BEST PRACTICE GUIDE

Nurturing leads: the secret is in CRM

Best practice guide Nurturing leads: the secret is in CRM | 2

Contents

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guide ‘Nurturing leads: The secret is in

CRM’. You can download it for free here.

Introduction 3

Lead nurture strategy 4

Best practice lead nurturing: the 7 dos 51. Targeting one-to-one2. Timing3. Supporting content4. Progressive profiling5. Keeping permission to stay in contact6. Automating lead hand-offs7. Testing, optimization and measurement

Best practice lead nurturing: the 7 don’ts 9

Case study: ITV Studios 10

Strike all the right chords and win the race 11

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IntroductionToday’s prospects don’t become customers overnight. You need to take them on

a journey to build that all-important trust with your brand. According to research,

63%* of people requesting information about your product now will not purchase

for at least 3 months – and 20% will take more than 12 months to buy.

2% 3% 5%

10%

80

%

2% first contact

3% second contact

5% third contact

10% fourth contact

80% fifth to twelfth contact

*Source: The Marketing Donut

Lead nurturing addresses the gap between when a prospect first interacts with your brand, right through to when they’re ready to make a purchase. But how do you do it and where do you start?

Nurture programs allow marketers to communicate with buyers across multiple channels throughout the sales cycle. This guide will show you how to harness the data in your CRM so you can transform those cold engagements into sales-ready leads.

Creating your lead nurture strategy

It’s no longer about focusing on one channel, like email, to nurture your leads. You’ve got to be thinking about all the different places your prospects are and how you can touch them at every point so your brand stays front of mind. After all, consumers move quickly and seamlessly between digital and offline channels. At the heart of all this is your CRM, because the data it holds will help you determine where your potential customers are, how influential they are within their organization, and what stage of the sales cycle they’re at.

Typically, the percentage of

sales are made:*

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Email

This channel remains one of the best ways to speak with your prospects and customers one-to-one. Thanks to advanced segmentation and personalization, you can use the data in your CRM to target relevant messages to specific people with pin-point accuracy. You’d be surprized at how little brands are using this tactic. A quarter of brand emails are sent using a ‘batch and blast’ method, which doesn’t take into account individual preferences (source: L2 Intelligence Report). So here’s your opportunity to stand out.

In store

If you’ve got one, your store is yet another point where customers can touch your brand. Therefore, a consistent customer experience is something you’ll need to consider. What does your website say about your product versus what your sales people are communicating? Consistency is essential when you’re at the trust-building stage.

Social networks

First, you need to work out which social networks most of your audience are using. This will form the basis of the social media arm of your nurturing strategy. For example, if you’re going to focus on LinkedIn you’ll need to tailor your messaging for this channel compared to what you’d say on Twitter. The two social networks are different in terms of audience, features and tone.

Retargeting ads

Retargeting ads tailored to what people look at on your site are a good way to tempt potential customers back. However, be aware that ad blockers are on the rise and this could affect the reach of your campaign. According to a report by PageFair, 200 million people worldwide are using blocking software. And let’s not forget businesses that automatically block ads on employees’ accounts. It’s therefore wise to closely assess the success of your campaign throughout its life.

Events

A bit of face-to-face interaction can work wonders when it comes to building relationships with your prospects. What’s more, events are an opportunity to get your key organization leaders showcasing your company’s expertise and product, while also being on hand to put any burning questions to bed there and then. This is a great way to target specific people with pertinent content, depending on where they are in the sales funnel.

Website personalization

If you know who’s coming to your website when they land there, this is your prime opportunity to harness the information you hold about to serve up a relevant web experience. Whether it’s a homepage with content targeted at warm engagements or an offer banner aimed at sales-qualified leads, personalization could be key to helping you close a sale.

6 channels you should be thinking

about when devising your nurture

strategy:

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Targeting one-to-oneYou’ve download a couple of pieces of content from a company with a product that could possibly help you overcome a business challenge. The first time you downloaded the content you were asked to provide your company’s business name and your job title. The company offers a number of products but because their CRM has collected data on who you are and the type of content you’ve downloaded, they now have an idea of who you are and your needs.

This information is the Holy Grail when it comes to building and segmenting your nurture programs. As we mentioned earlier, email is one of the strongest marketing channels to allow you to speak to your potential customers at a one-to-one level. A benchmarking study by Demand Gen Report found that almost six in 10 B2B marketers said the ability to segment prospects based on interests and behaviors was a benefit of lead nurture programs. And two-thirds of the marketing outputs that used this method drove better responses to campaigns and offers.

TimingWhen it comes to nurturing your leads, timing can be the difference between pushing prospects further down the funnel or losing them completely. You should consider and test where and at which points you communicate with your prospects, and the frequency at which you communicate with them.For example, if you’re sending a series of brand-building emails, when are they most likely to be read and how often is too often? You don’t want to hammer leads with emails every waking hour, but you also want to stand a better chance of your brand staying top of mind.

You should be taking the one-to-one approach here. If you’re collecting the right information on your leads in your CRM software, you should have the ability to determine exactly where they are in your sales cycle. Have they requested pricing information via your site and spoken to one of your salespeople on the phone? Perhaps it’s time to use this information to target your prospect with a personalized piece of content or special offer to close the sale.

