Best practices for building and testing a campaign

December 1, 2021 Stan

Setting up complex campaigns in Eloqua can seem like a daunting task and may even discourage teams from trying to create a comprehensive experience. Instead of relying on batch-and-blast, one-off email sends that can encourage disengagement with your content, try to incorporate these campaign building best practices to create journeys to guide your contacts through a helpful and compelling customer journey.

To create a campaign that follows best practices, the first thing your team should always consider is the goal you are looking to accomplish by sending a series of emails. For example, are you trying to guide the contact into purchasing a service or product from you, are you trying to get them to download a series of infographics, or attend a webinar? Setting the goal of the campaign will help determine how many emails are appropriate to send and who should be picked to participate.

Once the intention of the campaign has been set, whiteboarding or architecting the contact journey is a good way to brainstorm ideas for content to include, length of time to complete the campaign, and create a natural flow of information, or end-points, for contacts.

What are some considerations that should be taken into account when whiteboarding? Here are a few to get you started, but by no means is this an exhaustive list of options.

How often should contacts receive communications?

If a campaign’s focus is to guide a contact through a buyer’s journey, the best communication cadence may be once every two to three weeks, depending on the average length of sale from first contact to closed-won. However, if the goal is to prompt webinar registration, maybe send invites every three to four days.

Does every contact need to receive every email in the journey?

Sometimes, when building complex journeys, it becomes obvious that not every contact who will be participating in your upcoming campaign needs or should receive every email in the journey. Consider the content of each email, and the history your contact list has with your marketing communications. There are plenty of decision steps available on the campaign canvas to prevent already subscribed contacts from getting a subscribe CTA email, a repeat of an email they have already opened, or directions to check out a webpage they have recently viewed. With a little thought, you can create a personalized experience for many contacts just by incorporating decision steps on the canvas.

Will this campaign interfere with other running campaigns, or high-priority single email sends?

Although thinking through the steps of one campaign is important, it’s always necessary to think about how new campaigns could interfere with previously activated nurture campaigns, or other high-priority communications your organization sends. Industry best practice is to reduce the number of emails you send a contact overall, not inundate them with as much communication as possible.

Once you have thought through and built your campaign, a great way to test the journey is to make a copy of the campaign canvas, but in the test version shrink the timeline between emails and send a seed list of diverse contacts through. The seed list should include emails that have diverse profile data that will send at least one of them through every path a contact could take in your campaign.

As emails come to the seed list recipients, have them check for continuity, user experience, broken links in emails, and all the details that contribute to a positive customer journey. When you are confident that the campaign is ready, you can archive the test campaign, and activate your new nurture campaign. Need a little assistance devising a plan to build our and execute a campaign or testing a campaign? Relationship One is here to help, contact us!

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