Plezi is a marketing automation tool that fully automates B2B inbound marketing experience. While automation platforms like ActiveCampagin and Hubspot focus on CRM and many other marketing campaigns, Plezi keeps it simple by driving content-centric efforts to convert leads into paying customers.
In this blog, we will discuss how to use smart campaigns in Plezi for a dynamic lead nurturing experience.
What We Plan to Achieve With Plezi’s Smart Campaigns
We plan on building a sales funnel that navigates our organic traffic to one of our best blog posts. Marketers must identify a good blog post by analysing its search console data and how the content answers common consumer queries.
A lead magnet will get integrated with the blog post so that we can capture visitors’ names and emails in exchange for valuable content. When visitors fill out the form, they become a lead and enter the sales funnel. The leads’ information will directly get shared with Plezi.
Plezi divides the sales funnel into three stages:
- Awareness – Top of the Funnel
- Evaluation – Middle of the Funnel
- Decision – Bottom of the Funnel
The next step includes paying attention to each funnel stage and creating marketing workflows for them. We will be using lead scoring throughout the sales funnel to make the process more efficient and easier for us.
Suggested Read: How to Create a Lead Scoring Model
Stage- 1 (Awareness Stage)
For the lead to qualify for the next funnel stage, they have to perform specific actions that showcase their intent to buy. These actions can include:
- Opening of emails
- Downloading lead magnets
- Interacting with the brand’s website
Based on the prospect’s online activities, Plezi will assign them scores, and once they acquire a score of 19 or more, the leads will move to the evaluation stage of the funnel. The content shared at this stage is restricted to an informational basis and focuses on consumer pain points.
Stage- 2 (Evaluation Stage)
At this stage, the content is slightly different and presents the brand’s services as a solution to consumer problems with the help of case studies, specification sheets, etc.
Again, the leads will get scored based on their activities, and once they hit 30 or more, the prospects will move to the last stage of the funnel.
Stage- 3 (Decision Stage)
Here, the lead is ready to make the final decision and must get shared with the CRM platform. In our case, it gets shared with ActiveCampaign.
Plezi is a marketing automation platform and does not provide the flexibility a CRM can provide. A CRM tool in integration with Plezi will amplify your marketing efforts.
Before Setting up Smart Campaigns in Plezi
1. Set up Configurations
Go to your Plezi dashboard, and on the settings, select ‘Plezi Configurations’.
Select ‘lifecycle’ present on the left-hand side of the screen.
Here, you can set up the threshold for each sales funnel stage, as we discussed earlier.
Creating a Form for the Content
At the top of the form, there is a form space for ‘Number of points for an MQL’. Here, you will put the points required when a lead moves to the last funnel stage and becomes ready to move to CRM. You can also specify the employee that should get notified when a lead becomes an MQL.
2. Create a Contact List
In Plezi, there are two types of contact lists:
- Static List: Contacts get imported from CRM.
- Dynamic List: Contacts get added based on Plezi’s ecosystem.
In a dynamic list, contacts get added based on certain conditions set up by you. I have done the same. I have created a dynamic contact list where if the leads’ interests include landing pages, they get imported to this list.
To understand visitor interest, we use lead magnets. For downloading an e-book, the visitor first has to fill out a form that specifies their area of interest, and in this way, the visitor gets added to the contact lists.
The dynamic list criteria get defined in the contacts property tabs.
You are all set to start smart campaigning now.
Set up a Smart Campaigns on Plezi
Lead segmentation makes firms 60% more likely to understand prospects’ concerns and 130% more likely to know their intentions. But, how often marketing teams conduct lead segmentation on their lead lists is a topic of concern. Businesses do not always have the time to go through leads and nit-pick them into groups according to their attributes and online behaviour.
Plezi understood this problem and came up with smart campaigns. The company currently has three automation scenarios:
- Newsletter: For customer and prospect retention
- Workflow: For triggering actions from the lead’s side
- Smart Campaign: For nurturing leads
Newsletter and workflows are marketing strategies that you can easily find on other tools, but smart campaigns make all the difference. It sits at the heart of Plezi’s ecosystem and drives all the leads.
Let’s get started with the set-up:
First, on the left top corner, click automation.
And then, on the right top corner, click new scenarios.
Select smart campaign.
A screen will open up where you can define every stage of the funnel, the lead scoring system and much more.
You can not change prospects’ threshold lead scoring value here and have to go to the configuration settings as discussed earlier to set or reset them.
Another crucial form field present in the smart campaigns is ‘Number of unopened emails to remove a contact from the smart campaign’.
I have set the limit at ten, which means if the prospect does not open ten emails, they will get removed from the smart campaign.
Once you set up all the fields in the smart campaign, it will start sending emails based on the set configurations.
Setting up Templates
In Plezi, go to settings and click web form templates.
Click the ‘+Web Form’ icon present on the topmost right corner of the screen.
Name your web form and add a description. Then click on create form.
Now you can set all the form fields you want in the web form.
The smart campaigns offer an impressive progressive profiling feature called queued fields. Let’s understand it with an example:
Say your main form fields are:
- First name
- Last name
When the prospect visits your page for the first time, they have to fill these main form fields. But when the prospect revisits the same page the form fields will change, and instead of main from fields, queued form fields would appear. In this case, job title and industry.
