Engagement Studio, Pardot’s lead nurturing engine, is a powerful tool for creating personalised, automated programs to engage with your prospects and customers. It is available with all Pardot accounts, but it is commonly undervalued and under-used.
One reason for this is that creating an engagement program from scratch can seem like a daunting task. However, it doesn’t have to be. The key to getting started is to decide on a goal (e.g. education, upselling, promotion, onboarding) and go from there.
In this article, I will take you through 5 simple steps to create an Educational Engagement Program for your prospects and customers.
Preparatory Steps
- Create a campaign
- Create / choose a list to use in the program
1. Establish your goal
The primary goal of an education program is to establish credibility and trust and position your company as a thought leader in your industry.
The secondary goal is to reward highly engaged prospects and customers and enrich their profiles with key information you can later use for segmentation and sales.
2. Create your content & publish on your blog
Pick an industry-specific topic and go deep. I recommend using a keyword tool (like Google Ads Keyword Planner) to find industry-specific topics with good search volume. Alternatively, your sales or service team may be able to suggest topics based on frequently asked questions and queries.
I recommend writing 3 blog posts, and a 4th article summarising the blog posts which you can convert into a branded pdf takeaway. Keep the posts short, compelling, and optimised for search.
The blog posts should align on theme but provide value independently of each other, just in case some prospects don’t engage with all of them.
3. Create a custom redirect for each article
Create a custom redirect for each article and use these as calls to action in the emails you send in your engagement program. This helps you relate all engagement to the one campaign.
4. Create your email templates
Each email in your engagement program will require a unique template. Choose a responsive template and copy this for each email in the sequence, changing only the content.
Your primary call to action in each email should be the custom redirect for each article. If you wish to create a button for this, use a tool like Bulletproof Buttons.
5. Create your engagement program
The program is simple. Engagement is rewarded with a scoring boost and a tag is applied to the prospect profile, specific to the campaign and email.
You can then create dynamic lists of your most engaged prospects & customers based on:
- Prospects with one tag (clicked on one CTA)
- Prospects with two tags (clicked on two CTAs)
- Prospects with three tags (clicked on three CTAs)
Finally send an email a couple of weeks later to download the pdf (use a landing page and get more data). Sample program below
We hope this helps!
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