Build Your Audience
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define common terms for lead nurturing and automation tools in Account Engagement.
- Describe the automation tools available in Account Engagement.
- Identify actions to be automated in Account Engagement.
- Explain how to build an audience for your engagement programs using your prospect database.
Words to Know
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
Audience | The intended recipients of a lead nurturing program. |
Static Lists | A list of prospects that you build once and edit manually to make changes. |
Automation Rules | Repeatable, criteria-based rules that find matching prospects and apply actions to them |
Segmentation Rules | A one-time list of prospects and apply a segmentation actions based on specific criteria |
Completion Actions | Actions that enable you to automate directly from a marketing element, such as a form, file, or email send |
Dynamic Lists | Smart lists that automatically add or remove prospects based on criteria you provide |
Recipient Lists | Lists of prospects who you want to join your program |
Suppression Lists | Lists of prospects who you do not want to be on your program, even if they are on the recipient list(s) |
Engagement Programs | Programs that are customizable and conditional steps that prospects enter into through Engagement Studio for lead nurturing purposes |
Build an Audience
Your audience should determine the type of content you create for your engagement program, the duration of the program, the tone of the included assets (are you speaking to prospects, customers, resellers?), and the program’s strategy and end goals. The audience is the foundation you build your program on.
Prospects join your engagement programs through lists. Lists act as funnels, feeding prospects into a program. You can use different criteria and field values with Account Engagement automation tools to segment your prospects in different ways.
Dynamic lists are responsive, which makes them a natural fit for engagement programs. They’re easy to set up and maintain because the information you get from engagement programs changes frequently.
Segment Your Leads
Use the data in your account to segment your audience into lists for your engagement programs. Let’s look at some different types of segmentation markers.
While the segmentations you choose depend on the products or services you provide, and the demographics of your target audience, common segmentation markers include geographic location, job title, and company size. Personalization is key here, so the more targeted your lists are, the more you can personalize your content, and the more effective it will be. For example, you can create detailed segmentations around past purchases or a specific activity on your website.
Remember Leung from the Explore Strategies The Engage Customers module? She is a marketer at Get Cloudy Consulting company. She has been tapped to implement some features of Account Engagement. Leung also recently attended a trade show and converted several prospects. One particular prospect progresses through the sales process and begins to seek out more product-focused content. Leung needs to make sure the prospect gets the right product information from Get Cloudy instead of a competitor or biased third party. Leung needs to focus on her prospect’s pain points, how her product can address them, and the key features and benefits that will help them make a purchase decision.
For this type of engagement program, she can use case studies, customer testimonials, data sheets, and in-depth white papers. She segments her audience by using their indicated interest in product lines and activity data.
As she begins to segment her nurture program, she considers the following.
- What information should the segment be based on?
- Where is the information found? For example, does it exist as a field value in Account Engagement, or does she need to use a CSV import to update existing values and fill out empty ones?
- How will she build her nurture lists?
- What will the list be used for? Will it be a recipient list or a suppression list?
Engagement programs accept both recipient and suppression lists. Remember, recipient and suppression lists don’t have a 1:1 relationship. Someone could be placed on a recipient list, but also be on a dynamic suppression list, for example, one that suppresses anyone that’s been emailed more than seven times in a 2-week period.
Common Actions to Automate
Account Engagement offers four automation tools, each uniquely suited to help you take action in your account.
- Completion Actions
- Segmentation Rules
- Automation Rules
- Dynamic Lists
As both your marketing programs and database grow, you can scale your efforts in Account Engagement. Perhaps you’re used to importing .xls files in order to update prospect field data, or manually assigning prospects to sales based on their activities, but Account Engagement can do all of those things for you automatically. As you automate work you used to have to tackle manually, you can free up time to do other things.
Some common actions to automate include creating and maintaining lists for email sends, adjusting prospect score and grade, changing field values, and sending follow-up emails and autoresponders.
When using automation tools, consider following an order of operations. First, set up the tools you can use for any scenario, such as completion actions and automation rules. And then move to configure tools that you can use specifically for audience segmentation purposes, such as dynamic lists and segmentation rules.
Lastly, Engagement Studio is a great place to automate nurturing an audience because it constantly adapts to your needs. When you start a new program, you fill in basic program information and select at least one recipient list. You can use multiple lists with a single engagement program. When you add a new prospect to a program recipient list, they always start the program from the beginning. This is true even if the program has already been created and others are farther along in the process. You can always add new prospects to a program at any time without affecting other prospects in the program.
Next, we look at all of the automation tools that can help you automate your lead nurturing program.
Resources