Despite a sizable investment in marketing-automation software, many marketers approach marketing with an ad hoc approach — a series of blast emails designed to fill a newly identified gap or need. While this approach does at least keep your company name in front of your audience, there is copious overhead in the creative and deployment processes that create an unnecessary drain on your resources. Marketing automation, be that a drip or a nurture campaign, will capitalize on the repeatability and scalability of a design series that is developed specifically for the: Audience Campaign type Messaging Timing Goals ROI With any marketing campaign, your primary goal is to increase engagement, raise lead scores, and determine sales readiness in order to pass the lead to sales at the most-appropriate moment. Achieving this with a series of unrelated one-off blast emails is exponentially more difficult than the development of a consistently designed and carefully deployed automated program. In this article, we will discuss various implementations of the three email types — one-off blast emails, top-of-mind drip marketing, and purchase-enticing nurture marketing — and how you can use this combined approached in order to meet the primary goal.

2. INTRODUCTION..............................................5
Lead scoring.........................................................6
Lead Life cycLe 7
BLAST CAMPAIGNS ........................................8
WeLcome incoming prospects ......................8
segment into appropriate campaign.........8
DRIP CAMPAIGNS (TIME BASED)......................10
stay in touch.......................................................11
recycLe Leads......................................................11
recover Lost opportunities..........................11
re-engage subscribers ....................................12
re-engage customers .....................................12
reassess.................................................................12
evangeLize ...........................................................12
train customers................................................12
address buyer’s remorse................................12
NURTURE CAMPAIGNS (EVENT BASED)...........13
acceLerate interest .........................................13
foLLoW Live/recorded events......................13
augment saLes interactions........................13
nudge shoppers.................................................13
no budget .........................................................14
too smaLL ..........................................................14
distracted .........................................................14
abandoned........................................................14
up-seLL and cross-seLL...................................15
referraL and LoyaLty .....................................15
foLLoW up free triaL.......................................15
remind of contract reneWaL....................15
bLast, drip, and nurture..................................15
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE 2
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

3. drip marketing
nurture marketing
blast email
marketing automation
Lead scoring
Lead life cycle
KEYPHRASES
PAGE 3
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

4. are looking for ideas for your drip campaigns.
are looking for ideas for your nurture campaigns.
Would like to know more about marketing
automation.
Would like to improve engagement and
conversions.
spider trainers can heLp
if any of these describe you, spider trainers can help.
We are marketing-automation architects and we will
analyze your need and create a campaign for you that
will ensure your return on your email-automation
software investment — even when you’re feeling the
pinch of full workloads and too-few resources.
spider trainers is a network of more than 80 experts in
email development, web development, search-engine
optimization, analytics, graphic design, ad creation,
multimedia creation, social-media postings, writing,
and editing. We bring all of these disparate talents to
bear on your project, to ensure that every functional
requirement is met with the expertise it requires.
our publications are designed to help you identify
need, understand the topic, and enable you to
engage in development discussions. While we may be
guilty of giving too much information, we know that
the empowered and informed client is the successful
client. We hope this guide does that for you.
We look forward to learning more about your needs.
please contact us at 651 702 3793 or
cmeyer@spidertrainers.com.
YOU SHOULD READ THIS DOCUMENT IF YOU:
PAGE 4
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS

5. despite a sizeable investment in marketing-
automation software, many marketers approach
marketing with an ad hoc approach — a series of blast
emails designed to fill a newly identified gap or need.
While this approach does at least keep your company
name in front of your audience, there is copious
overhead in the creative and deployment processes
that create an unnecessary drain on your resources.
marketing automation, be that a drip or a nurture
campaign, will capitalize on the repeatability and
scalability of a design series that is developed
specifically for the:
audience
campaign type
messaging
timing
goals
roi
With any marketing campaign, your primary goal is to
increase engagement, raise lead scores, and
determine sales readiness in order to pass the lead to
sales at the most-appropriate moment. achieving this
with a series of un-related one-off blast emails is
exponentially more difficult than the development of a
consistently designed and carefully deployed
automated program.
in this article, we will discuss various implementations
of the three email types — one-off blast emails, top-of-
mind drip marketing, and purchase-enticing nurture
marketing — and how you can use this combined
approached in order to meet the primary goal.
INTRODUCTION
PAGE 5
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
?! 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales.
Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this
poor performance.
— MarketingSherpa
?! the primary goal of any marketing is to increase
engagement, raise lead scores, and determine
sales readiness in order to pass the lead to sales at the
most-appropriate moment.

