This week at Net-Results, the Intern focus was learning about campaign development, creation and management. Our internship program takes us through each department of Net-Results, training us on the platform and its capabilities. So when we were asked to participate in creating a Campaign we were super excited. As we began our strategy session, and met for our Agile Stand-ups, it became apparent that development of a campaign was a strategic choice that involved more than actions and content.
Marketing Automation (MA) is a technology designed to help you find, focus on, and connect with engaged prospects who are most likely to buy your product, or possibly your competitors. Through a series of actions, alerts and triggers based on user behavior, MA helps showcase what leads are getting closer to the buying stage allowing you to provide the right information at the right time in the sales cycle. You want to engage hot leads more aggressively than those browsing or just learning about your product, and MA helps you segment and target these leads through several unique methods. Our MA platform supports behavior-based responses with two distinct, yet responsive campaign methods: Drip and Nurture. Both are beneficial in different ways, as we, the Interns, learned this week when we became resources and observers to a recent campaign launch at Net-Results.
While I learned many interesting technical aspects about the campaign we launched, the concepts that really impressed me were the distinctions and rationale between using Drip Campaigns or Nurture Campaigns. I’ve decided to share some of this foundational information in this week’s Internlandia, because I believe that there are others, just like me, new to the MA space and ready to step out into the world of professional MA strategy!
Drip Campaigns
A drip campaign is a campaign designed to send messages to prospects or customers at regular intervals based on certain behavior or their lead status. It is the steady process of “dripping” your message to prospects at appropriate intervals. The most common ways to execute a drip campaign are email, direct mail, or social media. Drip campaigns are great because they are relatively simple to set up, and create results quickly that are easy to understand and act upon.
As I learned this week, with Net-Results, Drip Campaigns are your go-to, quick start campaign tool. They can be quickly defined, easily established, and delivering targeted content to prospects with just a few simple steps.
In the most basic terms, a drip email campaign starts by sending “email 1” on a specific day and time to a list of prospects, then waits a period of time you establish before sending “email 2” and so on for as many emails as you define. Drip email campaigns exist solely to send an email or series of emails with optional lead scoring based on opens or clicks.
Nurture Campaigns
Nurture campaigns are a deeper level campaign option that marketers can utilize. A nurture campaign supports advanced options and enables more attributes and behaviors to be tracked for the benefit of deeper qualifying of leads. Nurture campaigns are a great way to increase sales efficiency and revenue growth by automating “relationship-building” communications and dividing prospects into different “decision trees” based on their actions and place in the sales cycle. Nurture campaigns are designed to send emails based on Segments, Attributes or Behavior of contacts. Segments are an action or set of actions that have met conditions the User has defined; conditions can be anything, demographic, firmagraphic, or behavioral. By allowing Users to build different and unlimited segments the Net-Results tool can create nurture campaigns that have an unlimited number of actions over an unlimited amount of time.
With Net-Results a User can send “Email 1” then create different plans of action based on what people do with Email 1, for example, if a prospect opens it, deletes it, or goes to your company’s website from the email. A partner can set a nurture campaign to send prospects different email responses based on whatever segments users create. Net-Results allows users to leverage the power of segments to trigger subsequent actions based on real-time lead behavior or CRM data.
For our recent campaign, we decided to create a simple three-step nurturing campaign using progressive profiling. I’m excited to learn which type of campaign we’ll use for the follow up and I’m eager to follow the data as clicks, behaviors and attributes help develop the lead score profile we’ll track through the campaign. It’s been a great learning week at Net-Results and finding out about Drip and Nurture campaigns was just part of the adventure!
