Bilocating for Marketers: Building Your Catholic Funnel

If your marketing goals look like most Catholic businesses and ministries', they're probably something like:

• Welcome new prospects and tell them about our mission

• Convert inactive subscribers into active participants

• Build excitement around new product launches or donation drives

• Educate people about how to use your product or service

• Encourage engagement and interaction through brand ambassadorship and testimonials

Now imagine if you could accomplish all of this through email marketing on a personal, individual level.

Well gee, Emily, that sounds great. Do these magical emails also send themselves and miraculously make more time in my day?

Actually...they kind of do. Allow me to introduce you to your new best friend: Drip Marketing.

WHAT IS DRIP MARKETING?

Besides the coolest thing ever? (Yes, I'm a nerd, and proud of it.)

Drip marketing consists of automated marketing touch points that allow you to meet your audience where they're at without having to manually send a billion emails every day. (You may have also heard it called by other names like funnel, welcome sequence, automated email series, etc. It's all the same thing - pure awesomeness.)

So what does this look like? Let's say Pope John Paul II signs up for your email list on Tuesday. You send him an email that same day thanking him for signing up and sharing more information about your ministry. Then three days later, another email, this time sharing a resource on how he can use your rosaries or directory or whatever it is that you do. On day 5, another email with a coupon code.

But then St. Gianna signs up on Thursday, and you don't want her to get the coupon code before learning the resource. But also, you don't have time to keep track of when she signed up and what email she should receive each day. Boom - drip marketing to the rescue!

With drip marketing, you have the opportunity to digitally send unique touch points to your audience based on their time and unique journey, not yours. And the best part? It's all automated. Write and set them up once, and then forget about them as you bask in the glorious silence of a few uninterrupted moments.

HOW DOES THIS WORK?

I'm not going to lie - the process of setting up a drip marketing campaign can be daunting. I should know - back in my higher ed marketing days, I once set up a 75+ drip marketing email campaign that took me about 5 months to write and coordinate. (Note: I am NOT suggesting your drip campaign be 75 emails long! This was a special use case for enrollment marketing.)