6. in pursuit of your primary goal, all marketing can
contribute to the measurable value of the prospect or
lead. this value is known as the lead score and is
sometimes shown in a combination of letters and
numbers, but more often, perhaps, as a value on a
scale you define in advance.
common, positive-scoring activities for email are to
add points for sent, open, clicked, viewed a form, and
so on, as shown below in figure 1. the higher the lead
score, the more sales ready the prospect is deemed to
be. depending upon your goal, certain activities could
result in a negative number, thus reducing the overall
lead score.
for instance, if you send an email on a topic in which
you have determined your prospect is interested and
they open and then visit your website, you might add
two points for opening, but then subtract ten because
the visit was actually to the careers section of your
website. this type of page visit likely indicates they are
more interested in a job than they are in purchasing
your product and should therefore net a lower score
than another recipient who opens and clicks to visit
the offer landing page.
marketing content for your campaigns should
correspond with the interest or activity level
demonstrated by the recipient.
PAGE 6
©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
LEAD SCORING
Figure 1. Lead scoring can be as simple or as complex and you
need in order to help you and your sales team determine sales
readiness. In addition to the scoring features of your email-
automation system, your CRM likely offers lead scoring options
as well.
?! for more information on lead scoring, click to
download The Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring
from marketo.

7. every lead has a life cycle and in order to develop
effective blast, drip, and nurture campaigns, you must
determine rules, definitions, and strategies for each
phase of this life cycle — and this is not a marketing-
exclusive effort, it is a company effort and must involve
sales and company leaders. engaging in this exercise
will ensure that a lead is never lost along the way or
has an extended period of inactivity. further, it will
identify leads that have no interest in your product that
can be retired from your list in order to maintain your
sender reputation. for more information on sender
reputation, click here to download Spider Trainers’
eBook, Marketing Metrics.
using lead scoring there are three recognized stages a
lead’s life cycle in which marketing can participate:
Buying cycle. determine where in the sales
funnel the lead resides, at which point they are
sales ready, and when the lead will be
forwarded to the sales team.
Sales cycle. provide direct nurturing from the
sales team.
Retention cycle. manage the lead through
nurturing campaigns and determine if the lead
should be retired or recycled.
in a lead-recycling program, you will determine when a
lead will be returned to marketing for further nurturing
and to which program. this can occur when, for
whatever reason, the lead has not been engaged by
the sales team, or sales has contacted the lead and
has determined that the lead is not sales ready.
automated-marketing programs focused on the lead’s
life cycle removes the sales team’s burden of following
up with lower-ranked leads — in other words, these
programs warm the cold call. depending upon your
sales cycle, you can either drip emails at
predetermined intervals and/or provide emails
automatically responding to action or interaction of
the lead with a lead-nurturing campaign.
as we pointed out in Marketing Metrics, your triggered
campaigns are the start of a long-term relationship
with your lead. you must show respect and honor opt-
outs, be respectful and send at acceptable intervals,
and show an interest in them specifically by sending
messaging that is relevant. use your triggered
campaigns to maintain permission to stay in contact
with your lead, establish key ideas, perspectives,
viewpoints, authority, and trustworthiness, and
evaluate and respond to their progress through the
buying process.
LEAD LIFE CYCLE
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©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
?! during the last five years, the average sales cycle
has become 22 % longer, typically with three more
decision makers participating in the buying process.
— SiriusDecisions
?! 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to
buy.
— Gleanster Research

