How to Prepare for a Relationship Marketing Program
May 7, 2013
In my last post, I laid out the steps in the planning phase for building a relationship marketing program. In this post, I’ll break down the preparation phase of the program, which covers the integration steps you’ll need in order to launch your relationship marketing program. By the end of this series, you’ll have all of the steps necessary to build your own relationship marketing strategy.
Relationship Marketing Strategy Examples: 4 Steps to Prepare Your Program
There are four basic steps in the prep phase. These steps are as follows:
- Develop a work plan
- Build the program
- Establish campaign benchmarks
- Create feedback loops
In this post I’ll dive into the work plan, because it’s such a critical part of this phase and warrants its own article. Therefore we’ll cover steps 2-4 in detail in the next post. But as you read through, you’ll notice how the work plan feeds into these later stages, as well.
Step 1: Develop a Work Plan
At a minimum, your work plan should outline each step of the implementation process, by phase and outcome. The goal of the work plan is to ensure the work gets done quickly. It will help keep you and your team on track and provide you with a sense of what needs to be done in order to get to your end goal.
Since a relationship marketing program involves multiple channels, it gets complex quickly, and work plans keep you from getting bogged down. Each work plan will differ depending on the channel. For example, you may have several steps in an email drip marketing campaign and less steps in a social email outreach. However, you can keep the same format for all of your work plans, regardless of channel.
The following screenshots provide an example of a work plan for an email drip campaign.
a) Planning
Steps 1-4 in the planning phase of your channel work plan is essentially a carbon copy of the work you did in the planning phase at the program level. Having this information will focus the work you do within this channel.
b) Development & Performance Testing
This stage entails developing the creative — email, forms, images, PURLs, etc. — for the first email in your campaign. You will then load them into your marketing automation platform or email service provider and perform A/B and/or multivariant testing. Make sure to run your deliverability tests first to ensure your email renders correctly, is not flagged as SPAM, and that all the links are working.
Once you have that done, run an A/B test on subject lines (for open rates) on 5% of your contact list. You can also run an A/B test on content for click-through-rates, as long as you don’t get bogged down in trying to create the perfect email. You can always revise (and should revise) once the campaign is live.
The results of your A/B test will give you a benchmark to compare against once your drip campaign is deployed.
c) Prep
Now that you have your benchmarks, it’s time do develop the rest of your creative. You can also plug in the rest of your content into your flow diagram now that you’ve rounded out the subject line and email campaign, which can impact the content in your original flow.
The biggest action item here is to build the entire campaign logic and flow within your marketing automation tool or email service provider. This includes lead scoring, assignment, and creating your lists. I’ll cover more on lead scoring in a future blog post.
Run one last test to ensure compliance and that all links are working.
d) Execution
Ah, at last — time to flip the switch.
The timing of your launch is up to you. In this example, I’ve decided it’s best to run it between Monday-Thursday. The point is to time your launch according to historic data you may have on email open rate.
It is critical to also put a stake in the ground for your first follow up meeting to review the pipeline with Sales. Again, since you ran the A/B tests, you have something to benchmark your campaign performance against.
The goal of the one-week check-in is to also give you more insight as to where in the process your target buyer role is getting hung up. Try to look at each touchpoint in relation to the buyer journey you created to see how you can continue making tweaks to your campaign that actually move them forward to the next stage of the funnel.
Stay tuned for the next posts in the series, when I’ll break down the steps necessary to build your relationship marketing program, establish campaign benchmarks, create feedback loops.