By creating an interactive, personalized dialog with tailored customer groups, programs are meant to serve different communication goals. You can send a series of emails, such as newsletters, billing notifications, or discount and loyalty club promotions to your chosen users. Let's take a closer look at a nurture program: what it is and how to create it yourself.

Also known as a drip campaign, nurture campaigns help to build awareness and brand affinity, warming a colder lead or encouraging customers to more mature and valuable opportunity and lifecycle stages.

Use case: nurture program

Green Hands Garden Supplies (GHGS) is a client that specializes in commercial and residential environmentally 'green' garden tools and equipment, plants, flowers, and seeds. Green Hands Garden Supplies uses the following features in Acoustic Campaign to keep an ongoing dialog with their customers:

• Web forms: GHGS created a web form and placed it on their Subscribe web page. When customers submit the form, they automatically subscribe to GHGS seasonal catalogs, and join the active program.
• Programs: GHGS uses a seasonal discount email program that started in May and ends in September. This drip program automatically sends emails to residential and professional customers on fixed dates. It encourages customers to purchase supplies by offering discounts on future orders.

To learn more about true customer behavior, what drives customers deeper into the marketing funnel, and to increase sales, GHGS built a program designed to nurture customers by offering further incentives to those who make a purchase. Based on the amount of the purchases, they added value incentives, like discounts on multiple orders and free shipping.

How they did it - step by step

1. Create the program using a template.
2. Add four paths using a decision object. In the case of GHGS, the paths included: Residential Gardeners, Professional Gardeners, Residential Reminders, and Professional Reminders.
3. Add placeholder email steps for 'promotional' and 'discount' content for each path.
4. Use a query as the contact source for entrance based on whether the customer made a purchase within the first 30 days. You can store this data in a database or relational table with a last_purchase_date field, which tracks purchase history.
5. Add decision points and configure these decisions to occur after the 'Thank you for joining' email. Customers who qualified are then routed to the Residential and Professional Reminder paths if they did not make a purchase within 30 days after the first email. To give a natural cadence to the conversations, use wait time intervals. Control message sends tied to offer launch dates with fixed date waits.
6. Contacts who made a recent purchase enter and are routed to the messaging that best suits their profile and needs. Sales and interactions increase and you can use the data results to build deeper customer loyalty with additional programs.

Note: Typically data comes from a relational table that is fed by your purchasing systems. You might use a custom web tracking event if you created one and placed it on your website's purchase confirmation page, depending how that works on your website.