8. blasts are single, one-off emails commonly used by
marketers to announce advertisements or promotions
to the majority or entire customer list. also known as a
single-event email, mass email, bulk email, many
marketers use blast emails exclusively, even if they
have invested in email-automation software. for some,
developing triggered campaigns presents an
overhead in design and deployment they do not feel
prepared to address, and blast emails are perceived as
easier to build and launch on an as-needed basis. Like
most automated processes, the bulk of the effort is
founded in the set-up, but the reward that is gained
from the automatic deployment throughout the year
easily justifies this effort. further, drip and nurture
campaigns can benefit from the reuse of design
components, which reduces the development
requirements.
Let’s get started exploring some ideas.
WeLcome incoming prospects
1
blast emails are ideal for addressing the first goal
of a marketing strategy: processing the incoming
lead to determine which leads should be
diverted immediately to sales, which leads require
nurturing, which leads need to be reminded of the
relationship (stay top of mind).
for those leads that are sent to sales, at any point in
the process, there must be an agreed-upon process
and service-level agreement in place for how sales will
follow up with the leads they receive from marketing.
further, and as mentioned earlier, there must also be a
process for sales to return the lead to marketing if
follow up is not executed promptly or when sales
determines the lead is not sales ready.
SEGMENT INTO APPROPRIATE CAMPAIGN
using the welcome email as the catalyst for
segmentation, depending upon the recipients’
interaction with the campaign, you will use
demographic, bant (budget, authority, need,
timeline), completeness of data profile, behavioral
attributes, and lead score in order to drop the names
into appropriate triggered-campaign buckets, or
segments. this segmentation effort groups together
like leads in order to facilitate appropriate marketing
messages for the group.
BLAST CAMPAIGNS
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©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
?! companies that excel at lead nurturing
generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33%
lower cost.
— Forrester Research
?! Drip email. a series of email messages geared
toward education, branding, or positioning of a
product to prospects or leads that have subscribed
and requested information. drip marketing is typically
ongoing and generalized messaging.

9. PAGE 9
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
Figure 2. In this illustration, we have started with a blast welcome
email and depending upon engagement, segmented the lead
into either the drip or nurture campaigns.
?! 46% of marketers with mature lead-management
processes have sales teams that follow up on
more than 75% of marketing-generated leads.
— Forrester Research

10. drip marketing is the process of staying top of mind
with your list with a predetermined design and on a
predetermined schedule. it’s most often a generalized
message sent to a large audience and with the
purpose of enabling segmentation or the migration of
the lead into a sales-nurturing campaign at the
appropriate time.
as an example, and in an over-simplified view, your
leads would enter your marketing program by
completing a form, event registration or scanning,
through a rented or purchased list, or perhaps through
partnering efforts. as prospects become a lead for the
company, they will first receive a blast welcome email,
followed by drip emails to determine interest, and as
interest is established, migrated to a nurture campaign
that will foster that interest through the sales funnel or
convert that lead into a customer through your
ecommerce system. this approach is illustrated in
figure 2 on the previous page.
in order to create messaging for each type of email
that resonates with your leads, you must understand
who they are, their interests, their behaviors, their
demographics, their needs, their buying process, and
more. this is accomplished through the exercise of
creating persona profiles — a profile of the type of
leads you have, not a profile of every individual lead. if
you need help with this project, click here to access
our B2B persona profiler or click here for our B2C
persona profiler. While this tool is a very generalized
approach, it will at least help you to grasp the concept
of defining personas for your marketing.
your drip campaign can be described as the early
stage. you should provide thought leadership and best
practices through content marketing focused on
education, branding, or positioning.
in the middle stages of your sales funnel, the lead
recognizes they have a problem and have begun
exploring solutions. their accelerating interest drives
them to engage with one of your drip messages, such
as watching a video or downloading resource. this
interaction is met with a pre-destined auto-responder
nurturing email and thus, the start of their journey
through your nurturing program.
in the late stage of the sales funnel, leads are
narrowing down their options and beginning to justify
and prepare. nurture emails should contain company-
specific information containing evaluation and
affirmation messaging.
DRIP CAMPAIGNS(time based)
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©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
Figure 3. Drip campaigns are time-based: send a message, wait,
send message, wait, and so on. At the point of engagement —
when the recipient clicks — they should be shuttled off to a
nurture campaign, which provides responses based on
interaction.

