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Keep Your Lead Nurturing Messages Fresh

Posted on September 19, 2011 by in Email Marketing, Lead Nurturing, Marketing Strategy

Here’s a quick tip on how to keep you lead nurturing campaigns fresh – create templates that link to dynamic content.

What’s dynamic content? It’s a page that’s regularly updated but maintains the same link. Good examples of this are your blog (the main page, not a specific blog post), your social media pages like Twitter and Facebook, your company news page or a page where you announce new features.

Below is an example of a very basic nurturing email with dynamic content.

Dynamic Nurturing Email

Linking to this dynamic content means your nurturing campaigns stay fresh over time. You can craft simple templates with messaging pointing the reader to check out your latest blog posts and no matter when they visit, the content will be current (assuming you update your blog, of course).

Directing prospects to a page that showcases your new features is especially helpful when nurturing lost leads. If you lost a deal to a competitor, it may have been because of a certain feature your product didn’t offer. Drawing attention to product innovations can be an effective way to put yourself back in the game when it’s time for a lost customer to renew their contract with their current vendor.

As you develop your lead nurturing strategy, think about how to make your campaigns low maintenance. This will ensure they that they are effective time savers for your marketing team.

Using Marketing Automation to Manage Events

Posted on September 14, 2011 by in Lead Nurturing, ROI

Many marketers use events as a part of their overall marketing plan – whether it’s hosting events for prospects and customers or sponsoring industry events and trade shows for lead generation. Though there are many tools built for for managing events, marketing automation can also step in and help out in a few key areas. Here are some examples of how to effectively use your marketing automation tool as a part of your event marketing strategy.

Promote your event and send reminders.
Using the email tools in a marketing automation system, you can schedule emails for future dates. This is handy if you want to promote ticket sales for an event set up a series of reminder messages for those who have already purchased tickets.

Use forms for contests and lead capture.
Some marketing automation vendors offer cookie-less forms, which are different than traditional online form. Most online forms track visitor activity after they fill out the form, but by using cookie-less forms, you can collect an infinite amount of data using a single form without any messy tracking results. This is ideal for capturing people’s information at a trade show booth and also works well for running a state-of-the-art sweepstakes. One of the best parts about using a form to collect information is that you can instantly send out auto-responders and even begin a drip nurturing campaign to try to drive future brand engagement.

Track ROI
By simply tagging prospects with the correct campaign in your marketing automation system, you can easily track the ROI on your event investment. Prospects can be tagged with multiple campaigns so that even if you’ve interacted with them over a long period of time, you can still see that your event had an impact during the buying cycle.

 

Storytelling with Lead Nurturing

Posted on July 6, 2011 by in Lead Nurturing

Creating an effective email marketing plan involves understanding your potential customers’ mindsets. What are they doing when they’re checking their email? How do they feel about your company? What is going through their minds when they see the email you send? These questions are imperative to nurturing leads in order to convince them to become customers. By answering these questions, you can build a lead nurturing plan that tells a story.

How To Tell a Story With Lead Nuturing

The main quality of a story is that it flows nicely. It has a beginning, it goes through a logical, natural shift during the middle, and it culminates in an end – ideally, the decision made by the lead to purchase the product. Most people don’t just make snap decisions to buy items. They read about something online in the initial touch with your company, remember it, mull it over and eventually come to make the decision on their own.

The trick to lead nurturing via storytelling is making sure that your lead nurturing program of sending multiple emails nudges potential customers toward the right decision over time. This can be accomplished by segmenting your prospects according to various factors (for example, lead score or stage in the buying cycle). You may want to begin your nurturing program with a welcoming email, then send some marketing materials, then provide an email explaining a new feature or product that may align with their business strategy. Including marketing content (case studies, white papers) that would be most relevant to the prospect, keeping in mind their role at the company and the specific challenges they may face.

Be Mindful Of Your Prospect’s Progression

At any given moment, you may have dozens of leads that are slightly interested in buying your product. Gradually as they start to feel a greater need for what you have to offer, they will become more interested in purchasing your product or service. You will want the timing of your story to adjust throughout the nurturing cycle. You can do this by planning key activity triggers in your nurturing program like removing a prospect once they engage with a sales representative or transferring them to an accelerated track if they request a certain piece of content. Prospects that do not show specific buying signals can be left of the default drip track through completion.

When it comes to telling a story with lead nurturing, the goal is to build a series of emails and marketing materials that help the lead understand the benefits of your product for their specific situation.

Start at the Shallow End

Posted on May 5, 2011 by in Landing Pages, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring

Diving Board

Don't dive in too deep when you're just learning to swim.

