All posts tagged Lead Nurturing

Two Tips for Lead Nurturing Success

by JFung on May 20, 2011 in Nurturing Campaigns with No comments

An email blast is not the right solution to generating more opportunities. The leads in your database are unique, because their needs differ. A lead nurturing program allows you to develop a relationship with leads in an effective way until they become ready to buy. The sales team will be happier when marketing is passing better qualified leads to them.

Two tips for lead nurturing success:

1. Personalization: Personalized emails have the potential of leading to higher click-through rates over mass email techniques. Merely changing the salutation in your outbound marketing messages could double your click-throughs. Now imagine targeting by contact role, industry, and/or geography. Personalizing emails in each of these categories will impact your ROI; personalizing for all three could potentially double and in some cases triple your conversions.

2. Timely Engagement: Other than targeting your leads with the right message, building rapport with your prospects at the right time is also important. Mapping out content to match each stage of the buying cycle is essential for driving the sales process. Establish yourself as an industry thought leader by providing relevant information. Sending a whitepaper on minimizing risk, improving productivity, or case study can work to position you as a source for valuable industry knowledge.

Getting the Hottest Leads to Sales and No Sooner!

by JFung on May 11, 2011 in B2B Best Practices, Lead Scoring, Marketing Automation, Nurturing Campaigns, Other with No comments

Marketers are gaining leverage in the continuous war with their friends at their local sales department.

It’s true, once upon a time, long before automated technology took a significant role in the field of marketing, the sales guys were to blame for failed efforts at potential client meetings. However, they always rebuked: “Marketing isn’t doing a good enough job at pre-qualifying the leads they send us!” So once marketing gained a significant advantage with marketing automation tools that would measure campaign performance and the quality of each lead, marketing once again got the upper hand.

Marketing and sales may continue to fight like cats and dogs forever, but that doesn’t change the fact they really have to get along despite their rivalry.

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Identifying Active and Inactive Contacts

by Sandeep Singh on May 11, 2010 in Lead Scoring, Nurturing Campaigns, Other with No comments

Have you been sending out emails to find new leads which you can pass on to your sales team?  Have you been using your Eloqua or marketing database for a while now? Would you like to identify who is responding to your campaigns?

If you continue to send communication to contacts who do not respond to your marketing efforts they might mark your emails as spam rather than unsubscribing.  Identifying these contacts in your database will allow you to suppress them from frequent communication.

How we define active and inactive contacts in your database:
An active Contact is defined as a contact that has opened an email, visited your website or completed a form in the last 4 months.

An inactive Contact are defined as a contact who has been sent at least 3 emails over the past 4 months and not had ANY tracked response activity.

Using the new Eloqua contact filter interface you can now combine the ability to filter on contact field values, activity and inactivity data.  Having all your filtering criteria in one filter you might have to apply advanced logic to make your filter accurate and execute correctly.

Once these contacts have been categorized you can now see the potential of how you can target your marketing efforts to these segments of contacts.  We would suggest that you create a re-engaging nurturing campaign for the inactive contacts as they are not ready to buy but when they are you will be on top of their minds.

COntact Filter

Welcome Aboard!

by Carey Copeling on April 6, 2010 in Other with No comments

In the past few weeks, several of our clients have requested some help with a nurturing campaign. Not an uncommon request for our consultants here, but in my case, after reviewing the end goals and expected results, it became apparent that it was not so much a traditional nurturing campaign, but more of an on-boarding or AWP (automated welcoming program). Essentially, these clients wanted a way to welcome and introduce net-new contacts to their brand, products, services and resources using emails and hypersites.

One particular client had developed an idea wherein they wanted to leverage Eloqua’s Program Builder, Email and PURL-based Hypersites to direct all new contacts in the database to a personalized resource portal that featured their top 5 whitepaper/resources, their sales rep’s information (lead owner) and some personalized messaging based on their industry or vertical. Not to say that other organizations aren’t applying this type of program to their net new leads, but it dawned on me that the majority of nurturing efforts occur after lead scoring, and a few weeks of traditional communication efforts have not made them MQLs. This particular program engaged the lead within 24 hours of becoming an Eloqua contact and provided a tremendous amount of value right away to the prospective lead.

The determination of whether or not a lead qualified was fairly simple: Was the Date Created within the last 24 hours, or did the lead have a SFDC Lead Status of “Prospect, No Opportunity” and was Modified by CRM within the last 24 hours, and had that particular contact not run through the program previously? If all of those answers were true, then the feeder would fire and they would begin their path. An email was sent the following business day welcoming them to the company, and quickly let them know that there were some key, and more importantly free, resources available to them that they are encouraged to view on a personalized Hypersite page. When any of the assets were viewed/downloaded, a closed SFDC activity was written to their record, notifying the lead owner that the lead’s interest was mounting and that they were now far more educated about the client’s products and services than they were a mere 24 hours ago. On the Hypersite page itself, the lead owner’s information was clearly present, which gave an additional personalized touch to the resource page, and essentially put a name (and a face) to the connection between them and the next step in the relationship.

Now, we know that the first email isn’t always going to peak the interest of a particular contact, and as Steve Woods posted in his blog last week, evaluating which contacts clicked through and visited the hypersite and those that did not is the key to nurturing these welcoming messages. Putting a decision rule after the email send will allow you to ‘bucket’ those that did not action the first email, and allows you to change your messaging to this group and try them again at a later date. Steve referenced 4 days, but again, that is up to the client. With this particular example, the second email went out 3 weeks later, and a 3rd email went out 4 weeks later after evaluating visitors vs. non-visitors.

This is a very valuable tool/method for treating new contacts/leads in a way that will educate, empower and engage them quickly and effectively while passing on value immediately. If you have access to Program Builder and Hypersites this is a must have, and truly will help you gain that all-important first touch that you leads and contacts are probably really going to want.

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