Tip #5 for Lead Nurturing: Consistent repetition, consistent repetition, consistent repetition

Consistent repetition, consistent repetition, consistent repetition

There are two key concepts within this section. The first is repetition. The second is consistency. Since they go hand in hand, we’ve made them a single “key rule”.
Like almost everything in marketing, lead nurturing relies on repetition for its multiplying effect on success. Once a new lead is acquired and it is determined that he or she is interested but just not now, lead nurturing should begin immediately. As weekly or bi-weekly drip emails begin to be sent, the prospect may or may not be reading them or taking advantage of the useful information they contain. But over time, as the “conversation” grows, and as the prospect comes to expect the weekly email, and as trust builds that these emails are useful rather than pushy, prospects open more of them and respond more often.

The second twin in this final rule is consistency. It is imperative that lead nurturing, like its big brother, lead generation, be executed consistently. What we mean by “consistently” is the ruthless, disciplined adherence to the program. Too many organizations start out creating fresh new content for items like drip emails, newsletters, articles, etc. without fail, but eventually the effort trails off. The monthly newsletter becomes the “every 6 weeks” newsletter, and eventually the “do we still do a newsletter?” newsletter. The inventory of drip emails around key topics often suffers the same fate. Creating content for drip email must take place regularly, and ahead of the demand for it. Delivering weekly or bi-weekly drip emails to your interested leads must be done on a predictable, reliable schedule. Missing a week, or even slipping from the usual Tuesday to a Wednesday can damage the relationship you’re trying to create with your prospect. Repetition of friendly, non-salesy, informative, very bite-sized content delivered to the inbox breeds confidence, trust, and occasionally even anticipation on the part of your prospect. In turn, when he or she makes the transition from “searching for potential solutions” to “evaluating” or even “decision-making”, the probability of your company and your products being at the top of the prospect’s mind is dramatically increased.

We cannot emphasize this enough. Create the schedule for nurturing and drip emailing and stick to it.

Get your own copy of the white paper Top Five Rules for Using Lead Nurturing To Increase Sales at http://www.wingreenmarketing.net/Pages/WPTopFiveRulesforUsingLeadNurturing1.aspx

Tip #4 for Lead Nurturing: Use lead scoring to target highest potential leads

Use lead scoring to target highest potential leads

The more sophisticated lead generation systems have lead scoring in place for the initial capture of interested leads.  For example, a lead who has already downloaded two white papers and attended one webcast has a higher value than a lead who only requested one paper.  Scoring can be applied to the quality of the lead in terms of how well it matches “the perfect lead”.  For example, more lead score points can be attached when the lead is from the exact target industry, or a desirable ZIP code, or a decision-maker title.

With lead scores available, the lead nurturing program should leverage this data to deliver different drip emails to higher-scoring leads than to lower scoring leads. 

Also, during the weeks or months that a prospect is being nurtured, prior to being upgraded as a more qualified prospect, the prospect’s lead score should also be adjusted based on his or her behavior in receiving drip emails.  The previous section noted which items should be measured for the purpose of continuous improvement.  The same metrics should also be used for the purpose of adjusting prospects’ lead scores.

As a prospect opens each weekly drip email, perhaps the lead score will be increased by 100 points.  As they open an email and then click through to the website to learn more, they might earn another 500 points.  Of course, visiting subsequent web pages after arrival should be earning more lead score points anyway, so that activity also increases the score for a given prospect.  Finally, the prospect’s lead score should be decreased when he receives an email but doesn’t even open it.

With lead scoring at every phase of the marketing and sales process, sales people’s time is spent on the prospects who exhibit the highest probability of conversion and ultimate purchase.

