Lead Nurturing Best Practices

1. Lead Nurturing Best Practices STAY TOP OF MIND THROUGH ALL PHASES OF THE BUYING CYCLE

2. Lead Nurturing Best Practices Lead nurturing campaigns are the vehicle to guide your leads through all phases of the buying cycle, build relationships and lead them to purchase. By offering valuable content and addressing a prospect’s needs at every stage, you can stay top of mind and position your company in the market to create sales. Lead nurturing campaigns allow you to move clients along the buyer’s journey by appealing to, educating and anticipating the buyer’s needs. How important is lead nurturing? The latest B2B statistics suggest that only 25% of leads generated will close business in year one, while 75% of leads will close in year two or three. This statistic emphasizes the need to for continued engagement with prospects, educating and guiding them, until they become sales-ready. “ *

3. Start With A Strategy • As with any marketing tactic, lead nurturing begins with a strategy. Having a plan and being prepared, • as opposed to randomly sending out generic email blasts, will ensure success. • Your strategy should include (but is not limited to): • Product/Service • Objective/Goals • Key Message(s) • Personas • Content Map • Work Flows • Assets Required • Metrics to Measure • Your Product • Beginning with your product or service may seem obvious, but it is important to define it to keep the message focused. Stick with one product/service/theme for your campaign. • Trying to fit more than one product or service will dilute your message and you run the risk of turning off prospects by providing ancillary information they aren’t interested in.

4. Objectives & Goals • The second step is to define your objectives and goals. This will provide you with a guide to not only your key messages and content, but how to measure the success of your program. While you may set both qualitative and quantitative goals, it is imperative to make your quantitative goals specific and measurable. • It is through the measurement of these goals that you determine the success of your program, which is key to adjusting your nurture tracks for effectives, and most importantly gaining executive buy-in for your marketing programs. • Sample Qualitative Goals • Re-nurture leads to turn them from dormant to active • Collect more information on leads • Become a “go to” expert through engagement with customers • Sample Quantitative Goals • Convert x% of free trial users to paid subscribers • Increase monthly sales ready leads by x% • Increase sales with current customers by x%

5. Key Message Now that you know what you are marketing, and what you want to get out of your campaign you can determine how you want to convey this to your audience, this is the Key Message. Your Key Message is the main take away or overall theme that will be carried throughout the campaign. Note it isn’t simply saying, “our product is the best,” but adding value to their decision to purchase your product. For instance, if you are a tractor manufacturer, you may develop a campaign based on the “total cost of a tractor.”  You can include content about maintenance, fuel options and costs, pros/cons of certain features, etc. This allows you to develop multiple levels of content that provide valuable information to an interested party and move them to purchase. When the prospect is ready to purchase, they will remember you as a trusted source that provided information to help them make an informed decision. It is much more effective than simply sending a brochure about tractors features. Position Yourself as a Trusted Partner

6. Buyer Personas At this point, you will develop buyer personas to guide your content development and ensure communications are tailored based on interest and where your target is in the buying cycle and the role they play in the buying decision. By using your market research and data, you can create representations of customers. One example would be segmenting them as End User, Decision Maker and Financial Authority. Each may be important to the purchase of your product; however, their disparate interests require different information to move them along the funnel. Content Mapping As potential clients interact with your campaigns your content has two responsibilities; provide value and move them further down the funnel. Note no matter how well planned, your nurturing program won’t succeed unless you provide enough value to keep your audience engaged. Because not all leads have the same needs, or are at the same buying stage, you will need content that provides value at each stage. In this manner, it is helpful to map your content to the prospects buying cycle, developing materials that provide information specifically focused on what is important to a prospect at a certain stage in the buying cycle.

7. Depending on your campaign, you would ultimately strive to drive people to a landing page that includes content from each stage of the sales cycle. For example, you have determined your prospects’ buying cycle to be learn, solve, compare, purchase and loyalty. Learn: I think I have a problem Solve: how do I solve that problem Compare: am I solving the problem the right way Purchase: help me make a purchase decision or buy your product or service Loyalty: show me you appreciate me as a customer Spelling this out, and including personas will help you determine how to tailor the content in relation to who they are and where they are in buying stage. It is also an indicator of how many pieces will be needed. Whether your campaign is straightforward or complex, it is a good practice to have a progression of at least three pieces prepared for each stage before setting up your first email. This will allow you to map how a prospect will move through the funnel at different buying stages and ensure there are no gaps in content.

8. Workflows In conjunction with your content map, defining a workflow will make sure your campaign is focused prior to the first email being sent. This is anticipating and preparing for if / then scenarios and assigning actions to keep forward momentum in the funnel. Starting with the initial email, a workflow defines subsequent actions that are based on the recipient’s response, persona, and where they are in the buying cycle and profile. For example, a click by a Financial Authority on an email about the rising costs of tractor ownership can merit a workflow action to alert a tractor vendor’s service expert to have a consultative call. In this instance, dripping emails would be too passive because the click on “rising tractor expenses” indicates the Financial Authority has expense issues to Solve, and the subject matter expert can explain the situation in depth where emails cannot.

