Five steps to a welcome journey in Salesforce Pardot
Fundraising for a non-profit organization presents you with the necessary challenges: increasingly critical donors, instructing door-to-door recruiters and then noticing that the donors recruited cancel after a month.
In one of my previous blog posts I advised: think big and start small with marketing automation. For example, start with a simple welcome journey for new donors. In this article, I make a fictional journey in five steps in the engagement studio of Pardot. But first, I share the thinking that precedes this!
Step 1: determine the goal of your journey.
The purpose of this journey for new donors is loyalty. I want to make my new donors enthusiastic about my goal in a journey. I do this by not only introducing them to our mission and beneficiaries, but also to the people who work for our organization.
TIP: chart how long the average donor now stays with you, so that you can measure the effect of your journey. Schedule an interim evaluation!
Step 2: think about the next step
What do you want to do with your donors after the welcome trip? You can use this journey to measure the interest of your followers, so that your content increasingly meets the wishes and needs of your reader. Which areas of interest can you define? Which data is important for your organization to record and can you devise a new journey for that?
In my next blog I give a suggestion for this.
Step 3: determine who you include in your journey
I select everyone who gives an authorization for a structural contribution, regardless of the amount. As soon as someone becomes a donor, this is visible in Salesforce and you can work with this information in Pardot. I make sure these people are on a list in Pardot. And I make sure they disappear from the list if they cancel their donorship. This is called a dynamic list in Pardot.
Step 4: create your journey in Pardot
Below you see a picture of what the engagement studio in Pardot looks like. You look at a visual representation of the journey, which you can easily put together with the drag-and-drop functionality. The list with which you start your journey, is now nothing more than a name and a place where the new donors are sent when they meet the criterion of a donor (a continuous authorization).
Step 5: create inspiring content!
After this thinking, the creation begins. I have chosen to welcome new donors one day after they have been authorized by means of a short personal e-mail and to thank them for the support. You first create all e-mails, forms and any landing pages for your journey in Pardot. You then start your engagement program and you can add the assets you have created.
IDEA: let your fundraiser or a beneficiary speak in one of your emails. Tell what you do with donations.
ANOTHER IDEA: ask a question to enrich your database. For example, you can ask about interests on which you can base a follow-up journey. Or you try to complete missing information with a short follow-up question.
My journey ends after the last action: adding to a new list. To do this, consider the criteria in step 2. This is the starting point for the next journey. You decide how long your journey takes, as well as the amount and distribution of your messages.
