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A lot of focus has shifted to customer retention from new customer acquisition ever since company budgets dried up with the sluggish economy. Although I’m not a believer in the strategy that companies should stop looking at new customers altogether and focus their activity towards retaining existing ones, customer retention as well as upselling to your customer base is worth pursuing actively. Typically, existing customers which have a strong relation built with your company are easier to engage than new prospects and calling in on them from time to time to see if there are more opportunities to upsell or renew business with them but as the customer base grows, the task of keeping up with these phone follow ups can get tedious.
are just as suited towards retaining your existing customers engaged as identfying new opportunities. It’s important to be able to keep a constant channel of communication with your existing customers and keep them updated on you companies recent accomplishments perhaps, new product launches, updates on your blog, newsletters and more. If your lead nurturing software application
gives you visibility into when these customers come back to your website and which product pages they are frequenting, it could give some valuable insight into which ones to personally follow up on limiting the sales teams calls to a more manageable set of customers.
Having said this it’s important to note that you can’t completely automate the entire process and rely only on lead nurturing technology to connect reach out to existing customers. Being able to respond with personal email and calls every once in a while to check on your customers is still critical to bring more of the human touch and strenghten the relationship. However well designed nurturing program specifically designed for existing customers will aid the process tremendously and keep the activity alive. How many of you use marketing automation or have a campaign dedicated to nurturing existing customers? Any experiences to share on this?
A question posted on Linkedin on why very few B2B vendors do lead nurturing effectively sparked off an engaging discussion on what kind of expectaions sales and marketing executives have from lead nurturing and what the reality and actual purpose of it is. A brilliant reply by Rachel Schneider - President, Magnus Marketing Group gives a clear perspective on how far away from reality these expectations can be. Rachel says
There is no such thing as demand creation, only demand identification. People seem to think they can create markets – only with a great deal of patience and education, and potentially money. It takes time to find buyers at any time who are willing to listen or have a need. This is step one.
Marketing automation and lead nurturing programs are not designed to magically create demand for a product or solution. Those executives who believe this, believe in a myth. The reality is lead nurturing helps identify sales ready leads from amongst your database or eco-system of prospects and alert you as to which ones are actively responding to your company or product. It simply helps in customer engagement and identification of their interest level so you know which ones to engage at the right time rather than pushing them to buy when they are not ready to buy. However, a completely unqualified name in your marketing automation system who is potentially never likely to need what you offer can’t be automatically converted into a warm lead simply by running a lead nurturing program
and hitting them with messages from your company.
Another point to remember is lead nurturing and marketing automation are long term pull strategies of keeping prospects in the loop and waiting for them to respond to your product not a push strategy like cold calling so it’s wrong to compare the two. As Rachel states in her reply to the discussion:
Reality: Take any business owner what do you hear? I want sales now, now now, make me money, now now now. We aren’t going to make our goals this quarter, how many calls were made, what is our pipeline look like. Now. Close them today. Not thinking conducive to any type of true nuturing.
Lose the targets, telemarketers, short term goals, company centric sales mentality and try to really build a market or business strategically – then you will have lead nuturing.
If your database yielded 40 sales ready leads one month and only 20 in the next it doesn’t always mean your lead nurturing program didn’t work. It more likely means from your total prospects in the program a sub set of 40 had an immediate interest or were ready to be engaged last month and another 20 were ready to be engaged the next month. Having a healthy perspective on what a lead nurturing program can help you do is important to being able to use it effective and build a sustainable process which will keep your lead funnel filled with quality leads. It’s not magic but if its done right, it can work pretty damn well.
When you sit down to discuss the marketing goals for the year, you usually have some plan laid out where for example a campaign will be designed consisting of 9 email based reach outs spread out 3 weeks apart across a database of 10,000 prospects. However, unless its a pre defined campaign programmed in your marketing automation or lead nurturing software
, its easy to find yourself in a position where after 9 months, only 4 of those emails ever went out. We don’t always manage to touch base with our prospects as often as we planned to. prandin
Although it wont help define what is the optimum level of email reach outs, we thought it would be interesting to to learn how often marketers are reaching out to their prospects with this quick poll. How many times do you reach out to your prospects? Please vote now!
Also, if your answer is not as much as you would have liked to touch base with prospects, please leave us a comment on whats the biggest challenge you come across reaching out as often as you would like, is it cost? is it time? is it simply having too many other areas to attend to?
