Best practices for b2b nurture marketing

Understanding nurture marketing

Nurture marketing is a term that has gained visibility and interest in the B2B marketing space over the last several years. Initially, the concept grew out of the capabilities of CRM systems to track and manage sales interactions with early stage prospects over time. In the last 3 years, technology has flooded the market to help B2B marketers identity, generate and manage leads in the pre-qualification stage. Essentially, the strategic shift in B2B sales has been that marketing owns the top of the funnel while sales owns the middle to bottom of the funnel. In some cases inside sales/telemarketing has direct line reporting into marketing more so than sales. As this shift has taken root, marketing has increasingly expanded its role and capabilities around lead and demand generation. As eMarketing applications have flooded the B2B marketing community, there have been great strides in technology-enabled marketing to help professionals increase their capabilities relative to demand and lead generation.

With the new technology (email, SEO/SEM, social….etc) comes new challenges. In the age of internet-driven lead generation, the sheer volume of leads has increased dramatically, often times overwhelming marketing and inside sales departments. The issue a marketing department may have faced in years past was around generating enough leads to build the funnel on a quarter by quarter basis. Today, the challenge becomes filtering through the “noise” of hundreds of leads per month to ensure the best leads are being “touched” and the least qualified leads are being developed for the longer term.

Having a well balanced sales funnel with early-stage and late-stage leads is critical for a company to perform well against earnings targets over the long haul. What you do today as a B2B marketer may very well make the difference between success and failure 9 months from now. Your successful 4^th quarter begins in the first or second quarter.

For the B2B marketer, the technology is now in place to manage the process of nurture marketing and ensure that no lead gets left behind. However, as with all technology adoption curves, there is an initial dearth of functionality but an overall lack of education and understanding about 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 dependent upon a prospect’s 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 is basically the process of presenting content to a lead based on their current-state interest level and leading the prospect to continue interacting with you over a period of time until they either qualify in or qualify out.

Types of Nurture Marketing Campaigns

In B2B, nurture marketing campaigns can be a combination of many things over a relatively long period of time. Email campaigns, telesales, direct mail, can all play a role on nurturing a lead from identification to qualification. Today however, nurture marketing is most closely associated with email marketing. And within the context of email marketing, there are 2 distinct types of emails that are used by marketers for the purpose of lead nurturing.

Trigger Email

As the name suggests, trigger emails are emails that are executed when a condition is “triggered” or met. Simple examples of trigger emails are a “confirmation email” that is sent to a lead upon completing a form on the website. The email has no date associated with it, rather it queries the database and when the condition is met, the email is executed. Trigger emails use one or more dynamic segments to execute. A dynamic segment is nothing more than a pre-defined query of the marketing database who’s membership is made up of people who do certain things.

Sample Dynamic Segments

Web Activity – Individuals who have an active session on the website within the last 24-hours.

Form – completion of a form

Campaign – Opened and clicked through a certain email

Trigger emails are a simple yet invaluable way to continually “touch” a lead and ensure interactions are followed up on. Trigger emails can also be the launch point for more lengthy drip campaigns. If a web activity triggers an email and that email is then opened and clicked through, then that activity in and of itself may trigger a new set or string of email communications.

Drip Emails

These are similar in nature to a trigger email with one fundamental difference – a Drip email is a scheduled email. It will be set to go out at a certain time/date. It may still include the use of dynamic or conditional segments but again, they will go out at a scheduled time.

A good example of a drip email is a reminder email for a webinar campaign. The email may be set to go out on Tuesday at 10AM – but it will only go out to those individuals who have registered or completed the form for the webinar.

Drip emails are the core of Nurture marketing. You can set up a string of pre-determined emails in multiple branches in advance and let the campaign run in the background. Most typically, drip campaigns will last 30-90 days and no more.

Segmentation

While drip and trigger emails are the primary “executable” for nurture campaigns, they are driven by 2 types of segmentation. Segmentation can be broadly defined as a group of individuals who meet a certain criteria of a query. You cannot have nurture marketing without a good segmentation tool. While segmentation is nothing more than a query of the database, with respect to marketing automation technology, segmentation should be user friendly and allow users to “ask questions” of the database without the need for executing SQL.

Profile Segments – these are driven off of profile data in the lead record in either the marketing database or CRM database or both. The most common profile segments are related to titles, geography and company size/type.

Behavioral segments – these are conditional segments and group individuals based on their activity or behavior relative to interactions they have with you. A simple behavioral example, as mentioned before, may be – “everyone who has visited a certain web page in the last 24 hours.

Behavioral Data as a trigger for Nurture Marketing

What interactions does a prospective buyer engage in with the typical B2B firm today that may indicate potential interest in purchasing your products or services?

· Web Interactions – How did the prospect find your website? Search, PPC, Campaign Response? In regards to search, it is important to understand how and why the prospect found you. Identifying the keywords used or referring website may help and standard web analytics will identify this. Keywords gives insight into what the prospect was “thinking” or interested in when they came to your website.

· Email Response Activity – Has the prospect opened, clicked through or forwarded email communications from marketing?

· Campaign responses – Is the lead receptive to your campaigns? Are they responding to single or multiple campaigns?

Sample Nurture Marketing Campaigns

A good way to understand how nurture marketing works is to explore examples of campaigns. In the example below, a webinar campaign is described. Webinars are online events that allow vendors to promote a solution or industry expertise to a large group of passive attendees.

Campaign Type - Webinar

· An initial email invitation is sent to a list and/or other promotional vehicles (banner ad, email sponsorship....etc) are implemented. The email invitation contains a link to a registration page. The registration page captures the name, company, email and any other information the webinar sponsor is trying to capture from the attendees.

