| Vertical | Technology |
| Program | Lead Nurturing |
| Campaign | 3-Touch Automated Email Marketing |
Campaign Goal: Create an automated lead nurturing campaign that converts a subset of a customer’s warm leads – Middle of Funnel – to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) status.
Executive Summary
The Challenge
Prior to implementing the Act-On platform, this customer was using a different Email Service Provider (ESP) for email marketing. One of the bigger issues that they faced was dealing with was how to get leads that were stuck in awareness to engage further with the organization, and ultimately get to MQL status more quickly and efficiently. Their current implementation was a “batch and blast” with one-off emails. There was no real list segmentation that would deliver relevant content based on prior behavior.
The ability to tie together a cohesive campaign had been out of reach. Having line of sight into the behavior of a certain lead or customer, plus where the lead originated from, was paramount to their success. Just as important was improving the process of handing off MQLs to sales. Everyone agreed that there was not a good process in place and that they needed better lead definitions for what constituted an MQL and for each stage of the marketing pipeline (top, middle, and bottom).
The Solution
To create more meaningful engagement, the company needed to showcase how it could help businesses take control of key processes. We achieved this by developing a multi-touch automated email marketing campaign over a period of approximately 30 days.
How it works:
- An automated campaign kicks off when a lead completes the company’s introductory Video Demo (hosted on their website).
- The campaign includes a series of three connected emails delivered over a set period of time.
- When a lead opens an email and clicks on the CTA, Act-On sets off another email delivering specific assets based on their interest.
- These follow-on emails guide the lead to a final landing page that converts them to MQL status.
- Act-On sends an alert directly to the appropriate salesperson that the lead has converted and is ready for a one-on-one consultation.
Let's break down the email strategy. This company's email sends fall into three core segments:
- Awareness
- The first email leveraged the fact that the lead just completed the initial intro demo by thanking them, but, more importantly, offering an eBook to help overcome their pain points.
- Interest
- The second email was based on their product of interest that was captured from the demo. Depending on what they were interested in, the campaign delivered a case study that spoke to that particular product.
- Consideration
- The final email was to aid in their evaluation by setting up a personalized demo with sales.
This graphic shows the details of the campaign flow:
The Impact
This company gets several strategic benefits from this campaign:
- They can track which type of leads converting the fastest and which ones are getting stuck within the campaign.
- They can now build a pipeline of qualified leads with an attached opportunity value.
- They turned a very manual process (sending individual emails to each lead that completed the online video demo) into a fully automated campaign that engages the lead at the right time with the right information.
Their marketing team now has insights and efficiencies that let them focus on other strategic initiatives and leverage their time and resources more impactfully.
How to Build This Campaign
You can build this same multi-touch engagement campaign in just a few steps. Everything you need is below.
Included Assets
These are the assets needed to build the nurture stream.
- Warm Leads List - This list contains the warm leads who will go through the automation.
- MQL List: List of records who submitted the demo request form. The list will be used to early exit the Automated Program since they converted to MQL.
- Demo Request Form: Leads fill out the form to request a live demo. When filled out lead converts to MQL
- Demo Request Landing Page: Landing Page used to host Demo Request Form.
- Email #1: Awareness email that offers an ebook download and link to signup for Demo
- Email #1 Reminder: Copy of email #1 with changed subject line
- Email #2 : Interest email - Uses dynamic content to personalize the message based on the product interest. Contains link to information about product of interest and link live demo request form.
- Email #2 Reminder: Copy of email #2 with changed subject line.
- Email #3: Consideration message that links to demo request form.
- Email #3 Reminder: Copy of email #3 with changed subject line.
- Accelerator Program: Automated Campaign that will send out messages to warm leads to get them to signup for a live demo.
Automated Program Setup
General Settings tab
The general settings allows you to select the list of records that feed into the program and choose how often the program adds new records. Below is a video and screenshot of the general settings we used for this automation.
Program Messages and Lists & Segments tabs
To use lists and messages in and automated program you must import them under Program Messages and the Lists & Segments tabs. Once imported you can select them when building out the program flow.
Program Flow tab
The program flow is where we build out the actions performed by the automation like send messages, wait steps, and check for clicks.