9. In this same scenario, if an End User clicks that same rising cost of tractor email, a call is not warranted. Why? Because the End User has insufficient authority to make a final purchase decision and therefore a costly (resources, time) call is not recommended. Instead, the workflow would send an email, with links to a package of information, suggesting the End User meet with the Financial Authority and discuss how to Solve their issue. At the same time, an inside sales representative would receive an alert to call the End User later that day to confirm if the information was received, useful and if there were any questions. The actions in both scenarios will add up to build trust with the prospect and move them towards purchase. Again, workflows can be simple or complicated, depending on your needs and goals. Illustrated is a sample workflow, note this is just one (simple) representation of how a nurture campaign may work. What works for you and your company may look different.

10. Assets • As your program begins to come together you and your team will need to take stock of the assets required to meet your objectives. Ask yourselves: • How many emails are required? • Will we need landing pages? • Will we be offering downloadable materials (reports, case studies, eBooks, white papers, etc.? • Will webinars or video be part of the campaign? • Who will write and design the materials? • When developing the assets, it must be remembered to develop pieces that interest each persona and that tie the key message into the medium. • Using the Total Cost of a Tractor example above, • if you developed a piece on maintenance you • would want the slant to be towards good / poor maintenance affects the overall cost of owning • a tractor. • Don’t find yourself scrambling for content in the middle of a campaign, have a clear plan of what is needed for each stage of the funnel, each step in the workflow, as well as who is responsible to keep your project on track.

11. Evaluate and Adjust Once your program is up and running, it is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. In order to get maximum benefit out of your lead nurturing, you need to routinely evaluate and distinguish what is working and what is not. You can do this by observing traffic, open rates, lead conversion, sales conversion, forwarding rate, unsubscribes, active visitor clicking percentage, etc. By taking these into consideration, you can figure out where to roll out improvements and what to repeat, without waiting for the campaign to end. Measurement Just as you evaluate your campaign while it is ongoing, you will want to measure it more comprehensively at the end and possibly certain intervals, depending on campaign length. This is where, using data and analytics, you circle back to your original goals and objectives to gauge the effectiveness of your program. Using the following metrics you can determine what messaging works, who is moving along the funnel, who is buying and your program costs and ultimately gain the all important executive buy-in.

12. Engagement - • Click-through rates – Determine who clicked on the links within your email messages, and also get an idea of what subject/content interests people, • Conversion rates - How many recipients took the desired action; downloaded content, signed up for webinar, viewed a video, etc? • Lead Acceleration - • Time to customer conversion – What was the length of time it took for the lead to move through funnel, to sales and eventually purchase? • Revenue Impact - • Cost per customer – What was the cost to convert prospect to buyer through the funnel stages? Click Conversion Time Cost

13. A Few More Tips • Embarking on a nurturing campaign is not a straightforward path. As you get started, here are a few key points to remember: • Although the program belongs to marketing, sales input is an important part of any lead nurturing campaign. Your sales team is a valuable resource for what content is needed, lead scoring and MQL definition, lead routing and post nurturing schedules. • 2.    Don't forget lead nurturing isn’t just for lead generation. You can and should create nurture programs to stay in front of your existing customers. Every marketer knows it cost more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer. • 3.    Consider help from the outside. Depending on your needs and resources, it may be more efficient to seek experts to help you accomplish your goals. • 4.    Think outside the in-box. Make sure your campaign fits your company’s overall goals and that the messages is in line with those used in advertisements, trade shows, social media, etc Lead Nurturing is not the same thing as Email Marketing

14. 5.    Re-target prospects that have previously showed interest, but have not engaged recently. While showing successful conversion rates, retargeting campaigns may also use other mediums such as web ads, social media, etc. 6.    What not to do? Don’t email too often, overexposing your offer will elicit a negative response. Also, don’t make it about yourself. Don’t talk about how wonderful your product is, talk about the prospect; their pain, their interest, their needs. Lead nurturing strategies can enhance sales outcomes and promote long-term customer relationships. However, it requires multiple touches to convert a prospect into a sales-ready lead and that takes planning and patience.  With clear objectives, measurement and today’s technology and tools, you can build a successful lead nurturing campaign that brings value to prospects and MQLs to sales. Final Thoughts

15. Are You Getting the Most From Your Lead Nurturing Program? If you would like more information or would like to find out how to have a successful program, our experts would love to talk with you. +1 866 991 7227 support@makesbridge.com CLICK HERE FOR A FREE CONSULTATION