but less aggressive. The campaign consists of precise emails sent over a spread out schedule. (We suggest once a month.) The emails gently pull exhausted leads back into the engagement realm.
Nurture campaign
A nurture campaign cultivates new leads from the initial point of contact to conversion. A nurture campaign is a bit more aggressive than drip campaigns, because we send emails on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule. The emails are strategically planned out to gain trust and engagement from your new leads.
Event campaign
An event campaign promotes an event like an upcoming show, dinner event or webinar. Usually we supplement an event campaign with invitations, reminder emails and RSVP landing pages.
Once you decide what campaign fits your goal, you need to go through your marketing automation checklist.
- Is your marketing automation tracking code embedded on your website/landing pages?
- Have you authenticated your domain as an email sender?
- Is you email template built?
- Have you defined your target audience list? Did you correctly import it into your marketing automation platform?
- Have you decided how many emails your campaign will contain? We recommend nine to 12 emails per nurture campaign and four to six emails per drip campaign.
- Have you examined your email streams (awareness, consideration and justification)? Have you developed content based on these streams? This means each email in your campaign should correspond with an email stream and contain appropriate levels of content.
- Are all campaign pieces, including emails, landing pages and forms designed, built and approved?
- Have you determined your campaign cadence?
- Have you determined what triggers and filters you will use?
- Have you built, tested and proofed your campaign?
This checklist will ensure you cover all your bases when building your marketing automation program. However, just following a checklist does not guarantee success. The most important part of a successful marketing automation campaign setup is your strategy. Without a well thought out strategy, you can pretty much kiss you marketing automation efforts goodbye.
At globalHMA, we specialize in marketing automation. Learn more about our marketing automation process and how we can create a customized campaign for your business.
