CommuniGator. Lead Nurturing. Best Practices

Transcription

1 CommuniGator Lead Nurturing Best Practices

2 Lead nurturing best practices With the B2B marketers taking on more of the lead nurturing process, we decided to take a look at the tools and techniques that marketers should be using. In order to not be burdened down with the task of creating sales-ready leads, a fundamental element in nurturing is understanding where leads are in their buyer journey. With access to tools such as visitor tracking and techniques such as page scoring, working sales enablement into your marketing is easier than you might think. FOR B2B COMPANIES LOOKING TO MAKE THE MOST OF THEIR WEBSITES AND ALL THE GENUINE SALES OPPORTUNITIES FROM IT, THIS WHITEPAPER WILL LOOK AT THE BEST PRACTICES OF LEAD NURTURING. Contents What lead nurturing techniques are already available? What s next for lead nurturing?...3 Implementing the fundamentals of lead nurturing in How does lead nurturing software enable us as marketers?...5 What are the lead nurturing roadblocks to avoid? Sending too much Not double-opting in contacts Sleepy subscribers Short-term vs. long-term goals...7 Lead nurturing best practices Nurturing from cold calls Nurturing from website visits or content engagement Nurturing from PPC ads or for inbound leads Summary Lead nurturing best practices

3 What lead nurturing techniques are already available? Before we look at what you can achieve with lead nurturing, let us first consider the lead generation strategies you must set up for your sales team. Whether you are an SME or a corporate enterprise, a successful lead generation strategy that works with lead nurturing is essential to continued growth. There is plenty of material on how to create the best lead generation campaigns, and how to make them the most efficient for your business. With access to the most advanced IP lookup technology, there is no reason why you can t identify 90% of your website traffic. Further to this, visitor tracking technology will give you the option to understand where these leads go on your website and why. There is then the UTM tracking functionality, which you can use in any lead generation campaign to track where your leads are coming from. This gives you a good indication of which marketing campaigns are working and tells you specifically which element of your business your leads are interested in. BY KEEPING TRACK OF WHO IS ON YOUR WEBSITE, WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING AT AND WHERE THEY HAVE COME FROM, YOU CAN TRULY BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY NEED IN ORDER TO MOVE THROUGH THE BUYER JOURNEY. What s next for lead nurturing? Continuously communicating with these leads with a generic or monthly newsletter, as marketers have done in the past, no longer works. Conditioning of B2B lead nurturing is changing, and we must change with it. Prospects now expect businesses to anticipate their needs in advance and advise on the expertise they need. They expect a partnership relationship. Your nurturing strategy must not only provide them with the information they require, you must also convince them to commit to a sale. With lead nurturing producing 47% larger ROI at 33% less cost, this double-edged sword approach is worth investing in. The question is, how do we implement this revamped approach to nurturing leads? CommuniGator Ltd 3

4 Implementing the fundamentals of lead nurturing in 2016 Contrary to popular belief and past practices, lead nurturing is not just drip marketing. There are so many features to lead nurturing platforms that marketers need to start utilising in order to successfully convert leads. These tools need to be used to keep sales-ready leads interested and warm up cold, unenthusiastic leads. Once your website visitor has downloaded a whitepaper, they ll be added to this workflow. Start We have seen particular success from auto-nurture sequences, which are campaigns automatically triggered off the back of a website lead s interaction on the website. From downloading a whitepaper to hitting a certain action page, these auto-nurture campaigns are customised to align website behaviour with marketing campaigns. The ability to automate and trigger these sequences, or to allow sales to add prospects to these campaigns manually, not only reduces the UK marketer s workload in this area but is an efficient way to react to a lead s actions immediately. Wait 3 days before you send them another . You don t want to bombard them straight away! Wait 4 days before making contact. Allow them time to digest your material. Send a resource, like a case study, to an engaged contact. Did they click on a link? Determine what you send them next by their behaviour. Use a traffic light system to keep them in the workflow queue before moving them through to the next stage. Keep them interested with another piece of material on a similar topic. Send a product page, such as feature, to interested, hot leads. Businesses taking this personalised approach to their lead nurturing convert 50% of their sales-ready leads by utilising lead nurturing correctly. With these leads making up to 47% larger purchases than inbound, sales-ready leads, it s no wonder lead nurturing has shot up as one of the most important goals for UK marketers. Stay patient! Wait 4 days before contacting them again. Determine what you do next by whether they clicked or not! If they didn t engage with your previous , send them through a lead nurture campaign. Use the traffic light system to keep them in the queue. Determine what you do next by whether they clicked or not! IN 2016, LEAD NURTURING WAS THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT GOAL REPORTED If they don t engage, qualify them out of the workflow as no interaction. BY 85% OF UK MARKETERS. If they engage, send them through to the next level. For example, an action page like a demo. What did they do? Did they click on the link? If they didn t, get sales to give them a call and remove them from the workflow. If they did, send a notification to Finish 4 Lead nurturing best practices

