Imagine the scenario where your visitor simply bounces off a campaign landing page. This is all-to-common and defeating bounce is a core task in any marketer’s day!
But our visitor hasn't bounced and maybe starts to look around the website. It makes absolute sense that the website personalises around the campaign – after all it was powerful enough to trigger the visit.
The campaign messaging follows the visitor, as they consume more information, and offers multiple opportunities to re-engage with the campaign via prominent CTAs personalised towards anyone who visited the landing page, and so triggered the campaign but has failed to convert.
As a Sitecore Technical Marketer, I work with clients to build out solutions in Sitecore that create seamless, personalised digital experiences for their customers. From personalisation through to marketing automation, I bridge the gap between strategy and execution by configuring Sitecore and working with clients to help them acquire the skills necessary to become self-sufficient.
Many companies will complete a digital marketing strategy around their marketing automation campaigns and have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve. They understand their target audience, where to find them, and what their behaviour is on their website.
Then they dive into Sitecore to create their marketing automation campaign, but just don’t know where to start. Yes, it can be overwhelming, but with a bit of planning and design, it will make the overall process straight-forward and easy to configure.
The key to making your first marketing automation campaign a success is to keep it simple and start small:
- Visualise the customer journey
- Identify the touchpoints and elements
- Create and configure your scenario
1. Visualise the customer journey
You can either put pen to paper or use a tool such as Visio (or PowerPoint) to create a customer journey that serves as a guide through the entire digital marketing automation process. It is like a map that helps you navigate to your destination - you know your starting point, and you know where you want to end up, but how do you get there?
Below is an example of a customer journey flow I recently designed. The client wanted an uplift in the number of online home loan applications. They wanted to target their audience from a social ad and email campaign (the starting point), with the goal of getting people to apply online for a home loan (the end point).
The customer journey map identifies how a customer enters into the campaign (i.e. from a social ad or email campaign), and their interactions on the website that lead them to apply online.
2. Identify the touchpoints and elements
Customer journey mapping also helps identify the touchpoints and elements you need to create in Sitecore for your campaign. In my example, I was able to see at a glance that I needed to create the following:
- Social ad
- Email campaign in EXM
- Campaign landing page
- Personalised messages and rules
- Goal on the Apply Online page
Create and configure your scenario
The hard work of identifying what needs to be created is done, so the next step of creating and configuring your scenario in Sitecore should be really straight-forward.
- Create the social ad
- Create the email in Email Experience Manager (EXM)
- Create the campaign in Sitecore Campaign Manager and assign the correct channel and campaign taxonomy
- Build the campaign landing page
- Create the personalised banners and messages
- Create the personalisation rules
- Configure and apply the goal onto the relevant page(s)
Spending time on planning your marketing automation campaign will help you create the best user experience. It will not be perfect the first time, but if you take your time and remember to keep it simple and start small, you can create a successful marketing automation campaign.
The best news is that Sitecore will now record the all-important campaign metrics, so you can determine which campaigns and channels drive the best conversions, informing your marketing spend.
We've helped many businesses from a variety of sectors get the very best from Sitecore's marketing feature set to achieve their digital goals. Do get in touch to let us help you.