11. no matter the stage, it is critical that you provide
content relevant to their buying stage and their buyer
persona. content customized by the category in which
the leads falls is more valuable than content
categorized by industry. read on for some ideas for
the focus of drip campaigns.
stay in touch
2
drip campaigns are commonly known as stay-in-
touch or top-of-mind campaigns. this approach
is useful for keeping in touch with prospects that
are not ready to go to sales, but also identify leads that
should be retired. in addition to keeping you top of
mind, provide content that will build trust and
establishing credibility for your company.
a drip campaign also provides ample opportunity to
build more personal relationships between leads and
your sales team members when you send email from
an actual person or make introductions. add a from
address and signature lines with the name of the lead’s
salesperson to establish the salesperson as a trusted
advisor in their buying process.
recycLe Leads
3
depending upon the length of your sales cycle,
you may find that many of your leads are
seemingly dormant for long periods of time.
Without interaction with your campaign, it’s impossible
to measure their position in the sales cycle, or the
interest in your product. drip campaigns allow you to
stay in touch until such a time as the lead becomes
more active. by offering a wide variety of content on a
wide variety of topics, you will likely trigger action
within your list that enables you to segment off a small
percentage with each message.
for instance, if your drip campaign is promoting a
video series, offer topics that span tech support,
customer support, benefits, and the like. When the
recipient views a particular title, you will have perhaps
been able to identify where exactly they are
positioned in the sales funnel and in what type of
product they are interested, thus enabling
segmentation into a more specific set of nurture emails
ideally suited to that interest.
recover Lost opportunities
4
marketers most often build campaigns in order
to convert the lead into a customer, but leads
that have selected a competing company will
often suffer through buyer’s remorse three to four
weeks after purchase. this presents an opportune time
to educate them on the benefits of your products and
focus on the competitor’s shortcomings. use
educational content with messaging helpful to
companies not using your solutions and not messages
that sell. at the end of this recover phase, return
inactive leads to your stay-in-touch campaign.
if the product they have purchased is subscription,
licensed, or saas model, the lead is only lost for as
long as that contract remains in effect. your more-
aggressive sales messaging should start at a point that
educates them well in advance of the contract’s
expiration.
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©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
?! Progressive profiling. dynamic form fields that progressively capture basic
and then additional information on the person submitting the form. for
example, in order to access marketing content you offer, a prospect fills out a
short form. With each new resource requested, the prospect completes a short
form with new questions. the responses to new questions are added to
responses you have already collected, thus progressively profiling the prospect.

