Deadline reminders are a typical business use case where automated email campaigns step in to save the day. Pardot Engagement Studio offers marketers to schedule emails to send on a set date, which adds more value than meets the eye.
In this post, I will show you how to build out an Engagement Program using the email ‘send on date’, which can be applied to for an application deadline, approaching event date, membership expiry, or a limited time offer.
Prospects Entering the Campaign
You will want your deadline campaign flow to have a specific behaviour for prospects entering the campaign. Instead of joining the top of the flow, you will want them to enter at the correct email, according to the date.
Let’s take an example.
Your application deadline is coming in 4 weeks (31st October), and you would like to send a reminder email to prospects every week.
Email 1: 10/10 – “Application Deadline is in 4 Weeks”
Email 2: 17/10
Email 3: 24/10
Email 4 (the application deadline): 31/10/19
Any prospect joining the program on or before 10th October should receive email 1. However, if a prospect joins on 15th October, they should skip email 1, and instead receive email 2 on the correct date scheduled.
This kind of logic is only possible by using ’send on date’.
Engagement Studio ’Send on Date’
When you add a ‘Send Email’ action in Engagement Studio, you can tell Engagement Studio when to send the email in one of 3 ways.
By clicking ’Send on date’, a date field appears for you to insert your send date.
After adding each email, the Engagement Studio will look like this:
Get Clever with Content
Why would you go through all this hassle? You may be asking.
Surely, I could just use wait periods instead? There’s a reason why not.
Marketing Automation is all about being relevant in your messaging, for that specific moment in time; with this in mind, you will want to use different email content for each of the different weeks those emails are sent. Aside from getting specific with the remaining time in the email subject line, you may want to shake up the content to include more urgency as the deadline draws ever closer, or extra temptations, for example, an extra promotion.
Let your creativity run wild.
Summary
I’ve just shown you how to build out an Engagement Program using the email ‘send on date’ feature, which has a special behaviour for prospects entering the flow after the start date, ensuring they don’t receiving irrelevant/out-of-date email content. Send on date is a relatively new feature of Engagement Studio, and I am so glad Pardot bought this out – it’s a great help!