Get the white paper, Top Five Rules for Using Lead Nurturing To Increase Sales, to learn all five tips for maximizing sales effectiveness. Click here to get your copy: http://www.wingreenmarketing.net/Pages/WPTopFiveRulesforUsingLeadNurturing1.aspx

Third Tip for Using Lead Nurturing to Improve Sales Pipelines: Use web analytics and tracking

Use web analytics and tracking to adjust and mold your messages to your targets

Modern online marketing tools allow marketers to see who visits their websites, which pages are visited, and how different activities affect web traffic and results. Tracking and measuring effectiveness of lead nurturing is just as important – or perhaps more so – as tracking keyword, search engine, and web page effectiveness.

We’ll assume you’re using a comprehensive online marketing system, made up of bulk emailing, blogging, inbound marketing, web visitor tracking, CRM, and database integrity software tools. A well-conceived, well-executed online lead generation system (See our white paper entitled 21st Century Marketing for Effective Online Lead Generation at www.WinGreenMarketing.com/resourcecenter.aspx) allows you to send trackable emails to your prospects. Once they have responded to your initial lead generation campaign and self-identified themselves on your landing page, you’ll be able to track not only their “footprints” through your web pages, but also the effectiveness of your drip marketing efforts.

All lead nurturing emails should contain links back to pages on your website for prospects whose curiosity is aroused by the email they've received. Your goal isn’t to close business with a well-crafted nurturing email, but rather to create interest in the benefits of your products and earn trust that you are subject matter experts who might one day help the prospect achieve an objective. Therefore, your links shouldn't take people to “hard sell” pages, but rather to pages set up to deliver more information to those who wish to find it.
You can and should track all drip emails for the following:

• Was the email opened by the prospect?
• After landing on your website, did the prospect visit any other pages on the site? Which pages? In which order?
• Were any of the links within the email clicked? Which link(s)?

With this type of tracking information in hand, you should be able to make improvements to your drip program. For example, since multiple prospects will be receiving the same emails, you’ll be able to set up control groups, i.e. two different groups receiving the same email content but different subject line (to measure which subject line does better at getting people to open the email), or two different groups receiving similar email content but different links to see which links are more attractive. With control groups and web tracking, you’ll be able to see across many recipients which emails get opened and clicked and which do not. Armed with this knowledge, continuous improvement of your drip marketing tactics and methods becomes a way of life.

Second Tip for Using Lead Nurturing to Increase Sales: Use Nurturing Only in the Right Phase of the Sales Cycle.

Use lead nurturing only in the right phase of the sales cycle

As we all know, prospects advance through a “sales funnel” of various stages or phases of buying behavior, from initial contact through to (hopefully) closed sales. 

Marketing or sales funnel classifications may vary by company.  A good example of the levels or phases in a sales funnel might be:

1.     All possible contacts

2.     All target contacts

3.     Interested leads

4.     Pre-qualified prospects

5.     Qualified prospects

6.     Closed sales

All sales processes and pipeline definitions account for the fact that buyers exhibit different behaviors and look for different things at each stage of their progression through the process.  It’s critical to match your drip marketing content to both your and your prospects’ objectives for each phase.

 

The time to use drip marketing for nurturing your leads is after they have expressed some level of interest, but before they’re ready to take a meeting or seriously evaluate your specific product or proposal.  In most online lead generation scenarios, this means you’ll be getting new, interested leads who are in the “search for solutions” phase, who probably signed up for a webcast or a white paper, or contacted you for more information through your web form.  The proper marketing content for generating the interested lead would be a white paper, article, podcast, or webcast about the general topic related to what benefits your product delivers.  Once your new, interested lead has self-identified in order to receive that content, it’s very likely (70% or more) that although they’ve demonstrated interest, they’re not at all in a timeframe of buying or even evaluating products yet.  It is at this point that your lead nurturing and drip marketing should begin. 

The intent of lead nurturing between the “interested” and the “pre-qualified” stage is to keep your company’s brand in front of your prospect repeatedly during the period of time when they are working through their own processes that lead to evaluating, justifying, and finally purchasing a product. 

