When the game changes, so must the players. Access to information has changed the way that consumers interact with businesses, which has in turn changed the way that organizations market to their prospects and customers. Marketers must now focus on getting the right message to the right person at the right time, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
Enter campaign automation. Also known as nurture marketing or drip marketing, campaign automation involves sending a series of relevant and timely communications to prospects or customers over time.
As they proceed through a campaign automation, your recipients should be cheering your messages on, not booing them from the sidelines. The last thing a nurture program should do is drive prospects and customers away with annoying emails. When building a campaign automation, be sure to follow these six best practices:
- Content. Create campaign automations that contain information that will be of value to your leads or customers. Make sure that the content in every nurturing email is extremely relevant to the audience.
- Timing. Schedule messages appropriately based on the type of campaign automation. A campaign for sales-ready leads could have a shorter timeline than one for inactive leads that touches the prospect only a few times per year.
- Consistency. Nurture programs help establish trust and credibility. Make sure that messages are consistent with and reinforce the company’s brand. While consistency is important, every email should not be identical. Consider using different types of emails in campaign automations – perhaps some HTML emails with graphics that highlight an offer, and some plain text emails that look like personalized, one-on-one emails from a salesperson.
- Targeting and Personalization. One of the many benefits of a campaign automation is that messages can be customized based on the interactions a prospect has with the emails. Use this capability to its fullest extent with dynamic content and targeted messaging. Don’t just develop a series of generic emails that are sent over and over again; create personalized experiences.
- Permission. Ensure that nurture emails – and all other emails you send, for that matter – don’t violate spam rules. For example, the CAN-SPAM Act in the U.S. and CASL in Canada include specific guidance for giving email recipients the opportunity to opt-in or opt-out of receiving emails.
- Data. Data in CRM can be extremely helpful when creating nurture programs. Statistics such as industry and company size for business-to-business campaigns, or age, gender or location for business-to-consumer, can help tailor the message to a particular audience. Using web tracking data in a marketing automation solution like ClickDimensions, you can gain even more knowledge about prospects. What ads are people clicking on to get to your website? On which pages do they spend the most time? Knowing what content your prospects are most interested in can help to target the message in nurture campaign emails.
This post is an excerpt from the ClickDimensions eBook “The Campaign Automation Playbook: Scoring Big with Customer and Lead Nurturing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.” Download your complimentary copy here.
by ClickDimensions
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