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 upon revamp of nurture engine and database nurutring FY22 Q2.
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. The Prespriptive Buyers Journey Nurtures have separate tracks for Practitioners and for Managers. They are designed so that they send the the right content at the right time to the right persona (aligning with to stage of the buyers journey).
Note: Nurtures were moved from every-other-week to be weekly on 2021-01-16 to accelerate INQ > MQL conversion. Issue for Reference >
Note: Salesforce campaigns should NEVER be created for emails or nurture programs. This is because the utms within the emails are captured on the Bizible touchpoints to tell us about this channel driving engagement.
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.
To see all the emails, click here
These are also known as:
We launched these for:
Iterations:
We changed send time from 9am UTC every day (5am on the US east coast, 2am pacific) to 4PM UTC. This Change went live April 29, 2021. We could use April 30th forward for a comparison.
Who’s part of this project?
So what’s the deal?
Basically, we have a series of emails that deploy to net new namespaces. The goal is to get free users to use features of the product. There are 4 tracks - adopt Create, adopt Verify, invite Team, try a Trial. Each track has 3 emails that try to nudge users to take action. If a user takes the action referenced in the email, they will not get the next email in the series.
Keep in mind that:
Sisense data
From email and reply-to email
team @ gitlab.com - which is a group inbox. Amy is also a member of this group inbox.
Mailgun
These emails are sent “from the product” meaning the growth engineers build the emails in the product and use Mailgun as the SMTP. All of these emails are tagged “marketing” in Mailgun so when you view analytics, it’s an aggregate look for all of these emails. There is also a Mailgun unsubscribe link. All of this data lives in Mailgun.
HTML files
All of the HTML email files are in Litmus.
For more in-depth information about how these emails are implemented, please view the project epic and all associated project issues.
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.
For one-time emails (i.e. a blast to promote a program for which we do not receive leads):
A campaign folderAd-hoc (one time) emailsYYYYMMDD_NameOfEmail where YYYYMMDD is date of send (i.e. 20210603_DORAsurvey)How-to videos:
Target list issue templates are an interim solution while foundational work is being complete for overall Marketo database audience stretegy for lifecycle marketing engine (DRI: Nout Boctor-Smith).
sales segment Marketo segmentregion Marketo segmentsub-region Marketo segmentWhat to do with DemandBase Lists: In the Marketo smartlist, add filter for either Account ID (18) or Email Address (depending on what is provided in the DemandBase target list export that the requester has submited) and paste the list of Account IDs or Email Address from the DemandBase target list export.
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:
| Template Name in MKTO | Use For | Image Specs | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| A - Event Invite v2.0 | Events or asset downloads | Background image - jpg 600px wide. Example here. | Top button is not removable |
| B - Newsletter Dark Mode v1.0 | DevOps Download developer newsletter only | The only image we swap out is the background image of the release section - 600px wide. The top image (infinity loop) is 600px wide also. | For DevOps Download newsletter only |
| C - Event Invite 2 buttons and speakers v1.0 | Webcast invitations, events, ABM, anything really | Headline background image - 600px wide; Speaker images - 300px wide | The text version will need to be updated manually due to limitations with marketo variables |
| D - Letter format v1.0 | Any letter-like communication such as account update | N/A | N/A |
| E - Newsletter Remote v1.0 | Remote newsletter only | TBD | N/A |
Template notes
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