5 How does lead nurturing software enable us as marketers? With the help of workflows and lead scoring, lead nurturing can consist of different campaigns set up for different stages of the buyer cycle. Once you have established the different levels of engagement light content for cold leads and saleheavy for hot leads you can segment your data and place individuals into the campaign that suits their needs, based on their previous interactions and their current lead score. Workflows are complex systems that allow your leads to automatically move through different campaigns depending on which content they engage with. By sending automated communications at the right time, to the right client and with the right, relevant content included, prospects can dictate their own buyer journey with the feeling that you are assisting them the entire way. All without any human interaction required on your part as the marketer. YOUR MAIN CONCERN FROM THAT POINT ON IS DECIDING ON A SALE THAT WORKS IN BOTH YOU AND YOUR CLIENTS BEST INTERESTS. CommuniGator Ltd 5

6 What are the lead nurturing roadblocks to avoid? Understandably, not using the techniques and technology we ve talked about so far in this whitepaper will hinder your ability to deliver high-quality lead nurturing campaigns. However, there are a few other aspects you need to consider when creating your lead nurturing strategy in order for it to succeed. Sending too much The more frequently you send, the more likely you are to be marked as spam. The more times you get marked as spam, the more likely you are to get blacklisted. Throwing all contacts into one auto-nurture campaign won t work. If you want to succeed in the inbox, you must schedule your communications in order to not overwhelm your interested leads with too much information too soon. Not double-opting in contacts Remember, it s not just the spam label you re up against. The EU General Data Protection Laws (GDPR) means you need to double-opt in your contacts. Doubleopting essentially means your contacts have to subscribe twice: they subscribe once, then they get a confirmation agreeing that it was definitely them who used the to sign up in the first place. If your data isn t prepared when the laws come into force, you ll have a big problem nurturing any new leads at all risking a huge fine of up to 20 million or 4% of your annual turnover (whichever of the two is higher). 6 Lead nurturing best practices

7 Sleepy subscribers If your subscribers aren t engaging with your s, you need to wake them up. Sending a preferences centre can help get them to reconsider what they want to receive from you, and you can start sending them relevant content again. The more relevant the content you re sending, the more agreeable your subscribers are to being nurtured into a sale. Short-term vs. long-term goals Lead nurturing is not an overnight success story. It is a long-term process that you must invest and constantly monitor if you want to see results. Not all techniques or messages you use will be effective for your audience, and it can take the busy UK marketer time to see this. Those who check in with their lead nurturing progress monthly or quarterly are more apt to improving their campaigns and, as a result, their conversion rates. FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO MONITOR THEIR LEAD NURTURING CAREFULLY, LEAD SCORING SOFTWARE IS WHERE WE WOULD RECOMMEND STARTING. CommuniGator Ltd 7

