Personalizing nurture cadence.
“Personalized nurture cadence is cool? Damn right it’s cool! Now my nurtures are wicked smart.”
As marketers we want to personalize everything! We have tools to help optimize email send times, we A/B test content, create persona-specific campaigns and on and on. The thinking goes that the more personal we can make our communications, the better shot we have at creating some connection with our audience.
So, why are we still setting up nurtures that send everyone an email on the same day(s) every week?
If you’re willing to invest the time to build out a nurture cadence management program, you don’t have to treat everyone the same. With the right mix of processes you can accelerate or slow the pace of your nurture for your individual audience members.
Send those hot leads content more quickly, and slow down the pace for folks whose engagement may not be the right fit for frequent sends. Test, rinse, repeat. In a couple of months you can have a nice model with criteria to bucket your audience into the cadence that’s right for them instead of one-size-fits-all.
What you’ll need:
Defined criteria for who should have their cadence adjusted, and in which circumstances.
Processes that pause/resume your records based on these criteria.
An engagement program set to cast daily.
Weekly report that shows records who have gone out of the process control so that you may fix any errors you have. The report should account for anyone exceeding the limits for number of times pausing and unpausing in a time period, and also anyone who has remained paused longer than the limit set by your slowest cadence.
Smart Campaign Set Up (modified cadence management):
Determine the Smartlist setup that works for you
Trigger on “Email is Delivered” and filter on your criteria for a customized cadence.
Run a nightly batch on “Was Sent” and a combination of appropriate filters.
Flow - Pause the record, wait X time period, unpause record.
Recreate smart campaigns for each timing adjustment. For example, if you want to have 3 modified options (1x weekly, 2x weekly, 3x weekly) you would want a smart campaign for each of those options. Take care that your smart campaigns are mutually exclusive from one another so that you do not unintentionally pause/unpause nurture members.
Smart Campaign Set Up (default cadence):
Smartlist - Batch on “Was sent” and mutually exclusive criteria from your modified cadence smart campaigns above.
Flow - Pause the record, wait X time period, unpause record.
As with any new process be sure to test out your cadence management system before pushing it live. Be sure to have a default cadence in place for anyone who does not meet the criteria for your accelerated cadences. This is a very important step as you’ll have your nurture casting every day.