Learn more by requesting the complimentary white paper, Top Five Rules for Using Lead Nurturing To Increase Sales, at www.wingreenmarketing.com/Pages/WPTopFiveRulesforUsingLeadNurturing1.aspx

First Tip for Doing Lead Nurturing Well: Use Conversational Tone

We recently published a short post entitled "Five Tips for Doing Lead Nurturing Consistently Well" in which we summarized five key things to do in your lead nurturing programs in order to maximize results. Those five tips were: 

1.    Use conversational tone (not marketing or sales tone)

2.    Use lead nurturing only in the right phase of the sales cycle

3.    Use web analytics and tracking to adjust and mold your messages to your targets

4.    Use lead scoring to target highest potential leads

Request the companion white paper,
"Top Ten Tips for Online Lead Generation"

5.    Consistent repetition, consistent repetition, consistent repetition. 

Today, we'll go into the details behind the first tip.

Use Conversational Tone

There are actually a few aspects to this top tip.  At its most basic, our advice is to use drip marketing as a means of literally creating conversations with new sales leads.  The assumption is that these new leads are at an “interested” stage, meaning that they've explicitly expressed interest in the topic of whatever problems your product solves.  In the world of online marketing, these leads have probably come from your outbound email activities, whether they be white paper offers, webcast invitations, podcast downloads, or some other mechanism where someone from your target market segment self-identifies in response to an outbound email that they received from you (or from someone who forwarded it).

Some of the aspects of using conversational tone to take into account are (1) speaking directly to your audience, i.e. directly to their job role or industry or buyer type, (2) writing in a conversational style, and (3) creating two-way conversations.

Speak directly to your audience

As with all marketing activities since the dawn of time (or at least the dawn of marketing as a discipline), start with identifying your targets.  Marketing and sales should have collaborated on defining the “perfect lead” and documenting it as the touchstone for all future marketing and sales activities.  The perfect lead should be defined in terms of company size, vertical industry, geography, title of the decision making buyer, titles of influencers, titles of gatekeepers, etc. 

Since the scope of our lead nurturing and drip marketing in this paper is defined as the follow-up activities to creating an interested lead – probably through inbound marketing or outbound email, but possibly from trade shows, inbound telephone, professional networking, or any of the many ways people are identified as interested potential buyers – the creation of our drip emails should be in a tone that appeals directly to those defined titles.  Specifically, we recommend creating drip email content that is tailored for each of the categories of leads: decision maker, influencer, and gatekeeper.  (Yes, even gatekeepers sometimes play the role of researching potential purchases.)  Write your emails with the reader’s role in mind.  What information would a decision-maker find interesting or engaging?  What content would be informative to an influencer?  How can I win over a gatekeeper by delivering content he or she finds valuable on a regular basis?

Write in a conversational style

Your drip marketing emails should be written in a style that sounds more like you are speaking out loud to your prospect and less like a marketing document.  Since the objective is to keep each recipient engaged for a long period of time and over many weekly or bi-weekly emails, you’ll need to make sure that the style of writing doesn’t sound like a sales pitch, a formal research document, or a preachy primer.  We recommend that you create and write each one of those emails as if you were talking to someone live.  Test them by reading them aloud, preferably to a colleague, to see how your style and tone come across. 

Create two-way conversations

In addition to a conversational style, we recommend that your emails also elicit some sort of response, even if it’s only a subconscious response on the part of your prospect!  The best way to make your conversational email into a two-way conversation is to add questions to the content.

Hi Jim,

We’ve seen recent research that shows that widgets designed through the new widgetmagic process are showing 61% less maintenance costs over their effective lifecycle.  I thought of you when I saw this because I knew your company uses a lot of widgets in support of your business.  Have you seen this research?  It’s posted at www.widgetmagic.com/research and looks like it’s got some solid interest from a lot of companies. 

Is this something your folks are looking at?