Despite whatever differences you hear about between marketing and sales organizations within a company, almost everyone agrees marketing should try and generate the highest quality leads (or well qualified) leads for sales to work with and not just focus on the volume. I was just reading a brilliant Marketing Sherpa case study : How to Generate Revenue Quickly with a Lead Generation Campaign: 5 Steps which is an insight on how telecom giant BT set up and executed a quick campaign with a message based on the current economy and raked in £270,000 in new contracts in 5 weeks. The campaign was built on 5 fairly simple but relevant email messages targeted towards how the company can help in the current times sent two to three weeks apart. The study goes on to explain more details on how it was structured but what they were able to provide the sales team in their report on the results from the campaign is quoted in step #4 here:
Step #4. Track response rates and website activity
After each email send, the team tracked several metrics to determine customer engagement and gauge interest areas. They measured:
o Opens
o Clickthroughs
o Which page a customer initially visited
o Clickstream to other pages after landing on the siteo Time spent on each page
Step #5 goes on to explain some more interesting facts about the infirmation sales had to work with :
- Account managers received an instant message alerting them when a customer had opened an email or clicked a link inside.
- They also could access the email system to get a report detailing which pages of the site the customer had visited and how long they had spent on each page.
- Account managers used that data to plan follow-up contacts with their customers, to answer questions or discuss products in which a customer had shown interest.
Nurturing technology offers more than just automated send out of emails and auto repliers. The activity tracking can arm a sales rep with enough information about a prospect to go into a call or discussion with a mental map of the prospects interest. That can have a big impact! There is no doubt that BT must have got a number of things right with this campaign from excellent email copies, great target data and so on. Still, with the ability to track activity streams for the prospects, marketing was able to provide more than just a list of names and phone numbers to sales. It’s this quality of lead intelligence that sales will love marketing for.
Analytics have come a long way and helped fine tune the smallest details in a company’s marketing and lead generation process. Scruitinizing what you know about an email marketing campaign and its results and asking “what could we have done better?” keeps marketers on that constant path for improving results. The question is “how do you measure results?” “How do you know where the changes need to be made?”
This is where lead nurturing software has an edge over traditional email marketing applications. When you send out a simple email campaign, the key metrics you get are how many emails were delivered, opened and how many replied. If the reply rate is poor, you assume the email campaign wasn’t sucessful and there must be something wrong with the subject line. How did the email fare in invoking action after it was opened? The “lead activity stream” or “activity tracking” however it may be referred to, is the feature of lead nurturing technology which lets you analyze this. By tracking how the prospect interacts with the email and responds to your messages and analyzing this information, you can pin point where there is a possible break in the loop.
For example: if you send out an email with links to various products on your site and then directs the reader to a landing page with a “free subscription” sign up, lead nurturing would let you track the readers activity through this process. You can measure which leads opened the email, which were the most popular links clicked on, how many clicked through to the landing page and finally how many finally signed up. In a traditional email campaign scenario, if you found out :
- 80%% of the emails were delivered
- There was not a single sign up on the landing page
You would assume the email copy needs to be scrapped and re-written. However when you have an activity stream and you know:
- 70% of your emails were opened
- 40% clicked through to the landing page
- Not one of them signed up
You now know
- your subject line was sucessful in getting opens
- your email copy was sucessful in getting readers to the landing page
- your landing page didn’t convert them into sign ups
Its most likely your landing page that needs tweaking and not the email itself. Observing patterns of what links in your email get clicked and what doesn’t helps in identifying whats working and incorporating them in future campaigns. Activity streams and prospect behaviour patterns are invaluable in tweaking your marketing efforts. A little more information can go a long way.
I signed up for a webinar that caught my attention last month although now I can’t quite remember what it was about. I missed that webinar this Monday as I was distracted by a slideshare presentation I was working on at the time. The truth is…I forgot about it and it slipped my mind completely. I had a lot of things on my mind on Monday and in my defense, it’s been about a month since I signed up for it. Come to think about it, if I could just remember what it was about, I could probably search to see if there was a recorded version I can watch later today when I’m done with this post.
