This page focuses on emails and nurture programs, owned and managed by Marketing Campaigns. The Campaigns Team is heavily focused on building a key element to driving top-funnel demand generation: an "always on", logic-based and persona-driven nurture engine.
When our ideal state top-funnel demand gen nurture engine is in place, we will be able to provide the right offer to the right person at the right time - based on their placement in the buyer journey (lead funnel) and their areas of interest, and in some cases, their location.
Key foundational elements to achieve this:
To be added
The calendar below documents the emails to be sent via Marketo and Mailchimp for:
Note: emails in the future may be pushed out if timelines are not met for email testing, receiving lists from event organizers late, etc. The calendar will be updated if the email is pushed out.
In the event of an severity::1 (critical) security vulnerability email communication is needed during the holidays, please create an issue using the incident_communications template and ping in #marketing_programs tagging @marketing-programs and #mktgops. Follow addititonal directions here.
To be updated and documented.
SaaS Gold trial nurture communication are sent via Marketo and Outreach throughout the 30-day free trial period.
Goal of the Marketo nurture: Educate trialers on key features within GitLab Gold SaaS tier.
Goal of SDR Outreach nurture: Qualify and meetings setting for SaaS Gold trialers.
» Email copies for SaaS Gold package trial nurture
Self Hosted Ultimate trial nurture communication are sent via Marketo and Outreach throughout the 30-day free trial period.
» Email copies for Self-hosted Ultimate package nurture
The following are active GTM motion nurture programs, which each contain content streams for awareness, consideration, and decision/purchase stages. They send bi-weekly with the date of deployment included in each bullet.
Note: Nurtures were moved from every-other-week to be weekly on 2021-01-16 to accelerate INQ > MQL conversion. Issue for Reference >
Note: in our future state nurture system, leads would be nurtured appropriately through logic based on:
These future state nurture programs will be aligned to GTM Motions, with three streams to clearly designate the stage of the buyer journey (Awareness, Consideration, and Purchase/Decision) and therefore deliver content relevant to their stage of the buyer journey.
These smart campaigns are in Marketo program templates in order to add leads to nurture programs. This is the interim of building an automated Nurture Logic Engine, which will enable a more scaled and efficient approach.
Review the smartlist and run:
NOTE: These are pre-built in the templates, no need to edit!Run Once > Choose Run Now > Click RunWhile the future automated nurture system is in progress, to request to add a segment of leads to a nurture, please create an add-to-nurture issue request:
These issue templates are also built into the epic codes throughout the handbook accordingly. As the overarching automated nurture logic is created, AND epic codes consistently indicate the required details for the logic, we will discontinue use of these issue templates.
Open an issue using the Newsletter Request Template, including the newsletter send date in the issue title.
Epic of Past and Upcoming Newsletters
A day or two before the issue due date, create the newsletter draft. It's easiest to clone the last newsletter in Marketo:
YYYYMMDD_Newsletter Template, right click and select Clone.A Campaign Folder.Name field enter the name following the newsletter template naming format YYYYMMDD_Newsletter Name.Folder field select Newsletter & Security Release. You do not need to enter a description.Bi-weekly Newsletters, Monthly Newsletters or Quarterly Newsletters).Newsletter.Edit draft.HTML button on the menu bar and edit the HTML so you don't inadvertently lose formatting.Email actions from the menu at the top, then Send sample to preview.Person field, then in Send to you can add any other emails you'd like to send a preview too. We recommend sending a sample to the newsletter requestor (or rebecca@ from the content team for marketing newsletters) for final approval.Approve and close from the Email actions menu.Schedule box, enter the send date and select Recipient time zone if the option is available.Head start is checked too.Approval box, click on Approve program.Until our foundational Marketo database segmentations (noted in the overview at the top of this handbook page) are rolled out, there are challenges in targeting audiences efficiencly. If you would like to propose an MVC email, please remember that the tactical execution may be beyond bandwidth constraints.
PLEASE READ IMPORTANT NOTE IN SECTION ABOVE PRIOR TO SUBMITTING
To request an email send, please open an issue for consideration of your MVC email idea, and provide as much detail as possible (especially around the audience), and please respect if the determination is that "the juice isn't worth the squeeze" and that we may want to delay the launch until some foundational audience segmentations are established. Please review the Email Review Protocol section below for more detail.