The email is unobtrusive, written in an informal, conversational style, and it provides useful, relevant information to “Jim” along with two questions designed to elicit some sort of response and engagement in the conversation.

Conclusion

Lead nurturing is a valuable and effective way to increase the quantity and quality of sales leads developed by marketing and delivered to sales.  We've identified the five key tips for doing it well.  Our first tip, "Use conversational tone," includes direction to speak directly to your audience, write in a conversational style, and create two-way conversations. 

In our next post, we'll discuss the second key tip, "Use lead nurturing only in the right phase of the sales cycle."

WinGreen Marketing Systems

(650) LEAD GEN

www.wingreenmarketing.com

Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Content Marketing

Outsourcing the day-to-day content marketing function delivers many advantages and benefits. Here's a quick table showing the positive impact of outsourced content marketing.

Features	Benefits
Comprehensive, outsourced content marketing	ü Significant cost savings (25% to 50% lower cost than in-house content marketing; 50% to 80% less cost than in-house conventional lead generation) ü See immediate results.  No ramp-up ü Avoid hiring and training ü Avoid software and hardware investment, configuration, administration ü Fixed monthly retainer. No variable costs. ü Flexibility. Scale up or down as needed.
Content marketing agency creates all content	ü No more slipped schedules ü No more fire drills ü No more mad scrambles for content
Content marketing agency uses its own software platform	ü No IT or software investment required ü Pre-configured, ready to go ü Massively scalable, infinitely flexible
Automated lead capture and real-time distribution to designated salespeople	ü No more spreadsheets ü Conversion rates are improved through immediate call-back ü Save time and labor in uploading and downloading contact information
Sales enablement tools	ü CRM provides “single view of the truth” for leads, prospects, contacts, and customers ü SFA provides automation to manage sales workflow
Automated lead nurturing	ü Keep prospects alive and “warm” until they’re ready to purchase
Management views, dashboards, reporting	ü Accurate forecasts ü Insight to sales activities and drivers ü Measureable marketing

Visit www.wingreenmarketing.com to learn more about comprehensive outsourced content marketing. A smarter way to generate sales leads.

Content Marketing is Aligned With the Modern Buyer-Seller Paradigm

The seller-buyer relationship has shifted since the advent of the World Wide Web, and even more so since the advent of Google. Before 1993 (the invention of the WWW), sellers used to be able to promote their wares through “interrupt” marketing like advertising, cold calling, and even door-to-door selling because the buyer had no other way to engage in a buying process. Today’s buyers have Google and the entire World Wide Web at their fingertips, and the engagement process is driven by them, not by sellers any more.

The new seller-buyer paradigm looks more like this:

• The vast majority of purchase decisions begin with a Google search
• The seller-buyer power relationship has been upended completely. The traditional marketing assumption that the seller must find buyers has been replaced by a new model where the buyer has all the power, all the information at his fingertips, and will find the seller before the seller finds him
• The willingness to be sold to has decreased to almost zero, while the desire and ability to actively research sellers and choose who may “be invited to” sell has become the norm.

Content marketing is aligned with the new seller-buyer paradigm. It doesn’t interrupt with an advertisement or telemarketer’s call. It doesn’t rely on a prospective buyer getting on an airplane to travel to a trade show. And when done correctly, it delivers the “right information” to the “right target” at the “right time” (i.e. when they are beginning their evaluation on the Web rather than when they’re already selecting vendors)

Learn more in the white paper, Seven Ways That Content Marketing Improves Lead Generation Results, available in the WinGreen Marketing Systems Resource Center at www.wingreenmarketing.com/resourcecenter.aspx

What is Content Marketing? [Infographic]

content-marketing1.jpg (1650×1275)

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Top Ten Tips for Online Lead Generation

Top Ten Tips for Online Lead Generation from WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC

Using White Papers as the Foundation of Your Content Marketing Program

White papers are extremely effective when used as marketing premiums in content marketing campaigns. The ideal white paper for content marketing purposes should be about 2500 to 5000 words in length.  Topics should be related to the products the paper is intended to support.  For example, if your company sells network security software, your

white papers should present interesting topics – but never sales pitches – about the benefits of securing networks, the financial returns to be expected from better security, and perhaps tips and techniques for assessing security.  The objective of the white paper offer, as with all content marketing offers, is to uncover new prospects for your products by finding people who are interested enough in topics related to your products to take the time to fill in a form and identify themselves to you in return for the interesting content you’ve offered.