Hush movies Who ever was responsible for managing that webinar and webinar marketing could have done a few things better because I had every intention of attending when I signed up but I didn’t. So what went wrong? Lets go over the issues:
- I signed up about a month ago and didnt receive any follow ups since the sign up confirmation email
- Over time I’ve forgotten the webinar, the topic and the company that was hosting it. There was no communication during the month long gap
- On the day of the webinar at the time it was to start, I was distracted by something else and there was no reminder about the webinar that day to ensure I kept that time slot free
- There was no follow up after the webinar to connect with me and pursuade me to check out the webinar recording considering I missed the actual event but may still be interested
Constant communication. Those are the two key words to a successful webinar marketing campaign nocturna divx download which drives the maximum number of attendees. Whether you use an automated webinar marketing solution or email and phone calls to reach out to prospects, one of the main objectives of lead nurturing programs “to stay fresh in the prospects mind” is also what applies here. A simple weekly reminder about the webinar or leaving a voicemail can help ensure your webinar is still on your prospects agenda. Those last minutes on the day of the webinar is your final window of opportunity to try and convert a sign-up into an attendee and a small reminder can spell the differnce between the two. Lead nurturing Youth Without Youth trailer
technology or webinar marketing software can help you automate this reachout since those last moments are also often the busiest and reaching out to each sign up individually can be cumbersome. However its done finally, its important to be able to reach out to your audience and say “we start in 15 minutes, are you ready?” When you have done so much to drive sign ups you don’t want to miss out on an attendee just because he/she forgot about it at the last minute. Make the most of those precious last moments!
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There is a myth floating around that lead nurturing technology or marketing automation software are tools for the large organizations who have a million customers and a zillion leads to process. The truth: lead nurturing is just as applicable and benficial to small and mid sized businesses as it is to the large companies. There was a time when having a CRM software solution was also known to be an expensive investment large companies could make to better manage their marketing and customer data processes but that has changed drastically with so many smaller to mid sized companies having Salesforce and SugarCRM accounts.
Let’s consider a local corporate travel services business which caters to travel needs, ticketing and car rental to organizations within the vicinity. They would probably generate a decent database of prospects and leads FleshEater from cold calling, participating in conferences, holding promotional events events such as competitions, online inquiries off their website and so on. Like many other businesses, companies have a need to approach them only when they have a need to make travel arrangements and identifying when they may need it is what lead nurturing technology can help do. The key is to be in front of the organization whenever they may need travel services and building a lead nurturing program which reaches out to the companies within the area with updates, messages, offers and other content helps to stay fresh in their memories.
I have been receiving email messages from a newly opened business service apartments chain which recently popped up a few hundred meters away from our office. I opened the introductory email for the first time and scanned through it but never really bothered to click links, check out the website or explore further. They followed up with messages on food festivals they were holding, discount offers during off seasons and so on but I didn’t open those. Recently there was word that a potential customer was coming down to our city and we needed to come up with options on where he could be put up for a few days and preferably close to the office. That hospitality chain came to mind and I searched my inbox, went through previous emails, clicked through to their website and browsed a lot of information they had put up. I can’t help but think if that business had a lead nurturing system in place and had visibility into the enthusiasm with which I consumed their web content they would have called me before I had a chance to look at other options.
Setting up lead nurturing programs
are not as expensive or complicated as one would have believed and just like Salesforce threw the doors open to several small and mid sized businesses with their CRM, we can expect to see lead nurturing and marketing automation
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take a similar path.
“Lead nurturing and marketing automation technology you said? No thank you, we are good. We have been using Salesforce CRM for our leads and its working well for us, we don’t need marketing automation software to do the same. Thanks for reaching out though.” Click! That was a transcription of a prospect our inside sales executive spoke to a few days ago and it wasn’t the only one in which lead nurturing or marketing automation software was confused with CRM software. Comparing marketing automation technology to CRM technology is comparing apples and oranges. There is a difference!
Wikipedia defines CRM or customer relationship management as follows:
Customer relationship management
(CRM Hush movie full
) consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers. CRM software is used to support these processes; information about customers and customer interactions can be entered, stored and accessed by employees in different company departments. Typical CRM goals are to improve services provided to customers, and to use customer contact information for targeted marketing.