SLA: There is a standard 5 Business Day SLA in place for new email requests. All details in the "Submitter Checklist" of the issue must be complete in order to be triaged to the appropriate Campaign Manager.
*Urgent security emails are exempt from this SLA.
All links in email sends, going to about.gitlab.com will need to be appended with utm parameters, following the nomenclature outlined in this document. This is the way we track and give attribution to emails.
Below are the information from the issue template that will need to be filled out before the Campaign Manager will create the email in the appropriate system:
Marketing related ad-hoc emails are sent at the discretion of the Campaigns team.
Terms of Service or Privacy Policy updates that impact all users must be announced on the company meeting, in the #whats-happening-at-gitlab and #community-advocates Slack channels, and approved according to the table below prior to submitting the Email Request.
Support and Security emails sent to a small subset of users should be announced in #community-advocates and #support_escalations Slack channels, and mentioned in #whats-happening-at-gitlab if relevant.
The approval table below applies to non-Marketing emails.
| Users to be contacted | Approval by |
|---|---|
| < 1,000 | reply-to owner |
| 1,001-4,999 | PR, reply-to owner, community advocate |
| 5,000-499,999 | PR, reply-to owner, community advocate, director+ in originating department |
| 500,000+ | PR, reply-to owner, community advocate, director+ in originating department, e-group member |
What are email templates? An email template is a reusable HTML file that is used to build email campaigns (according to Litmus).
Why are email templates important? Using an email template allows you to produce campaigns faster, since the underlying code is already written. Instead of having to rewrite an entire email from scratch for every send, you can simply add copy, images, and links to an existing template before testing and sending it to your subscribers (according to Litmus).
What email templates are available for us to use? In Marketo (Design Studio > Email Templates), the following email templates are available:
Standard marketing campaign email templates
Other email templates (WIP) currently but will include notification alert emails.
If you don't have Marketo access and would like to see what the email templates look like, please view the project Epic and corresponding issues.
NOTE: It is very important that you format your copy to align with the design of the email template you're using. This will improve efficiency of building emails, and ensure copy is best fit to the layout.
What if I want a custom email template? You may submit a request for a custom layout, but please note that the critical priority currently is to efficiently launch emails and nurtures into market. In your request, please tag @nbsmith and clearly describe why the existing layout is not satisfactory, how often and broadly the requested template will be used, and quantifiable benefits we anticipate from the new layout. To reiterate: Upon implementation of the critical emails and nurtures, we plan to devote more time and energy to developing and testing new templates, however the launch of lifecycle emails takes precedence over these requests.
All Campaign Managers and reviewers should adhere to the following protocol for every marketing email that is sent to ensure brand consistency and quality in our email program.
We use both Marketo and Mailchimp to send ad-hoc emails. Marketo is the primary system for all marketing emails and the regularly scheduled security updates. Mailchimp should be used for emails to gitlab.com users as these users are not in our marketing systems (unless they have signed up for content). Examples of emails to be sent through Mailchimp: Critical security updates, support updates that impact a specific subset of users, suspicious account activity notifications.
In some cases, when invitations need to be more specific for an event, the Sales Nominated flows are used to allow sales to nominate who will receive the invite.
Note: if someone is nominated, but is unmailable (due to unsubscribe, invalid email, or hard bounce), they will not receive the invitation.
Sales Nominated automation smart lists are applied to Marketo program templates where sales nominated flows are relevant.
Review the Email:
Send sameple to the DRI for the program (i.e. workshop owner) who is responsible for testing and QAing the email. The email can be found under the Assets folder in the program. For some programs, the Marketo My Tokens are included in the Sales Nominated invite to make the email setup more efficient.
Review the smartlist and schedule recurrence of email:
Schedule RecurrenceYou can remove specific recurrences of scheduled sales nominated deployments. The FMC is responsible for this change for field marketing activities, and campaign managers are responsible for this change for demand generation activities.
Schedule tab of the Sales Nominated smart campaignx to the rightx next to any of the dates that you would like to remove from the scheduled deployments