Five Tips for Doing Lead Nurturing Consistently Well

The past few years have dramatically altered the way we think about and how we conduct business-to-business marketing and lead generation.  The ubiquity of Internet connectivity, broadband, and business email has led to a complete upending of the seller-buyer relationship.  Direct mail (“snail mail”) is out; email is in.  Reaching millions of people through mass advertising is out; reaching the same millions (but only when they want) through search engine optimization is in.  “Interrupt marketing” is out; “opt-in marketing” is very in.  Feast-or-famine results are out; consistent, smooth-line results are in.

With the advent of new technologies came the advent of new methods and strategies for finding and developing new sales leads.  The explosion of Google as the preferred search engine led to (or at least dramatically accelerated) the creation of an entire field of marketing around search engine marketing, and a second entire field of lead generation around pay-per-click advertising.  The affordability of email accounts and Internet connections for nearly every worker in America led to the explosive growth of email marketing, then (unfortunately) to the more explosive growth of spam, then to (fortunately) the creation of anti-spam filters and the CAN-SPAM Act, then to the concept of content marketing, and now to the refinement of email marketing into the twin cannons of lead development and nurturing: “outbound” and “drip” email marketing.

The objective of lead nurturing is to keep an interested lead engaged and “warm” until such time as that lead is ready to advance to the next sales phase.

The Five Principles of Lead Nurturing All B2B Marketers Need to Know

Let’s start by stating the obvious: There are far more than just five principles that are important for utilizing lead nurturing techniques to nurture leads and increase your B2B sales.  What we wanted to do with this post was present a brief, easy-to-read, easy-to-digest primer with just the five principles that everyone can take back to work and put to use.  In future papers, webcasts, podcasts, and books, we’ll go deeper into the strategies, methods, processes, and tools you can use to get even more effective with lead nurturing, but for now, let’s focus on our top five.

1.    Use conversational tone (not marketing or sales tone)

2.    Use lead nurturing only in the right phase of the sales cycle

3.    Use web analytics and tracking to adjust and mold your messages to your targets

4.    Use lead scoring to target highest potential leads

5.    Consistent repetition, consistent repetition, consistent repetition.

These sound simple and obvious, right?  Well, they are.  So are the instructions on how to hit a baseball (See ball, swing bat, try to hit ball with bat), but very few people can do it consistently well.  

In the next few posts, we'll explore each of these five tips and talk about doing them consistently well.

If you want to see an entire white paper on the topic and get everything in one PDF, then the white paper Top Five Rules for Using Lead Nurturing to Increase Sales is one in a series of white papers sponsored by WinGreen Marketing Systems.  Make sure to read the other papers in the series by visiting www.WinGreenMarketing.com/resources.aspx, where you’ll find links to many papers in the bottom right of the home page.

In our last post, we provided an overview of how to define success in lead generation programs. Today, we'll go into more detail on the three areas on which to focus: quantity, quality, and cost.

Quantity

If an organization has five sales people, each of whom is expected to close a $100,000 sale each month, the lead generation activities need to deliver 33 to 100 interested leads per rep into the top of the funnel each month.  Therefore the total objective is 500 interested leads each month. 

