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.)

But, I promise it's worth it.

So how do we make this happen?

• First, you'll need an email marketing platform that allows for automations (i.e. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, etc.).

• Write out all of your different audiences/stages and your goals for each of them. This is called a customer journey map. So let's say you sell Catholic apparel and decor. Your target audience is women in their 30s who are passionate about liturgical living. But, you know by evaluating your audience that you also seem to attract a lot of grandmas and husbands looking for gifts for their wives. So those are your three audiences! But what journeys or stages can they take? Maybe you have repeat customers, abandoned cart customers, and brand new subscribers. How do you get them to convert from their current stage to your ultimate goal (presumably regular customers)? This is where you map out the journey they would need to take (most likely mentally) from point A to point B.

• Now, write your emails based on that journey! Be sure that you write these emails in an other-centric fashion. For example, if you want people to become donors to your ministry, don't just write about why YOU need donations, but rather why donating will impact THEM. What effect will their money put in place? Why should they consider donating to your ministry versus all of the other ones out there?

• Set them up! Each email platform sets up drip marketing a little differently, but essentially you're looking for something like automation, customer journey, etc. In between each, you'll set a trigger (usually an amount of time to wait between each email). Within the emails, you can also put in merge fields like their name or other information to make it personalized. Then, you design and set up each email, hit send, and never look back! (Okay, that's kind of a lie...you should definitely check them occasionally to be sure the information is still accurate!)

There you have it - the closest we Catholic marketers will ever come to bilocating. Padre Pio, pray for us!

Need help with your bilocation? We don't quite offer bilocation services here at Gloriam, but we DO have a lead generation package that is the next best thing. Find out more about St. Andrew Leads here.