Campaign Goal: To formally acknowledge a customer's purchase, and to kick off the customer onboarding process by sharing next steps with clear timelines and enable them to take full advantage of the product by providing resources to help support the product/service proactively. This is a critical component of getting a customer fully adopted on your product to ensure a high renewal rate.

Executive Summary

The Challenge

Identifying new customers and manually sending these contacts vital information on their new purchase can be a very tedious process with lots of hands-on, manual day-to-day work. There is a lot of important product or service information we need to provide to all new customers to allow them to utilize their purchase to its fullest potential. The amount of information could be overwhelming within a single email, so we would like to split this up into smaller, more manageable messages that allow them to digest everything over time.

The Solution

Implement an automated Customer Welcome Campaign in order to trigger out a series of Customer Welcome emails to all new customers. Think about what you’re trying to accomplish, and how to effectively communicate accordingly. Note that customer programs aren’t built strictly to optimize engagement. In this case, we’re more concerned with customers getting all of the information they need, rather than with whether they click every email. As a result, we will use more streamlined programs, omitting the resend logic we use in Nurture Programs.

The Impact

Increase customer satisfaction by optimizing the new customer experience. By starting customers off on the right track in order to improve their utilization of your product or service, you will increase long-term satisfaction, and organically improve renewal rates and up-sell/cross-sell opportunities.

How to Build This Campaign

You can build a simple Customer Welcome campaign in just a few steps. Everything you need is below.

Included Assets

Segments

The campaign uses one segment:

• New Customers

We will first want to create a segment that automatically populates anyone who is a new customer. Depending on the data available within your Marketing Lists, there might be multiple ways to accomplish this. Oftentimes, this is data that is being updated in CRM as a deal closes, and then being sent to Act-On via a sync powered by an Act-On Connector, FTP, or API.

In this use-case, we are going to be looking at a date field titled “Contract Start Date” as well as a “Status” field that are syncing from a Salesforce account into an Act-On Marketing List.

Here you can see the criteria used for this Segment:

Note: Identifying all New Customer records is easiest when utilizing a Primary List structure within your Act-On Marketing Lists. This allows you to build a single segment underneath a parent Primary List to identify all records who meet your "New Customer" criteria.

Note: If you are using a static Marketing List in Act-On, chances are that “new customer” data will be manually appended periodically. In this case, you may need to increase the timeline of your entry segment criteria to align with how often you are manually updating this data (e.g. Contract Start Date is within the last 2 weeks).

Messages

Create a series of emails that you would like to use in order to welcome new customers onboard. We recommend that you include a series of 4-6 emails, depending on the amount of information required for new customers of your company. The content within these emails will vary by Company, Product, Service, & Industry. However the main goal should be providing your Customers with information that will make them a successful customer both in the short-term and long-run. This can include New Customer Resources, Product Information, Contact Information, Guides, Best Practices, Cross-Selling of Similar Products, Training Opportunities, Event Marketing, and much more.

Here are the emails that are being used in this particular Customer Welcome Campaign:

Automated Programs

The automated program will be used to automatically trigger off your welcome series emails. As mentioned, we will use more streamlined programs, omitting the resend logic we use in Nurture Programs.

General Settings Tab

The “New Customer” Segment will be used as our Source List to pull in all net-new customers who meet our Segment criteria. We have set up the Program to pull in new records within this segment every hour in order to make sure we don’t miss any customers that have converted within the current day

Note: Our segment is identifying all new customers based on “Contract Start Dates = Today.” By pulling in new records within this Segment every hour, we are ensuring we don’t miss any customers that may have converted after our Program has checked for new records within that segment on any given day.

Additionally, we have set the following options:

Suppress entrants on Suppression Lists: Ideally, no customers have opt-ed out or filed a SPAM complaint, however if that does occur, this option will prevent them from entering the Automated Program. While they would be unable to receive emails regardless of whether or not they enter, this will provide cleaner analytics in your reporting dashboard.

Ignore Email Fatigue Rules: If you have set up Email Fatigue Rules on your account, you have the option to override those rules for this particular Campaign. If you believe these emails are pertinent to your new customer base, it could be beneficial to override fatigue rules here to guarantee that these messages will be delivered. If you’re unfamiliar with Email Fatigue Rules, you can find an explanation here.

Screenshot of the General Settings tab:

Program Messages Tab

The program will include any email messages that you intend to use for your Customer Welcome Campaign.

List & Segments Tab

The only Segment listed within the “Lists & Segments” tab will include our Source List that we added in the “General Settings” tab titled “New Customers.”

Program Flow 

Below is a screenshot and of all the steps in the program. 

Final Step

Once your Automated Program is in Draft form, it is ready to be activated. When you’re ready to start actively pulling new customers into your Automated Program, you will need to activate it manually to get it started.