It is impossible to overstate the importance of having the sales and marketing leaders work together to agree on objectives.  Furthermore, we recommend a wide-open approach that involves all constituents in defining what a “quality” lead is, setting objectives, and agreeing to all aspects of the lead generation function.  Invite field sales, inside sales, marketing management, copywriters, and anyone else who contributes to the process to work together, communicate openly, and understand deeply what the numbers mean and what the quantity expectations are.

Quality

We chose to use the nomenclature “Contacts/Interested/Pre-qualified/Qualified/Closed” for our example.  Sales and marketing must mutually agree to the definitions of what constitutes a lead or prospect at each level of the funnel.  The best target type of lead for marketing lead generation activity is to deliver interested leads.  Contacts – or “suspects” -- are not sufficiently interested and will waste salespeople’s time.  At the same time, in our experience, using marketing or an outside firm to deliver live appointments or qualified prospects is too expensive, and often yields questionable results, as the people tasked with qualifying/disqualifying from interested leads have no vested interest in the final sale, and often “throw the prospect over the wall” to the sales organization while claiming success.  We recommend that sales and marketing mutually agree to define the quality objective as “leads who have self-identified and have expressed direct interest in what our products can do for them… or better.”

Again, the importance of mutual definition of “quality” cannot be exaggerated.  Even the tiniest disagreement or misunderstanding can grow into a canyon between sales and marketing when quota and revenue pressures mount.  It’s critical for sales and marketing leadership and employees to get together, discuss objectives and definitions openly, and commit to regular reviews of both their results and their assumptions.

Cost

Traditional marketing methods – direct mail, trade shows, and cold calling – will typically deliver interested leads for around $675 per lead.  Online marketing methods, when executed by experienced digital marketers, can generate interested leads for between $50 and $100 per lead.  Therefore, the final objective to be agreed between sales, marketing, and (now) the budget gatekeepers, is to deliver quality, interested leads, at less than $100 per lead.

From the WinGreen Marketing Systems white paper, 21^st Century Marketing for Effective Lead Generation:

The marketer of 1995 might conduct a direct mail campaign to a list of 50,000 people at a cost of $0.75 per name and address, $2.50 per color printed promo letter, $2.00 per insert, $1.00 for postage, and $0.50 per mailing house drop -- $337,500 for the campaign (without the telephone follow-up, if outsourced) – and get a 1% response rate (500 responses).  That’s $675.00 per “interested lead”. 

The 21^st Century marketer prepares PDF versions of collateral, builds interactive, informative, drill-down web pages, creates professional quality video and audio, and adds 21st century marketing assets like white papers, podcasts, webcasts, and online surveys.  Thousands of interested potential leads opt in to more communications.  Thousands more are offered marketing assets in email campaigns and subsequently self-identify.  Digital marketing assets are passed along by recipients, leading to more opt-ins.  The typical 21st century use of digital marketing assets allows the marketer to conduct a campaign to thousands of contacts, deliver them an invitation to download a marketing asset of interest, and receive perhaps 500 interested lead responses for about $50,000.

 

Setting an objective of $100 per interested lead is a reasonable goal for most organizations in technology businesses.  As we showed in the above example, organizations that run in-house campaigns very efficiently can deliver interested leads for a cost within the range of $80 to $150 per lead.

In our example of five sales people, each of whom is expected to close a $100,000 sale each month, the economics of online lead generation are quite compelling. We noted in the example that it would take an average of 100 interested leads (at a cost of $100 per lead) to yield one closed sale (at $100,000). Therefore the value of each interested lead is 100,000/100 = $1000. Since marketing costs are already factored into the financials and income statements, it’s fair to say that the incremental cost of $100 per lead yields incremental revenue of $1000, for a return on investment of 900%.

Economically, then, online marketing methods like content marketing, inbound marketing, and email marketing are far superior to old-school physical-world methods like direct mail, events, and mass media. The exact numbers, ratios, and dollars may vary quite a bit, but the logic is inarguable. Online marketing reaches your target buyers more efficiently, more effectively, and more affordably than traditional marketing.