Don’t Forget to Nurture Your Customers After the Sale with Helpful Drip Campaigns
Most marketing pros focus on pre-sale marketing activity to get more brand awareness and leads, but post-sale could use some love from marketing as well. Marketing automation with ActiveDEMAND can be used to create a smart drip campaign that trains customers and helps them get value out of a relationship with your company.
Step 1: Establish Goals and Triggers
It’s not good practice to jump right in and start creating a drip campaign. First, start with setting goals for your drip campaign. Examples of goals might be:
- Upsell different services/products
- Sell extended warranty
- Training/education/bring additional value
- etc
Once you’ve got your goals, you need to define what triggers the campaign. For a post-sale campaign, it’s usually a “deal won” in the CRM, but you’ll need to consider what happens if:
- You have multiple deals per person
- You have multiple customer contacts per deal
- etc
Step 2: Start Simple
For your first post-sale campaign, we recommend starting with a simple nurture campaign that you can build on. A simple campaign could be a campaign with 2-3 emails and some delays in between. Some companies are well served with a basic drip campaign like this.
Tips:
- Ask sales for some example emails they use when they close a deal
- Hit common early pain points for new customers
- Survey early so you can better understand your customers
Example Simple Post-Sale Nurture Campaign
In this basic example, we send a “welcome to the family” style email from the contact manager fairly quickly. Then we wait 1 week and then send an email telling the customer how they get support and contact us. After that, we wait until their one-month anniversary before asking for survey feedback on how we’re doing. You may want to survey earlier depending on how your business works.
Step 3: Expand and Personalize
After you’ve got a simple campaign running and are getting good insights out, you will want to start expanding your post-sale nurture campaign. Most companies will add different steps that help more customers along, assuming they’re going through an average user journey as per the data. But that just works for the average user. A better post-sale campaign uses decisions to customize and personalize how the drip works for different users.
Tips:
- Build a basic user journey for the post-sale experience, and try to figure out what pain points will be raised at different stages
- Look to track different user signals in ActiveDEMAND so that you have more to start with such as:
- CRM data on whether the customer has purchased common upsell products/services
- Data on what features of your platform or services they’ve engaged
- Watch for which emails get unsubscribed from the most. Those unhelpful emails may be turning customers off
- Personalize so that you don’t push the wrong stuff to the wrong customer. Don’t push the platinum package if the customer already has it, don’t tell them about the extended warranty if their product can’t be warrantied, etc.
Example Advanced Post-Sale Nurture Campaign
In this example advanced campaign, we’re showing a section of workflow that we use at ActiveDEMAND. It has a series of training emails BUT it shortcuts users who have already done what we’re trying to train on. So users who have already set up a call tracking number don’t get the email trying to help them set up their first one, users who have sent their first email don’t get beginner tips on how to send one, etc, etc, etc.
This means that users who are deploying more slowly get more help, while the ones who are blazing through get less, and only the help where they need it. This style of smarter automation provides months of personalized help to our new customers.
“Have they got an email from us recently” is a check if they’ve got a recent email and delays sending the next one until there’s a little break. Here’s the logic on that block if you want to use it on your campaign. It checks to see if they’ve got an email from us in the last 24 hours and will delay for up to 4 days. Green connection lines out of this decision are if they haven’t got an email, and red is if it fails after checking for the 4 days. You’ll note that both red and green connections go to the same place, so we’ve decided that after 4 days we’ll move forward no matter what.