8 Lead nurturing best practices Leads come in all different shapes and sizes, from different places and in different stages of their buyer journey. No two leads are the same. That s why lead nurturing is heavily influencing the personalisation and individuality of marketing campaigns. This doesn t mean marketers need to go back to writing manual s to thousands of customers just to make them each unique. That is just not feasible. What we do suggest is strong segments based on as much reliable CRM data as you have, and common features you find between contacts. Create truly targeted lists with your CRM for both your sales and marketing teams to work off in order to make your campaigns as personal as possible. HERE ARE A FEW OTHER STRATEGIES WE VE SEEN SUCCESSFUL MARKETING TEAMS IMPLEMENT IN Nurturing from cold calls Marketing and sales teams need to work together so that both sides know where the cold call contacts are in their buyer cycle. Using triggers within your CRM, your sales and marketing teams can establish what contact each lead has had from each team and what they need in order to engage with the next stage of their process. If the contact is on the icy end of the scale, you want to feed them into your lead nurturing workflow. Send them into a workflow with plenty of different content touch points and leads will move effortlessly through different campaigns, starting off with gentle marketing and moving onto harder hitting stuff later on. It s all about creating a workflow that aligns that sales and marketing goals together, at any point of the buyer journey. 8 Lead nurturing best practices

9 Nurturing from website visits or content engagement The campaigns you use to focus on already engaged contacts are going to be a lot more personalised than those for super cold contacts. By looking at the pages your leads are checking out, you can decide what other content on your website is most relevant to them. When contacts show engagement with a handful of blogs or social media posts, link them on to whitepapers and guides that might help them to get better acquainted with their topic. If it is a whitepaper or guide that they are engaged with, perhaps you should try ramping it up to product feature pages. KEEP THE FOCUS ON PAGES THAT DO MORE EXPLAINING THAN SELLING I.E. THIS IS HOW IT WORKS OVER THIS IS WHY OURS IS BETTER THAN THEIRS. With the help of page scoring, you can figure out what to do with leads that are simply coming to check out your pages. You wouldn t, for example, want to send a pricing page to a lead that has only looked at your homepage and events because they may not have discovered your product as a solution yet. Instead, invite them to a specific event, such as something upcoming or general (if they haven t engaged with any other specific pages), and try to rouse their interest in your company products. CommuniGator Ltd 9

10 Nurturing from PPC ads or for inbound leads Oftentimes, inbound leads are already showing quite a lot of interest in your product. Lead nurturing can still help you land a deal with these individuals, but the amount of time it takes to convert these leads should usually not take as long. That s why we recommend a quick 3-part auto-nurture campaign here. Something that will show prospects who you are, what your product does and why they should choose you, but without walking on eggshells around a sale. Although this doesn t mean you should immediately sell, sell, sell even an eager lead doesn t like aggressive tactics you do want to lean more towards this end of their buyer cycle. START BY SENDING AN EXPLAINING THE SERVICE OR FEATURE THAT YOUR LEAD WAS LOOKING AT, LINKING TO WHITEPAPERS OR GUIDES TO HELP THEM UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU DO A BIT BETTER. END WITH AN INVITATION TO GET IN CONTACT WITH YOUR COMPANY TO DISCUSS THEIR NEEDS. 10 Lead nurturing best practices

11 In Summary With the right tools and techniques in place, effective lead nurturing is easy to implement. Knowing which leads you are dealing with and adapting your methods depending on where they are in their buyer journey will be the determining factor in your ROI. LEAD NURTURING IMPROVES THE EFFICIENCY OF YOUR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS, ON AVERAGE INCREASING SALES OPPORTUNITIES BY AT LEAST 20%. Yet, 65% of B2B businesses have not got their own method implemented. With the tools at marketing teams disposals, there is no reason for lead nurturing to take a back seat any longer. CommuniGator Ltd 11

12 About CommuniGator CommuniGator is one of the leading marketing automation software providers in the UK. Established in 2005, we ve gone through a period of evolution as the marketing landscape has changed. The core platform functionality caters to marketing with automated welcome series, a HTML editor for designing your s, templates, responsive design, dynamic groups based on behaviour, integration with the leading CRM platforms, an event management suite, robust reporting and so the list goes on. On the marketing automation side we re able to track prospect activity across the web pages they visit on your website and the content they consume and take action against. This means you can build up a really detailed profile of who has done what. To read all the juicy details of what the platform offers and how we can help your business jump on over to our website: Give us a call: +44 (0) This document and it s contents are proprietary to CommuniGator or its licensors. No part of this document may be copied, reproduced or transmitted to any third party in any form without CommuniGator s prior written consent. Our products and services include: MarketingAutomation I GatorMail I GatorLeads I GatorEvents I GatorDocs GatorSurvey I GatorSocial I GatorData I CRM Integration I Managed Services