Many clients assume that the first message from a drip campaign to new leads should go out immediately or w/in one day of the Lead Post (creation) date. While this is appropriate for a single Default campaign, it's not the best strategy when you are using several procedure-based marketing campaigns..
Think of the your procedure marketing campaign(s) as a backup for your staff for managing older leads. Your staff spends the first 2-3 days contacting leads individually via phone, email or text, and during that time they will schedule several new patients and also have the opportunity to update Procedures of Interest for leads that came in with none. It's not long, however, that you are faced with a growing number of older leads in Follow Up status that you don't want to neglect if there is still a chance that they will become patients and boost your conversion rates.
With procedure-specific campaigns we recommend this timing:
1st message - 3 days after Lead Posted (creation) date
2nd message - X days after 1st message
3rd message - X weeks after 2nd message.
By waiting more than 1 day to send the first procedure marketing campaign message,
- You stand a better change of making sure the right people get into the right campaign audience
Your leads will receive tailored information about their Procedure of Interest and a clear call to action (schedule an appointment) that doesn't overlap with your staff's direct communication efforts to acknowledge new leads and schedule new patients.
Also important: email campaign messages do not change lead status from New to Follow-Up and are not included in the calculation of Average Response Time statistics on the Conversion and Activity reports.
For the 2nd and 3rd message, the idea is to continue to provide information and incentives to schedule without overcommunicating. You know your market so the "X" intervals are yours to define..
Scenarios for sending the first message immediately,
- If you are only using the Default campaign and targeting people based only on Status (New and Follow Up) but not on Procedure of Interest, a same-day acknowledgement / 'autoresonder' makes sense.
- If you are using one or more procedure-specific campaigns along w/the Default campaign and you feel strongly about the first message going out the same day, MyMedLeads recommends using an identical and generic initial acknowledgment email in every procedure campaign. The first procedure-specific message would go out 3-5 days after the initial acknowledgement, by which time several people may have already been scheduled or their Procedures of Interests verified.