Attracting net new leads is just the beginning of a lead gen campaign. At this point they are nothing but mere contacts that have shown some interest in your offering and filled a form. When these contacts engage with your content and take action across multiple channels, that is when their lead journey truly begins. While kudos for getting them through the door, a long journey lies ahead before they become meaningful leads engaging in meaningful activities.
At this point, it is crucial to build marketing campaigns that hold their attention and keep them coming back to discover more about your product or service. While email marketing is one of best marketing tactics to engage and nurture them through out their journey, emails cannot be the only channel you can rely on. You got to make sure you nurture across multiple channels at multiple times, across different formats – short form and long form. Nurture campaigns do a fantastic job in keeping contacts interested in a consistent drip feed. Smart nurture campaigns are intent driven, and are automated based on the speed at which contacts progress through the nurture journey. So how can one go about building efficient nurture campaigns?
Build target personas and segment – First things first – build your target personas. Once you know about your contact’s behavior, likes, dislikes, buying habits and more, you will be able to build relevant content to drip feed them from time to time. This will help you segment the contacts based on common interests and behavior patterns. Accurate segmentation will enable you to develop elements of a nurture plan for each of these segments making sure they are engaged optimally.
Define your campaign goals – Since you are aware of the type of contacts you hold, you will be aware where you want to take them. Defining what is it that you are trying to achieve from this nurture campaign will drive its success. Is it increasing sales, post sales customer care, driving traffic to a particular website, building audience on a social media channel, watching your videos, or downloading a set number of assets, moving them closer to a demo etc. Once these measurable goals are identified and the metrics measuring the success are defined, you are on your way to building content that facilitates meeting these goals.
Develop relevant content – Though you have segmented your contacts, different people consume content differently. It is important to build varied content. It falls in various categories like educational content, awareness building content, product specific content i.e. demos, content that initiates action i.e. register your spot, download a whitepaper, join the webinar, read our press release and more. It is often good to combine these different types of content to keep it interesting. While this content is being built and hosted across multiple channels, note to optimize for mobile. Your funnel should be mobile friendly as far as possible.
Have a multi-channel approach – While email nurture could be a main channel to nurture, remember your contacts are looking at multiple channels. You need to hence catch their attention across other channels along with the emails you are sending them. Get them to register for a webinar, invite them for an event – f2f or digital, catch their attention on a competition on the social networks, put out thought provoking thought leadership content on your websites and more. You cannot afford to be out of mind out of sight.
Personalize! – Audiences are over communicated to today! They need relevant, engaging content that speaks to their needs. When you have defined your audience better, you will know exactly (ish) what makes them tick. What will get them to take action. Personalize your content to make it go that bit further. Also, identifying the stage within the nurture they are in will help personalize better. If contacts are still warming up, and are at the top of funnel – you want to keep your content easy going, highly visual, short and precise so they don’t loose interest. As they progress further into the funnel, long form content, case studies, whitepapers etc. will get their attention. As they approach end of funnel, it will help to prompt them to watch demos, technical presentations and ultimately RFPs (hooray!).
Read into your analytics – Your user behavior will tell you what is working and what isn’t. Analyze the data at various drop-off points, so you can work out why it isn’t working and change it. If you want your lead nurture to work, it cannot be a fire-and-forget kind of an activity. Each element within the nurture needs to be checked upon at regular intervals. If it is not working it is key to amend or replace it, to ensure there are no dead ends to your customer journey within the nurture.
Ask for feedback – Ask those who matter the most! Your audience. It is important to gain insight into what they think of the content they are consuming within the nurture. There could be areas and elements that are working extremely well – maximize that, and there will be areas that need work – alter those! Feedback can be gained in multiple ways across multiple formats. A quick poll on social media, a lengthier survey via emails, a pop-up ‘chat bot’ driven poll on the website, are ways in which you can capture feedback on a regular basis.
Lead nurture campaigns are all about guiding your contacts through a decision-making process at each stage. Drip feed them consistently, engage them with relevant content and initiate action with precise understanding of their needs. Your sales team will thank you for your hard work! 🙂
