Learn about creating and running lead nurturing campaigns

Today’s buyers are more empowered than ever before. They engage with brands and companies through their own research across multiple channels, long before marketing or sales has the opportunity to engage with them directly. With lead nurturing, marketers can communicate consistently with buyer’s cross-channel and throughout the sales cycle, addressing the gap in time between when a lead first interacts with you and when they are ready to purchase.

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales and marketing funnel, and through every step of a buyer journey.

It focuses your marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information they need when they need it. Most new leads are not yet ready to become customers, but you can use lead nurturing to engage with them through ongoing communications that help them move closer to purchasing your products or services. An effective lead nurturing program can use lead scoring and an engagement engine to listen, learn, and respond to leads on multiple channels, not just email. Nurture programs can also use behavioral triggers, such as filling out a form or visiting a pricing page to track engagement. Lead nurturing builds trust over time so that when you communicate with your leads or customers you are welcomed instead of being regarded as intrusive.

One of the biggest benefits to lead nurturing is that it increases the chance that a lead will become a customer. Lead nurturing enables you to communicate with your buyers on a more sophisticated level. Instead of using only email, you build relationships over time through multiple media channels with relevant connected campaigns. Being present on the channels your leads use to engage with others increases the chance they will become a customer. When done well, lead nurturing plays a critical role in building your brand.

Credibility and trust are important brand attributes, and the best way to build these is by sharing useful information. If leads believe that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them, that can make a big difference when they are considering a purchase. The other main benefit of lead nurturing is that it shortens the sales cycle. With access to more information than ever before, buyers often take more time to explore their options before making a purchase decision. Modern sales cycles can be longer and nurturing your leads shortens the sales cycle, because you can be relevant, trustworthy, and engaging throughout that critical period of time.

Lead nurturing isn’t one-size-fits-all. The best nurture programs help you send targeted messages based on a prospect stage in the buying process. Here are some tracks to get you thinking about how you might use lead nurturing. Use a welcome nurture to give new leads the celebrity treatment by showing them how you can cater to their needs. These prospects might not know anything about your brand or solutions. Bring them up to speed with what you do, how you help companies like theirs, and who you are. In return, you’ll learn more about them. Use a recycling nurture to continue nurturing leads that are rejected by sales and marked recycled. First, make sure that recycled leads are segmented based on the reason for disqualification. If leads were rejected for reasons that can be fixed, like low interest or unreadiness to buy, place them in your recycle nurture. Once you build interest through a targeted nurture program, you can send them back over to sales. Maintain visibility with a stay in touch nurture. Pop up in front of contacts from time to time and stay relevant, even if they aren’t ready to buy. With a stay in touch nurture, you can assure contacts that you have the best solutions. Send messages at a slow but steady pace. By staying relevant, you’ll increase the chance your prospect will buy from you in the future. Make customers stick with a retention nurture. This is your chance to show customers that you value their business. How? Send them tips, industry news, service updates, personalized messages, or feedback surveys. When renewal is on the horizon, send offers they can’t refuse.

Revive inactive contacts with a wake up nurture. Your first step is to make sure you’re correctly categorizing leads. Have you been sending a CTO content meant for a VP of product? Double-check your data, because leads will quickly unsubscribe if you’re sending them irrelevant content. Next, make them an offer. Targeted content can warm up prospects, bring them back to life, and recapture their interest. Once they’re active again, you can move them into a new nurture that fits their needs.

Okay. You’ve decided you want to use a nurture campaign and have decided on your goals and strategy, including what communications you’ll send during each stage of the campaign. Your emails, landing pages, and other assets are built out and you’re ready to create a nurture program. In Marketo, you’ll build your nurture program using the engagement program type and the nurture channel with its predefined program statuses. First, you create the nurture program, then you create the streams, one for each stage of the campaign. Each stream sends out specific content, for example, early, mid, or late stage content to leads as they move through your sales and marketing funnel. All you need to do is add content to your streams in the order you want someone to receive it. Next, you create the transition rules that move program members from one stream to the next. You’ll need to create some smart campaigns too including one to add people to your program, and one to track program success. Success is how you determine the program has influenced a member. For example, when they visit your pricing page. Now, all you need to do is set the cadence for each cast, which tells Marketo when to send out the emails and activate your program. Marketo starts by sending out the first email on each stream to all current members. At the next cast, it sends out the next email in the stream, and so forth. But what if someone is added to the stream after the second cast? No problem. Marketo tracks each program member in the stream. So while existing members will receive email three in the cast, the new members receive email one.

Now what if you have a special time-limited offer for your leads and you want everyone in the stream to receive it in the next cast? All you need to do is create the email, add it to the stream, set the availability dates, and drag it to the top. This guarantees that everyone receives it in the next cast, no matter where they are in your stream, as long as the offer is valid.

Measuring your lead nurturing efforts is critical to your success. Since email is such an integral part of your lead nurture strategy, let’s start by reviewing some common metrics most email marketers track. The most common email metrics are, Sent, Delivered, Bounced, Opened, Open Rate, Clicks, Click Through Rate, and Unsubscribed.

We go over all of these in more detail in our scheduled email module. So review that if these metrics are not familiar to you. Once you get the basic measurements down, take a closer look at your lead nurturing programs with more advanced metrics, such as engagement, lead acceleration, and revenue impact.

Marketo uses an engagement score that takes multiple data points, including Clicks, Opens, Conversions, Unsubscribes, Program Successes, and then calculates a single measure of engagement. This metric takes the guesswork out of your marketing metrics and applies a tangible number that you can use when making future marketing decisions. To measure the revenue impact of lead nurturing, first, it’s important to understand that your buyer rarely makes a purchase as a result of a single campaign. Conventional marketing wisdom proposes that at least seven successful cross-channel touches or forms of engagement are needed in order to convert a new lead into a buyer.

Now you have an idea how to build a nurture program in Marketo and measure its impact, let’s go over some related best practices to help your program be a success. Be trustworthy, Trusted communications have a lower bounce and unsubscribe rate across channels. Alternatively, if trust isn’t there, you’ll see lower engagement scores, deliverability, and conversion rates. You’ll be more likely viewed as spam. Be relevant. If you aren’t relevant, your subscribers will opt out, or perhaps more likely emotionally opt out. Being relevant means sending the right content to the right person at the right time. This includes talking to the right people, saying the right things at the right time, and constantly improving. Use multiple channels. A typical buyer moves quickly from email to social media to your website, and then back to social media. Marketers not only need to prepare their lead nurturing strategy for multi-channel engagement, but also consider the devices buyers use to access these channels for an optimized and personal experience. Be strategic and impactful. Your lead nurturing program needs to be measurable. So you will know the value of your marketing tactics and their impact on your ROI. Defining the right sets of metrics is vital to achieve executive buy-in, adjust your nurture tracks, and report your success. Also, be sure to check out our video on sending a batch email for tips on how to create winning marketing emails. All right, now that we’ve covered nurture programs, and discussed a few different ways you can use them, let’s create one in Marketo. -