Marketing automation covers a lot of territory, and the possibilities for improving your bottom line can be overwhelming. As a growing field of business technology, it seems like a new methodology or technique is being created every day. If you’re just starting out with including automation techniques in your online marketing campaigns, it doesn’t make sense to utilize every aspect right away. Start small, dipping your toe in the shallow end, and work your way up from there as you get comfortable with the techniques. Remember that poorly executed advanced marketing automation is much less effective than correctly executed simple marketing automation.

Lead Nurturing

The most complicated area of marketing automation is probably the practice of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is how you convince potential customers to become paying customers, and automation programs allow you to do this on a large scale. If you’re just starting out, consider using simple drip programs for lead nurturing. A basic drip program will follow a straight path and consist of emails with pauses in between. As you get familiar with the system and start segmenting and understanding click actions, you can branch off a little more, but try to rein in your excitement and keep things straight, or you could find yourself in the deep end of the pool, unable to swim.

Scoring

Most MA programs have a default scoring system which should be adequate for anyone starting out. The urge might be to try and customize your scoring system, but remember that making changes will effect your entire database and can be difficult to reverse if you make a mistake. Certain changes are more and less valuable, so the best way to go about adjusting your own scoring system would be to change point values gradually and see what happens to your inbound leads. This way you can get a feel for what actions are more valuable.

Landing Pages

Smart forms and multivariate testing can be great tools for capturing lead information on your website, but inexperience can lead to landing pages that drive leads away. The key is to start with simple forms on your landing pages that ask just the minimal required amount of information to be useful and avoid being intrusive. Over time you can begin A/B testing to determine the right copy for your landing pages and fields for your forms.

What if I Were the Prospect?

Posted on April 4, 2011 by in Landing Pages, Lead Nurturing

By default, marketing automation encourages marketers to develop campaigns and programs to best generate leads and create opportunities. They have control over the amount of emails sent by a lead nurturing program or the information requested in a contact form. Unfortunately, most of the decisions are made from the viewpoint of the marketer and not the recipient – the prospect.  To achieve the most success with marketing automation, it’s important to assume the role of a lead and work through the content. Just ask yourself, “What if I were the prospect?” (WIIWTP).

Here are some areas to apply WIIWTP:

  • Email Frequency – How many emails do you receive per day? Chances are that it’s more than you can handle / would like to receive. With this in mind, think about how often you are reaching out to a prospect by email. Like you, most prospects don’t want to have their inbox flooded with messages from the same company. Consider, as a prospect, how often you are willing to receive emails from another company to determine the appropriate frequency. WIIWTP? – I would want the company to keep in touch with relevant information twice a month, but not overload me with emails.
  • Email Content – In general, most emails come off as marketing messages or personal emails. Although both types of emails can be successful, they have their own unique goals to accomplish and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. For instance, a full HTML email is great for announcing new features, whereas a personalized, text email helps the salesperson better engage the prospect. Do you prefer to be contacted by your sales rep at the company or by the general account? By using dynamic content, the emails used in a nurturing program can be general text emails that come off as personalized. WIIWTP? – I would want the receive the correct kind of email based on my stage in the buying process.
  • Contact Forms – These days, forms are the gatekeepers of information.  Companies use them as a means to gather information about a prospect and leads fill them out to unlock content. It’s a win-win situation as long as there’s balance. When companies get greedy for details, then prospects get deterred and don’t fill out the form. To keep this from happening, the marketer should approach the form from the perspective of the prospect to determine the amount of information needed by the company that the prospect would provide. As a visitor of the website, would you be willing to give your job title to download a white paper? Maybe not at first, but the company can use progressive profiling to slowly build a complete profile as new content is accessed. WIIWTP? – I would want to fill out a simple, non-invasive form for content.

WIIWTP? – This may not be the next big craze in rubber bracelets, but you may want to write it on a sticky note to put at your desk. You’ll always have that reminder of “What if I were the prospect?”

The Sales Team is Key to Marketing Automation Adoption

Posted on March 18, 2011 by in CRM, Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, ROI

Sales Advocate

Make Sales your #1 Fan

When implementing a new system, it is important to get buy-in from other users. Often in the case of marketing automation, the purchasing decision is made by the marketing team. In order for the implementation to be successful, it should be emphasized that the tool may be called marketing automation, but the sales team will see great benefits as well.

If you take the approach of just dumping a new tool in the lap of your already busy sales reps, they may be a bit overwhelmed and feel that they don’t have time to learn a new system. Instead, you should hold a collaborative meeting and explain the benefits of the new system and how it will make the sales process easier.

