Once you have a solid understanding of your market segments and your customer’s buying cycle, and you’ve created the content and emails for the campaign, you’ll be ready to think through the timing and triggers for the program.

First, you’ll want to think about how many touch points you will create for the program.  Will you send three follow-up emails or six, or ten?  The number of emails you decide on will depend on the complexity of the sale and the length of the buying cycle.  The longer the cycle, the more you’ll want to send over time.

Timing is also important.  Will you send emails every day, every two days, or once a week?  Again, that depends on how many messages you will be sending and over what time period. For most campaigns, weekly touch points work fine.  You’ll want to avoid mailing to your list too frequently, as this increases the risk of high opt out rates. You’ll also need to consider how long the campaign will last.  Will you send messages over two weeks, two months or a year?

Triggers are additional emails that can be sent based on specific activity taken by the user.  This activity can be a website visit, or even clicking on a specific page. For example, if I’m receiving early stage technology emails about my camcorder purchase and then one day I visit the pricing section of the website, you can set up the system to automatically send me a “free shipping” message since I may be farther down the cycle than you thought.

Triggers can be powerful tools, but you should avoid making it feel too much like “Big Brother” is watching.  In the example above, you would not want to say, “I noticed that you visited the pricing page and you may be interested in…”  You can be more general and still make people feel that you are speaking to them very personally.

One campaign we recently created for a client consisted of four touch points sent over a two month period of time with an additional trigger message that was sent the day after the user re-visited the website.

For more insight to help you build a complete Lead Nurture program, download the entire white paper here.