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
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| 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."
(650) LEAD GEN
www.wingreenmarketing.com