Sales benefits of marketing automation include:

  • More detailed information in the CRM, including a record of prospect activities
  • Daily and real-time alerts on active prospects
  • Anonymous visitor tracking to see who’s surfing your site
  • Automated nurturing emails to take education and follow-up out of the hands of sales
  • Lead scoring and grading to show a rep the hottest leads
  • Improved reporting to help identify the source of the best leads
  • Less junk and fewer duplicate records in the CRM

Gaining champions in the sales department will help ensure that your new investment is embraced across the organization.

Timing is Everything: Lead Nurturing Best Practices

Posted on February 14, 2011 by in Email Marketing, Lead Nurturing

inboxToday I read an article on MarketingCharts that summarized some research done on why people “unlike” a brand on Facebook. The top answer? Overposting. Don’t cha just hate it when someone clogs up your newsfeed? This reminded me of a recent case in which I unsubscribed from an email list. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the company, in fact, I buy from them often – it was because the just sent me too many emails. Sometimes two messages a day, for a product that I only buy about once every three months. I was actually disappointed to unsubscribe, as I love the coupons they send, but the frequent messages were just too much of a nuisance.

Frequency is something that’s very important to keep in mind when you’re setting up your automated email programs, such as a lead nurturing campaign. You want to keep your brand top of mind, staying in front of a product until they are ready to buy, but you don’t want to annoy them and cause them to unsubscribe. The Facebook study actually showed that there was little correlation between “unliking” a brand and refusal to buy from that company in the future – but I’d assert that B2B relationships are a bit different. Because, in many cases, the emails are designed to look like they are coming from a specific sales representative, too frequent or non-relevant emails could result in the person having negative feelings toward your sales rep next time they pick up the phone and call to follow-up.

Best practices recommend sending nurturing emails somewhere in the range of once every 1 – 2 weeks. This could vary in some cases – for example, you may send someone an informal welcome or follow-up email when they are placed on the nurturing track and then send along their first piece of promised content shortly after, to get them started on the program. It is also recommended that you have several different nurturing tracks – some for a more aggressive sales approach, and others for a long-term, educational approach. Prospects should be placed on the appropriate track based on their expressed interest and their stage in the buying cycle. If a prospect is placed on a nurturing track, but is also involved with a sales person, the sales person should be aware of all nurturing touch points so that they can bring up the nurturing messages when talking with a prospect (again, making the experience appear more personalized) and also so that they don’t send additional emails within a short window of when a nurturing email was sent. This can easily be accomplished with a marketing automation tool, which shows the sales representative a record of all past prospect interactions.

When it comes to email marketing and lead nurturing, the familiar golden rule applies – email others as you would like to be emailed.

Working Miracles With Lead Nurturing

Posted on October 8, 2010 by in Conversion Rate, Email Marketing, Lead Nurturing

I was just talking to a salesguy today about an amazing miracle he worked with a presumed-dead lead. The sales team had more or less written it off as dead by mid-2009, and the lead pretty much fell off the radar after that. But in early 2010 (almost a year after “dying”), this same lead was put on a nurturing track wherein a drip campaign sent out periodic emails about new product features and improvements.

It was the email update about a new CRM integration that caught this lead’s attention. This new feature solved one of her major pain points and was exactly what she had been waiting for! She clicked on the company’s pricing page, and the salesguy reengaged her and gave her the information she needed. He ended up closing a lucrative deal not long after that.

This is a prime example of how marketing automation can help you work miracles with your own dead leads. Lead nurturing reminds old prospects that your company still exists, and sending periodic updates on product development and features can be the spark that rekindles a relationship that your sales team might’ve otherwise left for dead.

Revive those dead leads with strategic use of lead nurturing! For example, a specially targeted drip email campaign that focuses on new features might be just what you need to hook disengaged prospects back into the buying cycle. You never know what sort of miracles you can work until you stop letting missed opportunities fall through the cracks.

Sell the Problem, Then the Solution

Posted on August 27, 2010 by in Conversion Rate, Lead Nurturing

As always, marketing guru Seth Godin shared some interesting food for thought on his blog yesterday: Sell problems first, then solutions.

In order to sell someone a solution (e.g., your product), that person must first believe that there is a problem in need of solving. If your prospect doesn’t think they have a problem, then they’re not going to take kindly to you peddling your solution, no matter how personable and skilled at sales you might be. But does that mean you should give up and only target cranky prospects who openly complain? Of course not. Godin points out that the fundamental trick of marketing is to be able to convince prospects that they’ve got a problem. Then–voilà!–you can (miraculously) follow up with a helpful solution.  It’s a far more effective strategy than cold calling skeptics to sell them what they’re likely to dismiss as snake oil.

