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What is lead nurturing? How does one define lead nurturing? Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo defines lead nurturing:

Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship by conducting an informative dialog that helps qualified prospects who are not yet sales-ready, regardless of budget, authority, or timing – and of ensuring a clean hand-off to sales at the right time.

It’s easy to mix the objective of lead nurturing and assume everything lies within the lead nurturing or marketing automation technology or software but there is more to it than that if you look at the definition. It’s possible to get a a really great lead nurturing application, start configuring it and get running while still missing the point

of being able to create a conversation and touching base with leads through informative content in a close loop till they are sales ready. Thats why it’s important to know what is not lead nurturing.

Brian Carrol of InTouch rightly says in a blog post on the B2B Lead Generation Blog:

It’s surprising how many marketers now say they do “lead nurturing” but in reality they are just sending monthly email campaigns or monthly newsletters with some call to action.

If all you do is send generic email marketing messages to your early stage leads over and over and over again, you’re missing the point. Consistency is good but being relevant and then consistent is even better.

To be truly effective, marketers must get over the “automated only” approach to lead nurturing (meaning there’s no actual human interaction just a blind system that can’t think). The point of nurturing is to build relationships and to do that we need to have a dialog between people that’s relevant and consistent.

One needs to be able to differentiate between creating a periodic email marketing campaign and setting up a lead nurturing program for the very reason mentioned above. Another point to note is, every email should not be an outright attempt to sell or make an offer. Selling is for leads that are already nurtured and ready to be sold to . During the lead nurturing stages, leads are absorbing content and information which may help them decide on how their problem can be solved when they are ready to buy. Perry of Leads360 puts this point across well in a blog post saying:

You must not sell. A lot of business owners fail in drip marketing because they are selling products to their nurtured leads. First, they do not fit the qualifications you have, so there is a huge chance that they are still not going to make a purchase. Second, if they keep on seeing the word “buy” in their inbox or mailbox, they can get so annoyed and leave your business.  However, you can pre-sell.

Auto responder email programs are often talked about as lead nurturing tools but auto responder email programs though very effective when used well, are just that….auto responder emails and not lead nurturing applications. Similarly fortnightly newsletter programs can be sent using lead nurturing technology, but isn’t strictly lead nurturing on it’s own.

So when you are planning your program, stand back, take a look at how it’s setup and check to see that it fits the goal of lead nurturing and isn’t whats its not supposed to be.
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A sales call is going well and the prospect seems to be showing interest and asking a few good questions and all of a sudden the tone changes and it looks like this call is not going to end as expected… what do you do? Some would end the call and make up and mark the lead “cold” giving up on it and moving onto the next one. The others whom some may call optimists would end the call but think to themselves “Alright, I’ll give this one some time and then follow up in a few weeks to see if there is any change”. I would say the optimism is a good thing because when it comes to how a qualified lead reacts to being engaged, has a lot to do with timing. Knowing a leads timing schedule and striking at the right time can spell all the difference in how they react to a sales call. Lead nurturing is the tool that can give one that kind of insight.

David Thompson, CEO of Genius.com

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puts this point across crisply in this short video clip which emphasises the importance of timing:

morgue the dvd So if you may be giving up on leads which are not put into a lead nurturing program and nurtured till they are ready, you may just be missing out on a future customer. Think about it.

“Well ofcourse you should strike while a lead is hot…isn’t that way too obvious a statement to make?”, you might be thinking. However in practice, it isn’t always followed by companies even those equipped with state-of-the-art lead nurturing technology. Leads which display a sudden spike in activity levels and can be scored higher are ones that are calling out to be contacted and followed up with personally by sales. If leads that have been nurtured to the point they have reached a level where they are “ready” and then allowed to sit idle for a longer period without being engaged by sales, the effect of the nurturing process will wear off after some time and that lead will “cool” down and eventually go to the bottom of the nurturing cycle where it probably started.

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If you look at the main objectives of lead nurtring

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• The first is to help keep your business fresh in a prospects mind so they think of you when they have a requirement you can fulfil
• The second is to identify when a prospect or lead is ready to be engaged based on how actively they are looking at your products or solutions

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If you go by the first objective, a lead has your business on the top of their minds when they are actively looking at your emails, when they are frequently visiting your website, when they are downloading more content on your offerings. Lead nurturing technology helps you see when these activities pick up and since thats teh time when your business is on their minds, that is the time to strike From Hell divx . Calling a lead who is going through what you have to offer or has very recently been through your content makes connecting far easier and more effective and the timing is right. “Ahhh I was just going through your website and looking at….” is the kind of response you can expect to hear at the time as opposed to “And who are you and what do you do?”.

Going by the second objective which is identification of leads that are sales ready, a “sales ready” state would be reached when a lead has responded actively to your content consistently enough to know that some level of interest has been achieved. A level enough for sales to take over from. The constant messages, content and reachouts are all focussed on driving a lead to this state and when a lead has reached this level, it’s time to act

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. Every hour after a lead has been identified as ready is an hour when the effect of all the messages till this point is wearing off and delaying beyond a point would result in the lead being cold again.

