Summary
Email has proven to be one of the most effective communication channels when it comes to providing information. Leveraging Marketing Automation Platforms like Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot, marketers have the tools and technology to send the right message at the right time. However, marketers typically lack the right data to drive relevance to their content. Evaluation of email success is based on binary metrics, such as opens and clicks; these don’t tell you if the recipient truly engaged with the content.
With a typical email send, you have 1 chance to capture the recipient’s attention before they move on to their next email. This makes it even more important to ensure that your call to action offers the opportunity to not only consume the primary content but leverage the attention you have captured to engage in other, relevant content.
Using PathFactory to deliver content to your contacts after the click-through on an email send will positively impact your campaign by:
- Making the most of the click and delivering more than one piece of content while you have their attention
- Capturing more than just open and click-through data – get true engagement information with your content (eg. how long visitors spent reading the content, what other content they consumed off of the single click)
- Determine the topics of interest for the recipient based on their engagement behaviour and leverage that for better list segmentation within your marketing automation platform
- Provide true engagement insights to your sales team even when a recipient doesn’t submit a form
Goals
- Overall Campaign Goal: Increase contact engagement through captivating email content (ie. subject line, email content and CTAs) to drive opens, clicks and engagement with content.
- PathFactory Influenced Goal: Evaluate contacts based on their content engagement to determine program membership and sales readiness.
Step 1: Planning and Considerations
- Email prep and supporting content
- Set your success metrics
- Benchmark KPIs
Step 2: Build a Content Track
Building a content track to support the primary piece of content the email is driving to will allow your audience to consume additional content and move themselves further down the funnel while you have their attention.
For a step by step guide on how to build a content track, see this article: Create a New Content Track
Since the primary audience being driven to this content track are known contacts, a form is not essential for capturing engagement data. However, you may want to add an opportunity for someone to raise their hand for a specific type of follow up. You could do this through a time-based form that would pop up after enough time has passed where someone is showing a significant amount of engagement or through a CTA button.
You also may want to consider the possibility that your content track link might be forwarded from one of your contacts to someone in their network. In this scenario, you could add a form that only shows to unknown visitors that visit your content track.
Regardless of which strategy you implement, it’s important to pass the form submission data back to your MAP AND to PathFactory in order to identify the individual after their session. This is done by simply adding the PathFactory capture tag to either the thank you page or the submit event of your form.
For a step-by-step guide on how to add your MAP form to PathFactory, see this article:
Using the Forms Library
To understand how to add the capture tag to track external form fills, see this article:
Intro to Capture Tags
To better understand how to use forms in a content track, see this tutorial video:
How To Use Forms In Content Tracks
Step 3: Build your Email Campaign
The most important thing to remember when deploying an email campaign that points to a PathFactory Content Track is to include the email tracking link. The email tracking link is simply the content track URL with a query string that includes the email personalization token associated with your MAP. This will dynamically pass the email address to PathFactory when the email link is clicked.
Step 4: Prepare your MAP
Bringing rich PathFactory engagement data back into your MAP is imperative to making a difference with your campaign. By this point, you should have your webhooks set up and enabled to send the relevant information to your MAP. If you are still missing this step, follow up with your CSM.
Related documentation can be found here:
Setting Up Webhooks
Step 5: Actioning the Database
Understanding PathFactory engagement data will allow you to segment prospects who have responded to this campaign. For example, you may deem someone who spent a significant amount of time on the high value asset worthy of sales follow-up, or someone who engaged with more than one asset up to a certain threshold of time fitting for sales.
In these scenarios, you will need to have the following webhook fields in your session webhooks sending over to your map:
- Experience name
- Content count time threshold met
- Engagement time
Fast Moving Buyer Alerts
A great way to let sales know someone is a hot lead is a fast-moving buyer alert. This is simply an email that is sent to a specific individual or group to let them know the details about this lead – name, phone number, organization, etc. as well as information around what they did to make them a priority.
This is where PathFactory data can be very helpful – the content pieces they consumed, for how long, etc.
PathFactory for Sales
With PathFactory for Sales, sales reps have the ability to understand PathFactory engagement data at a opportunity, lead, contact, and account level in SFDC. These insights help sales have a better conversation with the contact they are following up with, since they can focus the discussion on the contact’s observed topic of interest. It also allows sales to prioritize accounts they reach out to based on activity and have a good understanding of their overall engagement.
For more information on PathFactory for Sales, check out this article.
Step 6: Go Live
Deploy your email campaign to your carefully segmented audience.
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Note
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Ensure you have fully tested the flow that the end user will go through to ensure the journey is working as expected, the data is flowing properly to your MAP, and the data is being actioned in the appropriate way once it arrives there. |
Step 7: Evaluate and Measure
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Did you achieve the goals you set out at the start of this campaign?
- What was the open and click rates of your email?
- How many contacts have binged on content (viewed more than one asset)?
- How many contacts met the FMB criteria (who are sales ready/ prioritized for sales)?
- How many contacts raised their hand for further follow up?
- How many event/ webinar registrations did you get?
Step 8: Optimize
Campaign optimizations
Segment your contacts based on engagement-–those with lower engagement could move into the next funnel stage of content, while those with more engagement can be sent to an inside sales team.
Content track optimizations
Is there a significant drop-off at a certain piece of content that is performing really well lower in the content track? Reorder your subsequent content to hold people’s attention longer or switch out content if it’s not performing as expected.
Are you noticing that you are getting people to your tracks but no one is engaging with your first piece of content or binging? Try pointing your email to a different asset to see if it’s more engaging for your audience.
Evaluate email engagement
Lower than ideal open rate? You might need to spice up your subject line. Next time try an A/B test with subject lines to better understand what is intriguing to your audience.
Not getting the clicks? You can put a few different CTA’s in the email to give your contacts a variety of content they might be interested in. They can all point to the same content track so the level of effort doesn’t necessarily increase but allows your audience a few extra opportunities to engage.