Understanding nurture marketing

Nurture marketing is a term that has gained public visibility over the last several years.  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.

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).  

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 

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

• 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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Marketing automation and your budget

Marketing automation solutions have enjoyed tremendous growth in use by B2B marketers over the last 2 years and the trend is clearly in favor of eMarketing vendors. eMarketing solutions encompass a wide array of technologies including: Email Marketing, Web Analytics, Lead Management, SEM/PPC Management and Landing Pages. Much has been written about the fundamental shift away from "traditional" marketing mix items such as direct mail, trade shows and magazine advertising to more interactive, real-time emarketing venues. That blog topic has since past. eMarketing IS the marketing mix in B2B.

One of the key issues facing b2b marketers now is "how much can we spend on an eMarketing solution?" Pricing for eMarketing applications range vary widely. There are 2 classes of applications; Platform (meaning most components like email, landing pages...etc) are part of a single application or Point Solutions (email) wherein only one area is focused on in the application.

Platform application costs typically range from $1500 per month upwards of $5000 per month. Costing of SaaS marketing platforms is often times based on email volume per month/year and database size.

Marketers need to be very cautious when applications price based on database size. Depending on what is applied against the database size (customer records, emails, landing pages) the size of the DB can balloon very quickly and you're suddenly on the hook for a much larger monthly fee than you were planning on.

Additionally, be aware that email volume is not based solely on first outbound emails. Trigger, drip and nurture emails need to be factored into your total email volume per month.

If you're planning on using an email marketing solution for drip and trigger emails and you plan on marketing to a database of 10,000 names, you should estimate your volume at 10,000 x 2.5 per month. That will ensure you've budgeted for enough email to cover trigger emails.

Other things to factor in with email is metering. With some applications, you can meter bursts at a pre-determined rate. Other applications allow you to borrow from other month's allotments. There is no one perfect way to do this. You should work closely with your eMarketing vendor to ensure costs are well defined an your vendor should know what you're trying to accomplish in advance so they can recommend the best plan based on your budget.

Regarding budget, what percentage of your total budget should be allotted to eMarketing software? 10-20% is a number agreed upon by most but is by no means a hard and fast rule.
If your annual marketing budget is $100,000 then 20% works out to to about $1600 per month.

Obviously, the percentage varies based on your needs/activity but if you're total spend on technology is exceeding 25% of your total marketing budget, you are very likely paying too much for a platform based application.