It is a way to positively interact with the prospects and gather more information about them without making them repeatedly fill in the same information.
Defining Content-Type
We need to define a content item that will tie up our whole campaign workflow.
Head over to the content option, present at the top left corner of the screen. Then, click the ‘add new content’ option at the screen’s top right corner.
Select the content type you want to share. I will be going with an ebook.
After giving a name to your content item, in the next step, you can add more details about it like description, title, teaser, etc.
In the end, you must also add a tag to the content item, which will help in deciding the relevancy of the content to a specific prospect.
Tags get extensively utilised in Plezi as they play a crucial role in understanding buyers’ behaviour. A tag is a characteristic assigned to particular content. It represents for what type of prospects a specific piece of content got created. For example, the tags can be funnel stage, targeted buyers’ persona, lead score, etc. Say if I have an educational blog, then its tags will be:
- funnel stage: top of the funnel
- targeted buyer’s persona: marketer
- lead score: less than 30
Tags make classifying and organising all created content easier. It allows marketers to understand consumer pain points in real-time.
Plezi divides its tags into two categories:
- Exclusive: Tags that are necessary for the delivery of content
- Preferential: Tags that are conditional for the delivery of content
For example, if a company has created a guide specifically for marketers, exclusive tags ensure that they only get shared with marketers and not with other profiles.
Finally, you can define the scoring system for a content item. The scoring will be in-line with your entire buying journey. Here, the prospects who download the e-book will get 10 points.
Creating a Form for the Content
As we have created a content item, we need to create a web form for it. Click on the ‘content’ option again and click your content type.
I will be picking a 5-point landing page checklist.
Here, click ‘publication’ and then ‘create new webform’.
Next, we will give the web form a title and select the web form as the one we created earlier, and click create.
Now you can decide on the design and other elements of the form.
For example, in the follow-up section, you can put in a thank you page after the lead fills the web form.
We have selected to redirect the visitor to a URL that contains the 5-point landing page PDF. You must also put in emails of the employees who should get notified when a lead submits a form.
After everything is set, click on the share button.
Copy the script present in the tab and paste it into the targeted blog post.
This is how it will look once you have copied the script.
Setting up Awareness Funnel
Now that we have learned how to set up a smart campaign let’s see how we can set up a sales funnel stage. I will focus on the awareness stage.
For the awareness funnel, I have put together three emails.
In the first two emails, we will link our leverage our blog posts to attract consumer attention. The third email contains a blog post which has a web form. If the lead fills the form, they get a score of +10. Likewise, for clicking on the CTA of an email, the lead will get a score of +1.
Similarly, by setting up more emails and online activities, leads can gain points and eventually move to the next funnel stage.
For building this in Plezi, start by opening the dashboard and clicking content.
Click ‘add a new content’ and select blog.
Give it a name and continue. After that, you can define some more information about the blog post and add tags for it. This blog post is specifically for the awareness stage, so awareness becomes an exclusive tag.
Now, head over to automation and enable the below setting. It will allow us to assign an email to this content item. This email will get associated with the blog post and motivate the leads to read it.
Once you click the new email option, you will see:
From here, you can use an existing email template or one of the templates provided by Plezi. Here, I will be using one of my own templates.
Next, you can easily edit, design, and create the email. On the CTA button, you can add the URL of the targeted blog post, so the interested leads get redirected to it.
You can test out the email and share a preview with yourself or co-workers. Once you are happy with it, you just have to save the email. And that’s it; you have successfully associated a blog post with an email.
Creating Lead Magnet Offer Content-Type
Let’s see how to create an email with a lead magnet at the end. Again, head over to Plezi’s dashboard and click content. Here, click new content, and choose the content type as offered.
Fill in the required information, and don’t forget to set the scoring for page visited as 1 and for form submission as 10.
Then head over to publication and click create a new web form.
Choose the name and use the same web form we built earlier.
Now, head over to automation and enable the below setting. It will allow us to assign an email to this content item. This email will get associated with the blog post and motivate the leads to read it.
Click create, and a tab will open up where you can edit the web form.
Here, you have to make sure that the CTA button of the web form has a copy that highlights the lead magnet’s offer. When a prospect clicks on the CTA button, they must get redirected to the resource offered.
Once you are happy with all the changes, head over to share, copy the script and paste it into the required blog post.
Click save and click back.
Till now, we have created the offer we want to share with visitors. Let’s create an email so that it reaches out to prospects with the offer. We need to follow the same steps we followed earlier to create an email.
With this, we are all set.
Wrapping Up
Despite being a new player in marketing automation, Plezi does an excellent job of truly automating the whole digital marketing experience. Its shining feature is the smart campaigns that adjust themselves according to prospect behaviour, and new content makes hyper-personalisation easier.
Plezi as a marketing automation tool has a lot of potential and with the right marketing efforts, you can too use it to generate quality leads. With such a powerful tool, it becomes easier to focus on bigger business projects.
If you want to know about the basics of Plezi, then check out this blog: Introduction to Plezi: Marketing Automation Tool
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