Although CRM software like Salesforce can have myriads of additional functionality built into it by adding on appexchange applications, its primary objective is to effectively track and organize accounts and lead data effectively through the marketing and sales cycle. To better understand Marketing Automation, have a look at this insightful post by Terry Hedlund on the Demand Gen Biz Blog titled Marketing Automation and Circular Saws keywords or dfeatures to look out for in a software to identify if it’s really a marketing automation tool. A lead nurturing or marketing automation tool will typically help you:
- Create and run email campaigns
- Automate responses or trigger responses and reachouts
- Program rule based campaigns and follow-ups
- Track lead activity streams
- Assign a grade or score to leads based on their ’sales readiness’
- Provide reporting and analytics
The primary objective with such technology is to automate the process of reaching out and communicating regularly with the leads and identifying which ones are ready to be engaged (based on response activity and interest shown). Eventually the two technologies work hand in hand. CRM’s are needed to manage the data, lead nurturing and marketing automation is needed to keep those leads engaged and generate warm or more qualified leads and communicate this to the CRM. They are interlinked but solve a different challenge and provide tremendous value each in their own way.
Sometime well before Nurture even started taking shape, I was working with inside sales for technology products and services, we would use microsoft outlook as our primary email client and for a small startup company, it wasn’t a bad solution to send out small email campaigns to a set of prospects although not ideal for larger campaigns. I think the most impressive feature as an inside sales rep was that you could be notified when the email was delivered, when the email would bounce and that all important read received notification. As little as that notification can tell you, it is
inteligence and helps you make a better informed call. It helps you say “Hi Jeremy, I’m calling to follow up on an email you probably received yesterday” knowing full well he did receive it. That was something!
Sometime later we started using more intelligent email marketing software which wouldn’t tell you just about received email but notified you when and how many times a prospect would open the email. That was impressive! Almost always, follow up calls to those who opened their email multiple times ended in good conversations simply because they were actively looking at the offering and open to a discussion. If you look at email marketing technology, it has evolved on many fronts from being able to handle a lot more bulk, organized campaigns, analytics and tracking of camapign sucess rates in terms of sent, received and opened emails. However, it stops at a certain point in the process in terms of tracking a lead’s activity and the focus is on tracking the email campaign results.
This is where lead nurturing software picks up from since it doesn’t end with measuring how effective one was in getting a message delivered to prospects but its more a continuous cycle to help turn leads into identified opportunities. It helps track the activity stream and results on each prospect or lead within the database much after the email has been opened. How many times was the email opened? Was the website visited after opening the email? How many times has the website been visited? Which links in the email were clicked? Which landing pages were visited? When did each of these opens, visits or clicks happen? When you have these questions answered, you have a profile of the leads interest rather than just a notification. As an inside sales person, this technology changes my conversation to “Hi Jeremy, I was calling to follow up on an email you read this morning just before lunch time and I understand you’ve been to our website and our webinar marketing product in some detail, could I help you with more information on that or perhaps set up a demo for you when you’re not too busy?” It changes the approach completely and puts a lot more intelligence at your disposal to into a call well prepared not to mention you’re talking to a lead who is already actively showing some interest in your offering. This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lead nurturing technology and it’s still going to evolve further. If you’re still sending emails, you will definitely want to see whats beyond.
If you are interested in a demo of simple lead nurturing technology in action, fill in the ‘Getting Started ‘ form at the bottom of the page and we will get in touch with you.
Almost a year ago we cold called a potential prospect who appreciated what we could do for him but didn’t have a requirement and wasn’t interested in carrying on the discussion just then. A few months later we sent him another email checking up on how things were going and whether anything had changed since then hoping he would need our services. He sent a quick reply but nothing had changed. Since then we shot out some quick emails to him during the rest of the year to which some didnt have replies. He never did engage our services but yesterday we closed a new customer whom we had never spoken to before and guess who referred him to us? Thats right!
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of a lead nurturing program
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is its ability to keep in touch with old leads and in-active prospects which have been retired to the database, keep your offering fresh in their memories and keep them engaged in a non-verbal discussion without having to individually connect with each and every lead one by one. It’s often these regular, more personal messages which go out to your old prospects which help re-ignite the fact that your company is out there when they need you. Send them an email letting them know that you are moving into a new office space or that you have recently revamped your website and would love to have their feedback. Wish them happy holidays or tell them about the new office branch your company just opened this week. Use of triggers to send out simple personal thank you notes every time they download a whitepaper or check through to one of your product landing pages, all of these contribute in some way to helping leads build a relationship with your brand or company and help carve out a place in their memory to help seperate you from the other options available.
Keep in touch with someone, they remember. Lose contact with them, they begin to forget. Keeping in touch with thousands of prospects may be challenging but with a little help from nurturing technology it’s really not all that bad. Is it?
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