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Nurture has been instrumental in helping us track our leads and personalizing... 
Nurture is an innovative marketing automation application that empowers businesses to build personalized one-on-one conversations with prospects to build strong relationships leading to increase sales.
” 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 software was confused with CRM software. Comparing marketing automation technology to CRM technology is comparing apples and oranges. There is a difference!
as follows:
(CRM
) consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective . 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 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, 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 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 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.
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
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 it’s really not all that bad. Is it?
Direct mail marketing is sliding down the popularity charts. It’s not news, everyone has seen its decline and everything seems to be working against it coming back as a strong force in the
mix.
Current times demand clear metrics and proof of ROI. Can you justify sending a direct mail or catalog which costs$40 a piece to a database of 5000 leads which may or may not open and read it? Would it make more sense to send it to just 200 of those who are more likely to consume that mail and possibly even act on it? Sure! Thas where having a in place can help determine the best way to use the personal effect of direct mail along with other electronic content, email, brochures, press releases and so on. will enable the company to leverage lower cost digitally distributed content like emails, press releases and landing pages to create that initial awareness and interest in the prospect and more importantly, single out and score the leads which are responding well to that content and showing interest in the product or service. The direct mails can then be targetted only
towards these leads where they are more likely to absorb the content of the direct mail and respond favorably. For example, if knew that I have been actively reading up landing pages and their email reviews on the new “Dell Inspirion Mini 9 Netbook” and used that intelligence to send me a personalized letter with a 15% limited time company discount offer, I am more likely to act on it.
A which helps identify the active leads within a database during a certain time can help streamline direct mailing campaigns and make the most of its advantages while still being able to justify the costs. It’s a matter of keeping focus and spending on what can yield conversions and cutting out waste. Lead nurturing and direct marketing, the old and the new can work together and work well
.
Webinars have become a staple component of the marketing mix and strategy for a lot of companies and yet marketing the webinar to drive the maximum attendees is a marketing challenge in itself. A large part of that challenge lies in the fact that a lot of components and activities go into process of webinar marketing and while each activity contributes in some way to making the webinar a sucess, it’s difficult for marketers to get clear visibility into just how well potental attendees are responding at every strange of that process and the overall metrics of their activities. From webinar advertisements, awareness messages, first invitation emails, reach outs, follow ups, reminders to post webinar follow ups there is very little clarity on where the entire effort stands after each stage and thats where a lead nurturing or solution can help you drive the process a lot better.
Now here is the problem: If you have a lead database with 100,000 leads and you pick 1000 of them every month to email and see if they may have some kind of immediate requirement,
of your ‘ potential.
The chances are, that most of leads in your database that had a requirement for your product or service at the time you sent that email campaign were outside those 1000 you picked to receive something about your business. Opportunity missed! This is how most companies would make use of their wealth of leads and prospects and not surprisingly as it isn’t easy launching campaigns on your entire lead database and then again, it isn’t possible to guess exactly which of your leads are looking out for what you have to offer and should be sent something from your company. The trick is to be in front of your prospect at the time when they are looking to buy what you have to offer and running selective email campaigns may yield results but it clearly doesnt unleash the full potential of your database.
This is where comes to the rescue. Having the technology to develop, program and automate sending multiple messages and content gives you the ability to reach out to your entire ecosystem of leads and identify the ones that are sales ready after every reach out. Once the campaign and content has been developed and programed, the system makes sure the leads are being touched regularly without the painstaking effort needed to run smaller targeted campaigns. All lead data has a limited life and needs to be updated and cleansed with time and having large parts of your sit in the pipeline without any activity can lead to them simply stagnating till they are no longer useful.
Getting a simple in place will keep the activity on your leads constant and help you make the most of what you have gathered and have your database work for you. Think about it!
Nurture is a powerful marketing automation & revenue optimization application for B2B marketing campaigns. Nurture is offered on a subscription-based pricing model and you can start automating your marketing campaign today with our free trial.
