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Are you new to lead nurturing and drip marketing? It can be a challenging and daunting task to create your first drip program or drip marketing campaign. Not to worry, we will walk through how to create your very first and complete drip campaign from start to finish.

Planning a Drip Program or Engagement program is great a way to connect with your subscribers and engage with them automatically with a specific set of emails you’ve previously created. These emails will be sent to a subscriber usually on a set of triggers or rule logic which will determine what that prospect will receive. For example, if you’re targeted a certain type of customer in your database with powerful content it’s always a best practice to keep them engaged and receiving similar content that will help lead to a sale.

Most company’s objective is to create complex drip campaigns which will automate the sales process and support the sales and marketing functions. After reading this post you will be able to setup your campaign, test it and configure the logic to be inline to your business’s objectives.

Why Use A Drip Campaign?

Drip Campaigns are incredibly powerful programs that pretty much all digital marketers will swear by. The are pre-determined campaigns which can follow-up, re-engage, up-sell, nurture and basically track leads through the buying cycle. Drip Campaigns are highly personalized, setup to be timely and optimized to further the relationship between a potential customer and the point of sale, and even including the relationship and communication between its customers and stakeholders.

Drip campaigns are used to target highly relevant emails and content to educate prospects and have been shown to produce 18 times more revenue than globally sent emails. Drip campaigns are used to segment your audience and send specific information at the right time and cadence instead of a randomly chosen time and date than a standard email send. Way more effective.

 

Starting Your Drip Campaign

Now that you’re eager to get started, we have to look at the plan and objectives. Take note’s on what do you want your prospects to do, what content you want them to receive? Your prospect journey can be setup using a flow chart graph, or tool like this drip campaign builder Pardot offers.

Drip Campaign Setup Steps

Now that you have planned your drip strategy, it’s time to start with your setup. Ideally, you will want to create a name for this campaign and assign all your email assets, campaign name, lists with that name.

  • Step 1 – Setup your audience and create your email recipient list, email templates and create your drip program in your marketing automation software. Assign the correct source and campaign so that this specific drip is tracked accordingly.
  • Step 2 – Create your logic and flow chart with the software to include all the steps you have created previously. Be sure to assign leads to appropriate reps, setup the correct alerts, rules and triggers.
  • Step 3 – Test your campaign by creating a fake prospect account, and using a test list. Then speed up your drip program and test this logic to see how a prospect would progress through this campaign. Some Marketing automation tools have a testing feature to ensure your logic is correct.
  • Step 4 – Un-pause or launch your drip campaign.

Managing Your Drip Campaign

Now that you have launched this intelligent drip program, how to do manage its effectiveness and ensure it’s running the way you want? Setup alerts and reports so that you see the engagement and actions your drip program is having in your database. If you look into your reporting features, you can also see if the ROI reporting is showing sales from the campaign you have assigned to this drip program. Doing this will show which prospects converted from their engagement with this drip campaign.

Check back periodically every week to two weeks and see whether your prospects are fully completing the drip program.