CATEGORY: Best practice

Date-driven campaigns cheat sheet

It is true that marketing automation can be complex, but we recommend that you start with proven campaigns that are both high impact and simple to set up. 

A date-driven campaign is an email that triggers automatically either before on or after a contact-centric date. With data from CRM, website interactions and transactions, you can send targeted emails to contacts based on dates and events that are important to them. The examples below form part of proven marketing automation strategies that help you to communicate more effectively and more efficiently and are all based on common business scenarios. 

Renewals

As contacts approach dates where they need to renew contracts or subscriptions with your business, then campaigns promoting their renewal options are a great way to ensure things are not left to the last minute or forgotten. Tracked interactions with these campaigns can also give your team useful insights for manual follow up.

Birthdays

Acknowledge your contacts’ birthdays either before or on their birthday. This is usually used by B2C senders and often includes an offer or voucher code for an online transaction. For those who have products or services that contacts may buy for their birthday (e.g; restaurants) then it is sensible to send the campaign well in advance of the date itself.

Appointments

When contacts arrange something important with your business, like a demo or some other form of meeting, you can use what would normally be a functional email confirming date and time to inform and interest them in things related to the appointment. This type of campaign is also useful via SMS as well as email.

Purchases

After contacts purchase products and services from you, you have a good opportunity to extend the value their custom provides you by promoting upsell and cross sell opportunities. This is also a good opportunity to ask for recommendation, referral and review of their original purchase. 

With an understanding of the likely timeframes after original purchase for the follow up action, you can leverage significant additional opportunities.

Cancellations

Customer churn is inevitable, you can and should attempt to win back those who you have lost previously with a specific and timely proposition based on the anniversary of their previous departure. Interactions with these campaigns can give your sales team a useful insight into who may have found the grass was no greener on the other side.

These sorts of campaigns are easy to configure and yield a great ROI over time. You can usually get the dates that you need by integrating the relevant fields from your CRM or from data passed back from your website.

Learn more about the date-driven campaign tool in e-shot^TM auto.

If you would like to learn more about email marketing automation and get some help setting up your first automated campaign - we run a free series of workshops, our Marketing Automation Accelerator Programme