A brilliant example of the problem-centric marketing strategy that Godin talks about are those home security system ads on TV. These commercials present average people at home doing average things, like making an afternoon snack for their kid or getting ready for a first date. Everything seems safe and serene–until an unwanted intruder breaks in to the sound of shattering glass and their victim’s terrified shrieks, all undercut by the wailing alarm. Who would’ve ever thought that throwing a whimsical candle-studded get-together with some friends could lead to immediate post-party stalking by that pushy guy A.J. (who you thought was an awesome catch but is really just mentally unstable)? OK, so we know we’ve got a problem (A.J.), but what’s the solution? When you see that victim pick up a ringing phone to hear the reassuring voice of her call center protector promising to send help right away, the solution becomes clear: Gotta have that alarm system!

This commercial is compelling because it makes me aware of a problem I didn’t even know I had (Yipes! I’m really at risk for a home invasion and didn’t even know it!) and then gets me scared enough to pay attention to what an informed consumer should do about it (Better get an alarm system installed, pronto!). The truth is that the odds are probably million to one that somebody’s actually going to break into my house while I’m on the treadmill rocking out to my ipod, but…better safe than sorry, right? Fear is a powerful motivator that often overrides logic, and these commercials are effective precisely because they are so alarmist (pun somewhat intended).

B2B marketers can adapt this same model to suit their own purposes, ála Godin’s suggestion. Surprise a prospect by showing them how much money they’re losing each month, and then demonstrate how your product can help them streamline budgets and boost efficiency. Start off by telling another prospect how many potential leads are slipping through the cracks undetected every day, and then persuade them that your lead generation tool will close this loophole for once and for all. If you have case studies or hard statistics to back up your argument (rather than manufactured fear), you’ll present an even more powerful and convincing case.

Godin closes with an observation that’s worded so flawlessly that I have to quote it directly:

When a prospect comes to the table and says, ‘we have a problem,’ then you’re both on the same side of the table when it comes time to solve it. On the other hand, if they’re at the table because you’re persistent or charming, the only problem they have is, ‘how do I get out of here.’

If your prospect isn’t aware of the problem you’re trying to solve, point out how they might be affected, and then show them your solution. Here’s your problem, and here’s how we can help you solve it. Brilliant.

6 Ways to Make a Sale Without Being Sales-y

Posted on August 2, 2010 by in Email Marketing, Lead Nurturing

There’s no bigger turnoff than dealing with a salesperson who seems desperate to make quota. Similarly, generic email blasts and marketing communications can alienate leads who could potentially become good customers. So how do you make inroads with prospects without coming off as obsessed with making a sale? Here are six suggestions:

  1. Share an article. Passing along helpful information is beneficial on two fronts: it empowers your prospect, and it makes you seem knowledgeable. When you share a relevant informational article, your prospect is that much more likely to turn to you, their well-informed friend, when they’re ready to make a buying decision.
  2. Send a gift. There’s nothing that will make a prospect’s day more than getting a little “just because” token. Gifts shouldn’t come off as bribes-in-disguise, so make sure they’re relevant. If you know they’re an avid coffee drinker, send them a Starbucks gift card. After a promising demo, supplement it by mailing them a copy of an informative book about your industry or field. Offering free trials or webinars are also ways to shower prospects with perks that will likely influence their buying decision in your favor.
  3. Be a good listener. Sales and marketing folks are used to doing all or most of the talking. Sales reps use scripts and rehearsed spiels, while marketing people are fluent in keywords and branding-speak. But your prospects don’t want to be talked at. They want to be able to communicate with you on a basic level and in a two-way exchange. Keep it conversational and make sure you’re doing at least as much listening as talking.
  4. Anticipate needs. This is one of the most valuable lessons I learned during my short stint in the restaurant business: Providing excellent service depends on anticipating your customer’s needs and responding accordingly. You can create opportunities where none existed by anticipating a need that the prospect didn’t even know they had.
  5. Solve problems. Solving problems goes hand in hand with anticipating needs (above). When you know a prospect’s pain points or anticipate their needs, be ready with a solution. Nobody wants to focus solely on problems and complaints. Try presenting solutions in your prospect communications, and you’ll likely be surprised with how responsive your audience becomes.
  6. Give advice. Sound advice dispensed freely by an industry expert can really win over skeptical prospects. Be that expert and offer up your honest professional advice to fence-sitters. The worst that can happen is that you don’t close the sale in the end, although you could have arrived at that outcome anyway. Not only will you maintain your integrity, but you’ll also greatly improve the chances that the prospect will turn to you for solutions in the future. The far more likely scenario is that giving out advice will boost your credibility and build trust with prospects, which will ultimately translate to more closed sales at the end of the day.

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