· For Registrants, a “Thank-You” or “Confirmation” email is Triggered immediately following completion of the registration. This Trigger email will contain the webinar detail and may cross-promote additional content.

· 2-3 days after the initial webinar email invitation goes out, a drip email is sent to the original list but segmented based on individuals who did not open the original email - 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 first email. This is a drip email because it has a launch date associated with it.

· 2-3 days later, a first reminder drip email is sent for all registered leads for the webinar.

· The day of the webinar - a second drip reminder email is sent 1 hour before the start of the event.

· Post-webinar - 2 primary branched follow up campaigns are then executed following the webinar.

Branch 1 - Attendee email follow up campaign - For attendees, a follow up email is immediately triggered thanking the attendees for attending. 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

· Attendee responds to email - triggers call from sales (CRM integration)

· 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 follow up emails. A simple 2-branch event may contain up to 15-20 different emails with discrete content. Each of those emails may contain responder/non-responder branching as well. The management of nurture campaigns is not feasible without automation. There are simply too many variables to track and manage. 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.

Lead Scoring and Sales Integration

Lead scoring is a technology that ranks and sorts leads based on the aggregate value of their integrations and quality of their demographic profile, relative to your company’s ideal prospect. Lead scoring is a critical component to a nurture marketing and absolutely necessary when integrating marketing into the CRM/Sales process. Lead scoring will typically look at 4 buckets of data. Each is described below.

Profile Data – this is the basic validation of a lead.

· Company information – size, geography, vertical

· Title – validation of title – is this the type of person we sell to?

· Email validation – non-free mail

Web Behavior – may score on a number of elements including

· Recency and frequency of web visits

· Website downloads

· Return visits

Survey Data – looks at how individuals respond to questions in surveys forms

Campaign data – scores leads based on responses to single or multiple campaigns

Scoring will assign a relative point value to each element in the data buckets mentioned above. The aggregate score will help marketing and sales determine the “value” of the lead or “interest level”. Further marketing may take place for low-value/interest leads while immediate action and integration/alerting to sales may occur with high value leads.

When integrating with sales, it is important that there is good integration between the marketing database and the CRM database. Basic information should be passed from marketing such as the demographics and lead score, the campaign activity and any other relevant information that sales can use in their first call. Sales should then be able to provide a feedback loop to marketing. By changing the lead status, the lead should either be validated or disqualified in the CRM system and this information should make its way back to marketing for validation of scoring rules.

Again – a key success factor is having the right database and technology to make all of this work in harmony.

SalesFUSION 360 provides simple yet powerful technology that enables marketers to engage in true nurture marketing activities in a highly automated fashion. The solution is comprised of eMarketing suite. In the suite, tools are available that allow users to set up and manage a variety of campaigns including drip emails, trigger emails, automated rules-based emails, follow up emails and logic-based landing pages.

Nurture marketing campaigns in SalesFUSION can be developed by non-technical users and executed using any number of profile and activity-based triggers. A powerful segmentation engine empowers marketers to define a path of communication that combines static and dynamic segments.

The segmentation engine is driven off of profile data and campaign data. Campaign-based segments allow marketers to take action on the response or non-response to campaigns or steps in campaigns. This functionality, in combination with lead scoring and the drip, trigger and follow up email capabilities is what makes SalesFUSION’s solution powerful yet simple.

Lead Scoring plays a key role in SalesFUSION Nurture marketing as well. Scoring is done on 4 buckets of data including Web Activity, Profile, Campaign Response and Demographics.

Scoring-based triggers are an invaluable asset to the marketer, particularly marketing departments with limited budgets and resources. Leads may be classified into “interest groups”. Once a lead is assigned to an interest group a trigger campaign may be executed against that lead. The trigger campaign will then begin a series of communications based on action/reaction to the outbound emails. The marketer need not worry about whether leads are being “touched” or followed up on. The system is continually monitoring the lead activity/scores and deciding who gets what. This is the essence of ‘set it and forget it’ technology.

Lead Scoring by SalesFUSION is a simple solution to a complex problem. It allows the user to work within a simple user interface to define the interest level of a lead based on the most common elements of marketing activity: Campaign Response, Profile Data, Survey Data and Web Behavior. Because SalesFUSION includes a full suite of web analytics, it is easy to incorporate web behavior into lead scoring, which is one of the key indicators of interest level.

While some solutions focus on reporting on “who’s on my website”, SalesFUSION allows you to take action against this valuable information.

Powerful analytics and alerting keep the marketing and sales teams updated on all activity and sales is directly tied into the lead nurturing process with email alerts. Lead routing and assignment technology ensures that each rep is notified when a high-value lead has been “active”, either in response to a campaign or through an organic visit to the website. These alerts may trigger rules in your CRM system that prompt a direct phone call by sales. It has been proven that timing is a critical component in having a successful first phone call with a lead.

About SalesFUSION

SalesFUSION 360 is a truly integrated eMarketing solution that combines ALL aspects of the eMarketing mix into one easy to use application. SalesFUSION 360 enables companies to set up and manage the exact campaigns (drip, trigger, nurture) described in this paper.

SalesFUSION 360 is an on demand enterprise lead management company committed to changing the way the world creates and manages leads.

SalesFUSION 360 provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. This is made possible through the SalesFusion 360™ suite, which complements Sales Force Automation applications by adding an on-demand enterprise lead management service. SalesFUSION 360 increases lead quantity, lead quality and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process.