So if you have a nurturing program in place and have the technology to track lead activity and identify ready leads, make the most of it and strike while the lead is hot.

It’s a good sign when a prospect who has received an email from your company opens it. It’s a better sign when they open and read an email multiple times and it’s an even better sign when someone clicks through and actively reviews content on your web site. Thats when you know you have a lead thats absorbing the content you’ve developed on your site and that lead is being nurtured. When it comes to being able to track lead web activity on your website, there is more to lead nurturing software than the direct benefits of being able to know what the customer has been clicking and showing interest in.

With the whole evolution of online marketing, websites have become more than just an online brochure with information on your business. They are sources of rich content which helps prospects understand your offering better and help them decide whether you can help them fix a pain point. Websites have gone from being stand alone pages of information to an integrated part of the sales and marketing process and as important as it is to know what content your potential customers are reading to understand their interest level, it’s just as important to know what they are reading to know whether you are providing them the right content and learn what you can improve on.

Using the web activity tracking features that lead nurturing software offers, it’s not to difficult to vizualize the browsing patterns of leads on the company website. For example if a lead goes from your email to a landing page on your website, selects the product or offering which interests them, reviews information on that product, downloads content related to it and proceeds to a request form or tries to connect with the company, it displays a good website flow which is working towards building interest in being contacted by the company. On the other hand if the lead goes to the homepage, clicks random links very quickly and leaves the site quickly, it means the website is not able to keep them engaged and needs to be worked on.

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Web activity tracking is a great indicator of what needs to be added to the website, what needs to be changed, what needs to be provided to make the website as much a part of the lead nurturing process as the software application being used. After all till all the elements work in synch, adjustments need to be made to reach that goal of generating a steady flow of qualified leads.

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A common question for those who are out looking to set up their own lead nurturing program for the first time is “how do I plan a campaign?”. Having a lead nurturing software application or the technology in place is just the first step. To get a nurturing program from planning stages to execution can be challenging the first time around and there are no fixed definte formulas which if followed will guarantee you a fixed response rate. Whats best for your business may not be as effective in someone elses and vice versa. Experimenting and making changes along the way will help tune your program and squeeze out better results and every scenario is different.

There are however, three factors to that simply have to be looked into while planning your nurturing program: content, scheduling and a lead scoring system. First up is deciding on content.

Content

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The saying ‘content is king’ holds true for nurturing programs too and it’s best never to underestimate the importance of high quality,  effective content that can impact the users decision making process and convince them to act on the information they consumed. There is a vaierty of options you can review to make your selection. Here are some of them:

• Articles
• Case Studies
• Press Releases
• Whitepapers
• E-Newsletters
• Research Findings
• Polls / Surveys
• Brochures & Collateral
• Emails
• Invites

Schedule

Scheduling or planning out the timelines between the content send-outs is another crucial step where you need to ask yourself a number of questions to find what works the best. How often to you want to reach out to your prospects with the content you’ve designed? How often is too often? How little is too little to the point they dont remember you till the next time they receive something? Again, there are no hard and fast rules but here is a great example of a nurturing campaign schedule from Brian Carrol of In Touch:

Sample of Nurturing Plan Schedule

• Day 1 Introductory phone call and follow-up email
• Day 28 E-newsletter with voicemail alert that it’s there
• Day 42 Email recent customer success story, in related industry if possible
• Day 60 Personal invitation from sales person to forthcoming seminar
• Day 80 Mail case study and personalized letter of transmittal
• Day 100 Email recent article of interest on Internet
• Day 120 Email “touching base” note
• Day 140 Mail follow-up letter with free report
• Day 160 Prospect calls you: now a qualified

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Lead Scoring

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The last area to come to a consensus on is lead scoring or deciding how much weightage in points would be assigned to a prospect based on the response to the content. For example a lead gets 20 points for clicking on a link in the introductory email but gets 60 points for accepting an webinar invite and signing up. A webinar registrant is almost definitely more qualified than a link click through. How much more qualified and how much more the weightage assigned to this response is a decision you will have to make . Here is a sample of the lead scoring rules page on Nurture :

Once the program gets rolling its possible to make tweaks and changes to improve on it but every program needs to start somewhere and decisions have to be made. Let us know about any sample nurturing plans you’ve developed and what went into planning it.

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 :

1. 80%% of the emails were delivered
2. 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:

1. 70% of your emails were opened
2. 40% clicked through to the landing page
3. Not one of them signed up

You now know

1. your subject line was sucessful in getting opens
2. your email copy was sucessful in getting readers to the landing page
3. 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.

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

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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!

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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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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,

you are utilizing 0.01%

of your lead databases‘ potential.

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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 lead nurturing 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 qualified leads sit in the pipeline without any activity can lead to them simply stagnating till they are no longer useful.

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Getting a simple lead nurturing program 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!

Seller: Do you need a pair of shoes?

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