12. re-engage subscribers
5
there are myriad reasons for subscribers to stop
engaging, too many emails, new spam filter
settings, irrelevant messaging, and change in
needs. if your subscribers have not engaged for a pre-
determined period of time, use a re-engagement
campaign with a series of offers specifically reminding
them of the relationship they have with your company.
this campaign will likely prompt a higher round of
unsubscribes, but if they truly do not want to receive
your messages, it is detrimental to continue to send
emails and expensive to continue to send direct mail.
re-engage customers
6
dormant customers are usually easier to re-
engage than dormant subscribers, because
personalization that contains previous purchase
details can be used to remind them of a positive
experience and recommend similar products in which
they may be interested.
reassess
7
With automated campaigns, your marketing
department will be experts at identifying sales
readiness and kicking leads over to the sales
team, but in cases where sales determines the lead
needs more time, you need to have a ready plan for
reassessing where they actually are in the funnel and
start providing them information key to that stage.
similar in content to your stay-in-touch campaign,
reassessment campaigns are tailored specifically to
your need to reassess a lead’s sales readiness.
evangeLize
8
not every segment in your list is a potential
customer. you may have lists of analysts, press
members, alumni, testers, and new employees,
for example. each of these lists is an opportunity for
evangelizing a drip campaign; a campaign to keep
everyone informed and involved with your company.
train customers
9
once a lead has become a customer, don’t stop
there. ensure that every customer has a
successful experience with your company,
before and after the sale. create an educational series
of videos or webcasts targeting your current customers
to make sure that they are engaged and content with
your product. happy customers are the foundation for
word-of-mouth marketing — work to make sure they
are saying great things and not complaining. head off
at the pass your competitors with a recover campaign
targeting your new customer.
address buyer’s remorse
10
buyer’s remorse tends to set in at three to
four weeks whether it's a competitor's
product, as mentioned previously, or when
it is your own. so before your new customers have a
moment to start reconsidering their purchase, send
out messaging that reminds them of why they chose
your company in the first place and the benefits that
they will continue to receive as a customer of your
company.
PAGE 12
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
?! companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9%
more sales reps making quota.
— CSO Insights

13. nurture campaigns are long-term engagements
designed to nudge leads that have disclosed an
interest in your solutions through the sales funnel.
nurture email programs are pre-designed and
deployed to nurture potential prospects that are not in
the market this moment, but that need to learn more
about your company and product in order to consider
purchasing from you. this type of program may run for
weeks, months, or years depending upon your buying
cycle. With the longer-term campaigns, it’s not usually
possible to identify all of the marketing messaging and
communication in advance (it may well become out of
date before deployment), so instead you must focus
on the structure and criteria. this is best done by
designing the theme and drafting a schema just for
the extended components of the campaign. in the
following sections, i’ll give you some ideas for the
focus of nurture campaigns.
acceLerate interest
11
in order to give sufficient nudges at opportune
moments, you must first send messages and
second monitor interactions. this is the focus
of an accelerator campaign. done well, the lead is
guided along the sales funnel at a pace faster than
they would traverse it on their own. interactions such
as site visits, videos watched, resources downloaded,
and the like will trigger relevant auto-responder emails
to offer the next in the line of content focused on the
same topic.
foLLoW Live/recorded events
12
meeting your leads, either online or at live
events are the ideal starting point for a
nurture campaign that builds upon their
demonstrated interest. your first email should be a
blast welcome, thank you, or nice to meet you email
that allows you to shuttle the disinterested into a drip
campaign and the interested into a fast-paced nurture
campaign.
augment saLes interactions
13
you shouldn’t keep your marketing-
automation program all to yourself, share
with your sales team and work with them to
develop a nurturing program that digitizes sales
nudges where possible. this campaign can also be
used along with progressive-profiling forms to
augment their contact information and lead profile so
that the sales person can follow up with calls and
interactions with a personal, tailored touch.
NURTURE CAMPAIGNS(event based)
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©2013 SPIDER TRAINERS
?! Nurture email. a series of email messages sent to
specific recipients based upon their previous
actions or interactions and their place in the buying
cycle. also known as closed- loop, just-in-time, or
transactional marketing.
?! nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20%
increase in sales opportunities versus non-
nurtured leads.
— DemandGen Report

