As with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding at how best to leverage new technology in day-to-day circumstances. Nurture marketing is a perfect example of this. The term itself can be somewhat misleading so we'll first spend some time defining what nurture marketing is, what technology makes up "nurture marketing" and then we'll provide some real world examples of how b2b marketers can leverage this technology to improve their coverage and reach.
What is nurture marketing?
Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer. The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria. This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral. For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical. Behavioral criteria are typically dependent upon a prospects interactions with the seller. These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).
Nurture marketing can be defined as a process that automates a flow of communication with a prospective customer. The seller pre-defines a path of automated communications based on certain criteria. This criteria typically falls into 2 categories; Demographic and Behavioral. For demographic, you may have a certain email campaign for one vertical and another set of content for a different vertical. Behavioral criteria are typically dependent upon a prospects interactions with the seller. These interactions may be based on website behavior (visits to website, pages, downloads of documents on the seller website...etc) or campaign response behavior (email responses, open email responses).
How is nurture marketing implementing?
In the context of eMarketing, nurture marketing is typically comprised of of 2 types of email communications; Drip Email and Trigger Email. Drip emails are timed emails that go out to a pre-defined segment of contacts at a pre-defined time/date. Trigger emails are only sent when a certain condition is met such as follow up email sent based on a campaign response.
Probably the best way to describe nurture marketing is to describe a sample campaign.
Basic nurture campaign:
Campaign Type - Webinar
Campaign Type - Webinar
An initial invitation will go out or other promotional vehicles (banner ad, email sponsorship....etc are implemented. Initiations direct individuals to a registration page for signing up for the webinar.
2-3 days after the initial webinar email invitation goes out, a subject line swap email is implemented. In this case, the original email subject line is changed to a new subject and automatically re-sent to all those in the original list who did not open the email.
2-3 days later, a reminder email is triggered for all registered leads for the webinar.
The day of the webinar - a second reminder is sent about 1 hour before the start of the event.
Post-webinar - 2 primary branched followup campaigns are then executed following the webinar.
Branch 1 - Attendee email follow up campaign - For attendees a followup email is immediately triggered thanking the attendees for attending and the email may include a redirect to a companion white paper, a pdf copy of the presentation or to the website for additional information.
Potential follow up activities for branch 1
The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.
- Attendee responds to email - triggers call from sales
- Attendee does not respond to email - put into 7-day drip email
- Attendee responds to email - triggers invitation to next webinar
Branch 2 - Non-Attendees - those who registered but did not attend webinar - for this branch you may go in several directions. The key is to stay engaged with this group as they were interested enough to register but likely had something come up that prevented them from coming.
Potential follow up activities for branch 2
- Send "sorry you couldn't attend" email immediately following the event - redirect to a re-broadcast registration (if applicable)
- Send email with link to copy (pdf) of the presentation
- Email inviting to a similar webinar
- Email inviting non-attendees to download a copy of a white paper
As you can see from this very simple example, companies can get very creative and detailed in trigger/drip followup.
The key to making nurture campaigns work is having the right technology available to helping a marketer schedule, plan and implement a complex multi-contact campaign.
Solutions like SalesFUSION (www.salesfusion.com) are specifically designed to help marketers implement these types of campaigns.
To learn more - visit us at www.salesfusion.com
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Thanks for the post Kevin, it's a great summary of lead nurturing. We've collected some benefits of lead nurturing from a number of industry analysts such as Forrester and CSO Insights. We've built lead nurturing into our marketing automation platform and use it at our own company! Here's some data to share with you. Hope this adds a quantitative "flavor" to your post.
ReplyDelete1. Decrease the percent of leads generated by marketing that are ignored by sales from 80% to approximately 25%.
2. Raise win rates of leads generated by marketing 7% points higher and reduce “no decisions” by 6%.
3. Have 9% more sales representatives make quota and decrease ramp up time for new reps by 10%.
4. Increase efficiency as nurtured-prospects buy more, require less discounting and have shorter sales cycles than prospects that bought but were not nurtured.
5. Generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead.