Designing your campaigns

A campaign is a programmed effort to create awareness about your products and / or services to a defined group of people with the intention of driving  them toward a conversion. A good campaign is planned out, with a journey model and people to support leads as they progress through their journeys.

Campaigns can be designed to be almost anything you can imagine, but I focus on a few standard, effective methods of coming up with your automations. All campaigns should have goals; bring sales, marketing, and operations teams together to discuss and agree on their reponsibilities in bringing leads through their journeys to meet those goals.

Using the delay-decision-action model

Building a model of your campaign is important, both from a planning and an execution standpoint. A comprehensive campaign model demonstrates to be careful automating if you’re :

• Selling high-value, expensive items or fundraising large dollar amounts
• Offering services where a high degree of trust is required
• Marketing anything that is so complex that a back-and-forth question-and-answer session is likely needed

In cases where you don’t want to automate communication directly with a lead or customer, use your automation to trigger a CRM activity involving a live person on your staff. It’s still a form of marketing automation, as trigger is automated, but the action itself is fulfilled by a person.

On the other hand, if you can easily educate a person by sending useful material on an automated schedule, you save time from having to hire people to say the same things over and over again. Leverage software to communicate relevant, targeted information to ensure consistency of experience and provide a measure of legal accountability.