How to build a sleek marketing automation engine for your nonprofit in 5 easy steps
Having a marketing automation engine is an integral part of your nonprofit’s marketing strategy. When you boil it down to the basics, the engine revolves around two concepts: providing your customers with what they want, and getting them to take actions that align with your organizational goals.
Simply put, your marketing automation engine is about creating a win-win relationship between you and your customers. It’s about respect both for your customers’ time and needs and for your organization’s vital mission.
Read this guide to learn how to set up your marketing automation engine in 5 easy (not simple!) steps.
Step 1: Map out your big picture goals
Your organizational goals may be slightly different, but here’s how we mapped it out at FEE:
- Increasing donations — We wanted to automate the process of asking engaged people on our website to support our mission’s work.
- Increasing programs — Programs are the center of our mission. By setting up conditional logic to send certain customers timely and appropriate CTAs (Calls-to-Action), we can increase customer satisfaction along with the number of programs booked.
- Business intelligence — We wanted a section in this engine dedicated to helping us understand more about our website visitors. Are they coming from a domain name that’s tied to a grant-making organization? Our development guys will want to be notified of that. Are they potential partners? External relations needs that information, etc.
- Customer journey attribution — One thing that donors and grant-making organizations often ask is, “How do you know that you’re having an impact on your target demographic?” Setting up a simple customer journey section of your engine will help your organization approach donors with accurate and quantifiable results. You’ll be able to say X number of people saw our videos, Y number of those signed up for an e-newsletter, and Z number of those are highly engaged with our content.
Step 2: Draw a diagram
Now that you have a good idea of what you want the marketing automation engine to accomplish, draw out a simplified diagram of how you want traffic to flow.
The diagram does not need to contain every bit of conditional logic (it shouldn’t). You may even deviate from the diagram when you run into technical obstacles in your marketing automation software. But it should provide a good understanding of how the engine works.
When you build the engine, think adaptability. You want to be able to switch out parts on the fly if you discover they’re not working the way you want them to. Baking in long-term structure with easy adaptability is both an art and a science.
Start by separating it by the four organizational goals outlined in Step 1(you can add more as we did in the diagram below, but it’s not necessary).
Then break it down into 5 easy-to-visually-differentiate components. This is extremely important as you share this with decision-makers at your organization. The following are some of the main ways we chose to break this diagram down:
- Entry points
Where do the rules and conditional logic start that determine which path your customers take?
- Automations
Include some (not all) of the automations you have running behind the scenes. This will also help decision-makers at your organization better follow the logic of your diagram.
- Conditional logic
The bulk of your automation is built on easy-to-comprehend (yet not simple to execute) conditional logic. IF/THEN.
- Automated emails
Any strong marketing automation engine employs automated touch points with customers. In fact, this is the central piece of your automation. While you can’t spam people (and you don’t want to — it would be counterproductive to your goals), you do want to reach out to them tastefully if they complete certain actions on your site.
- Customer Journey = “TRUE”
Adding a few of these visual markers in your diagram can help your organization’s leadership grasp how customers are qualified as having been on a journey.
We chose page engagement, specifically, 25 pageviews. For example: If someone comes into the funnel from a webinar and joins an e-newsletter and has >= 25 pageviews, then we label their customer journey as “TRUE” — and we can share that beautifully simple funnel with our donors.
Step 3: Create each piece of the engine
While it’s possible to create one large flow in Pardot Engagement Studio, Hubspot, MailChimp, or whichever email automation software your organization has, that would make it very difficult to understand in real time what your customers are doing and troubleshoot issues.
Just like an actual engine exploded-view image, breaking the engine down helps to better comprehend what each piece does and, when something goes wrong, what exactly went wrong.
As you can see below, we’ve broken down the engine into multiple parts.
Within each section, you’re going to want to break it down further. Below is an example of one part of these sections broken down further:
For example, what you see above is that based on easy to grasp (yet complex) rules, if someone meets certain criteria such as being highly engaged and not being a teacher or student and subscribing to a certain email newsletter, we send them an automated email to ask to support our mission. If they open it and don’t unsubscribe and are still not a donor after a few days, then we send them another, and so on.
Step 4: Add detail upfront
While not necessary, you can save yourself and your team a lot of trouble by putting the hard work in upfront and adding as much complexity as possible to each part of the engine.
While we could just make do with one of these for the entire Donations section, we wanted to see in real time how people are interacting with our automations by age and acquisition source.
We also wanted to send different automated emails to different segments. For example, if someone is a highly engaged parent on our website, is not currently a donor, and is subscribed to the LiberatED newsletter (parenting and education), we want to reach out to them in a very different way than if they’re a Gen Zer on the Words and Numbers email newsletter.
Segmenting based on psychographics and consumption goals (needs-based) is vital to not only not annoying your customers, but also achieving much higher conversion rates.
Detailed segmentation also helps you understand in real time what’s working and what’s not, so you can adapt quickly, changing out parts of the engine for others where needed.
Step 5: Test, test, test
The last step before going live is to test your engine. Create an internal list of people from your organization and have them run through each piece of the engine. Chances are, they’ll spot issues that can be remedied before going live.
Bringing it all together
Setting up your marketing automation engine is a win-win-win exercise.
It’s a win for your customers as they get better, more targeted CTAs in a shorter period of time.
It’s a win for your organization as they get more donations, more programs booked, and, essentially, “free” employees through automation.
And lastly, it’s a win for you, the implementer. You get to spend less time hurrying around completing tasks and more time engaging your faculties and attention in more specialized pursuits.
As always, feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about implementing a similar system at your organization. Thank you for reading!