14. nudge shoppers
once a prospect has made it as far as your
ecommerce site or spoken with a salesperson, they
are ready to be reminded of their cart content or of the
sales discussion. the design of this type of email relies
heavily on personalization of the messaging to contain
information about what is in their cart, when offers are
expiring, new offers that can be applied to the cart or
impending sales, and much more. the key to nurture-
messaging success is the reminder. here are ideas for
reminder types.
NO BUDGET
14
b2b companies tend to sell products that
are more expensive and represent a larger
hit to a department or company’s budget.
as such, the likelihood that your marketing is perfectly
aligned with their buying cycle is slim. that’s why the
timing of nurture campaigns is so important. With
consideration for end-of-year budgets, start your
campaign just before the new fiscal year begins and
include reminders along the way of where they are in
their budget year. escalate the messaging urgency as
time passes.
TOO SMALL
15
another consideration within the b2b space
is the company that’s too small to afford the
purchase from your company. though too
small today, tomorrow might be another story. design
a campaign to continually remind them of the benefits
your company offers and provide engagement links for
tracking interest and lead scoring. follow them socially
and through search-engine alerts, to be at the ready
with a campaign specifically targeting announcements
about acquisitions, investments, and other news that
might affect their ability to take on this expense.
DISTRACTED
16
every business deals with the distracted
lead and distraction should not be mistaken
for inactive or disinterested. before kicking
your lead to the archive bucket, consider a distracted
campaign that provides very high value content in
order to truly discern the disinterested from the
distracted.
PAGE 14
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
Figure 4. Nurture campaigns are action/interaction based.
Messages (auto-responders) are sent in response to the
recipient’s action (an event) with the message.

15. ABANDONED
17
Like the distracted leads, there are many
reasons for abandonment, but not all of
them mean the end of the road for your
leads. in the case of lost budget, the opportunity exists
that next year’s budget will bring changes in your favor.
here again, it’s important that you have campaign
messaging that will root out the actual status of your
lead, before you delete them from your list.
UP-SELL AND CROSS-SELL
18
in an up-sell/cross-sell campaign, you are
engaging current customers and
developing opportunities to turn them into
repeat buyers. personalization plays a big part as you
remind them of recent purchases and suggest items
that are similar or that complement that purchase. as
marketers, we all know that it costs less to maintain a
customer than find a new one, and this campaign may
well be your best return on investment.
REFERRAL AND LOYALTY
19
companies across the world and industries
have found success with referral and loyalty
campaigns. referral or loyalty programs
provide cyclical benefits that are enjoyed by both the
consumer and the company. the buyer gains access to
specialized discounts and rewards, as these are
redeemed the company accumulates copious and
detailed information about the buyer. this information
is in turn used to provide continued and relevant offers
to the buyer, and so on. here again, the success of this
campaign is attributed to personalization and
referencing their buying habits and responding with
messages that show deference to those habits.
FOLLOW UP FREE TRIAL
20
if your product has a free-trial period,
automatically fire off messaging that
ensures success during the trial: training,
case studies, success stories, testimonials, faQs and
the like. also send a reminder at least a week before
the trial expires with the option to extend the trial
period or to make the purchase immediately.
remind of contract reneWaL
21
continuing with the repeat customer
nurturing ideas, eliminate manual renewal
processes when you launch a nurture
campaign for your clients with reminders about new
benefits, new pricing, new training resources, and
contract-renewal dates.
bLast, drip, and nurture
automated marketing is rarely about choosing blast
over drip, drip over nurture, it’s about finding the right
PAGE 15
©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS
?! Lead nurturing emails get 4 – 10 times the
response rate compared to standalone email
blasts.
—SilverPop/DemandGen Report?! nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than
non-nurtured leads.
— Annuitas Group
?! 61% of b2b marketers send all leads directly to
sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be
qualified.
— MarketingSherpa
?! Loyalty programs. marketing programs that track
customer behavior and reward those customers
for their brand loyalty. these programs provide the
issuing company with a wealth of consumer
information as buyer behavior is tracked through a
unique buyer id.

16. mix to convert prospects into customers, but without
overwhelming any one group at the risk of spam
scores and sender reputation. since some leads will
naturally fall into more than one bucket (segment), you
need to monitor the collective number of messages
they receive from you and you need to ensure that the
messaging does not conflict. settle on three or four
message streams; there is a point of diminishing return
and that occurs when using more than five campaigns.
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©2013 SPIDERTRAINERS