How To Use Nurture Marketing Campaigns to Double Sales Leads
The goal of nurture marketing campaigns is to cultivate unqualified sales leads until they become sales-ready.
In B2B industries such as professional services, nurture campaigns facilitated with marketing automation software can double the volume of sales-ready leads delivered to the salesforce. Here's how that works.
Acquired sales leads follow a bell curve in terms of buyer readiness. About 26 percent, on average, are sales-ready when received. These leads are immediately forwarded to the sales team.
About 49 percent are not sales-ready when received. However, if these leads are nurtured, about 65 percent of them will eventually become sales-ready over a few months to a few quarters.
Finally, about 25 percent of new leads are not sales-ready when received and never will be. These leads should be disqualified.
For most professional service companies, that middle group is neglected and lost. These not-yet sales ready leads are forwarded from marketing to sales. But most of them are in the early stages and don’t yet want to speak with a seller.
When sales engages buyers that don’t want to be engaged it creates friction and the leads are essentially abandoned. They linger without any pursuit and eventually succumb to lead leakage.
To recapture that middle group, nurture marketing campaigns can be used to cultivate those not-yet-sales-ready leads until they become sales-ready. When correctly done, over half of this group will eventually become qualified and forwarded to the salespeople at the point where buyers are ready to speak with sellers.
Because this middle group is often about twice as large as the initially qualified leads, and about half of them will eventually make a purchase from somebody, you can see how the math adds up and effectively doubles the total number of qualified leads sent to the salesforce.
Below are some nurture marketing best practices to further improve your lead acquisition success.
Nurture Campaign Best Practices
- Customer Segmentation. Start by segmenting prospects and customers based on demographics, firmographics and online behaviors. This will then allow you to deliver more relevant and personalized email campaigns. If you combine these segments with the customer insights and buy cycle stages, you will increase conversions by low double digits.
- Email Distributions. The most effective nurture campaigns send progressive messaging where each message compliments or builds upon the prior, and ultimately reaches a crescendo effect. Traditional marketers often follow the Rule of 7 for email campaigns, meaning that they will distribute seven flights before being exhausted. However, research shows that there is so much noise that buyers are tuning out most messages. That’s why we are now seeing that 12 flights improve response rates by 15 percent. That’s a big jump. The number of email distributions per nurture campaign is an item that will have to be tested to discover what works best.
- Drip Campaigns. Another best practice is to create at least three types of outbound campaigns, being time-based, behavior-based and trigger responses. Time-based campaigns are drip distributions whereby emails are staged by date with lapse periods in between deliveries. It’s a good idea to automatically convert leads from a time-based campaign to a behavior-based campaign once the lead engages and you begin tracking digital footprints.
- Trigger Campaigns. Trigger responses are programmed replies which activate based on a particular lead action. For example, they send an instant response to the prospect or immediately forward the lead to a salesperson based on a buyer’s action or event. Trigger responses are less frequent but result in a higher conversion rate.
- Lifecycle Campaigns. Understanding how your customers procure, renew, and expand your services allows you to deploy lifecycle campaigns. These digital marketing programs deliver messaging at just the right time. That is, when customers are ready to make their next purchase. Performing some customer analysis and database profiling to identify purchase patterns by type of customer or type of service can go a long way in aiding these purchases, increasing customer share and reducing churn.
A Few Challenges to Be Aware of
Using technology such as a Marketing Automation Platform can automate the distribution of emails with supporting content to different customer groups.
However, each nurture campaign generally requires several content assets for those distributions. Prospects are bombarded with promotional content, so you need standout content that separates your messaging from the market noise.
The other big challenge is extending your campaigns beyond just email distributions. Nurture campaigns realize higher conversions when they adopt an omni-channel approach.
That means using additional channels such as social networks, your website, direct mail, newsletters, or events. Increasing channels increases lead conversions and further identifies what channel each customer best responds.
The Point is This
Effective campaigns require a combination of customer profiling, marketing automation technology and remarkable content. It’s no easy task for sure.
But the upside is significant. According to Gartner, companies that apply these types of programs realize a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6 to 9 months.
And according to Forrester, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost per lead. These are research findings that should not go unnoticed.