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the 7 dosBest practice lead nurturing:

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9 best practice tips for Supporting contentIf you’ve not heard the saying ‘content is king’ before, where have you been? Content marketing is a key component of many marketing teams’ strategies.

It’s no longer just media outlets and publishers who produce and distribute content; brands are becoming publishers, too. But what you produce must be relevant to your audience, otherwise it’s a wasted effort. There are a number of ways that you can find out what your prospects are interested in consuming. This could be based on search insight within your sector from Google, internal searches made on your website, or insight from your sales team after speaking with potential clients about challenges they’re facing.

Therefore, creating content that answers the challenges of businesses puts your brand in a position of authority within your field.

Progressive profilingEver been presented with an online form that had enough fields to make you want to bounce and run? It’s a catch 22 situation for marketers: you want to collect and enrich as much data on your contacts as possible so you can make your marketing relevant and targeted, but at the same time you don’t want to overwhelm users. That’s where progressive profiling comes in.

This concept means you collect information on your leads over time by displaying new form fields as they interact with you during the sales cycle. Over time, not only will you build a solid profile of your potential customer in your CRM, but you’ll see an improvement in engagements, ROI and better results overall.

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A blog post that appears in search results when someone’s looking for tips or advice could be the first opportunity to expose your brand – and expertise – to a prospect

A whitepaper designed to inspire CMOs to change the course of their strategy, with your product at the heart of it, might make them think “I must speak to these guys”

An event or seminar showcasing the USPs of your product, with outstanding client success stories, could be enough to get prospects fighting to speak to a salesperson at the end

MECLABSsaw a +275%

increase in its emailcapture rate just

by droppingthe phone

number field.

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Keeping permission to stay

in contactYou’ve spent time and effort collecting and enriching the data in your CRM, so you don’t want to alienate your leads by not utilizing it correctly. This is pertinent if the crux of your nurturing strategy is led by email, because you’ll want to avoid the dreaded unsubscribes that will lose you leads.

How? It’s all about relevancy. More than half the people in your sales funnel will stop interacting with your brand as soon as the content becomes irrelevant (Source: Cone Consumer New Media Study).

This goes back to our earlier point about targeting one-on-one. You want to make your potential customers feel like they’ve got your undivided attention and are not just another number. According to LeadFuze, relevant nurturing emails have four to 10 times the response rate of standard email blasts.

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Automating lead hand-offsWhile the timing of your communications during the nurture process is important, it’s also essential that you pass over those sales-ready leads before they go cold. If you’ve got a constant flow of data entering your CRM, it’s a time-consuming task to analyse that information and then have to keep handing it over to your sales team.

Research shows that 35 to 50% of sales go to the company that responds first (Source: Inside Sales). This highlights how the marketing team’s hard work collecting leads can be resigned to the trash if hand-offs aren’t done in a timely manner.

So what’s the answer? Automated hand-offs. If you’ve built up great data in your CRM then your salespeople are in a great position to know the tact in which they should approach prospects.

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Testing, optimization and measurementLike any kind of marketing, it’s imperative to measure the success of your campaign or program throughout its life. After all, you might find that something’s working so well that you want to replicate it in another segment of your nurture program. Or, of course, something might be going horribly wrong and you’ll want to fix it as soon as possible.

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Test don’t guess

The key to testing is to take small steps. If you try and test too many variables at once, you won’t be able to understand what it was that people liked or didn’t like. Therefore, a test on two different subject lines or, indeed, a set of two different colored buttons would give you a clearer result.

Remember that if your strategy spans multiple channels, you’re going to want to try different things to see what’s best for each. For instance, testing different messages on different email segments or creating two or more display ad creatives.

Optimize it

You’ve ran a test and the version that used personalized content performed better by 10%. The next step is to document it and use this insight to optimize the components of your program that include this option.

Measure it

If you’re taking a multichannel approach, you need to have visibility across your whole nurture program. If you’ve created a piece of persona-specific content and you’ve distributed it to a segmented email list, you you’ll want to see how many people have opened the email and what they did on your site after they read it. But you might never discover the full impact of your program if the prospect was persuaded by your nurture program and went on to convert in store.

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We won’t dwell too much on the don’ts, because following the previous points should

hold you in good stead for your nurturing strategy. But here are some things you

definitely shouldn’t do:

the 7 don’tsBest practice lead nurturing:

Don’t invade your prospects’ personal space. Too many emails and calls are annoying and a turn-off.

Don’t create one-size-fits-all marketing comms. ‘Batch and blast’ mailouts are a thing of the past.

Don’t deliver irrelevant content. If you know what your prospects are interested in, avoid sending them something that makes you look like you don’t.

Don’t press send and then forget about your nurture program. Learn from the results and use the data to become smarter with your marketing.

Don’t use bad data. It can lead to all kinds of problems, particularly when you want to become targeted with your marketing.

Don’t forget to inform sales about the programs you’re running. It’ll help them understand what information prospects have already been exposed to.

Don’t think that all leads are quality leads. Scoring removes time-wasting and will automatically generate sales-ready leads.

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A typical campaign will use multiple emails to promote a new program, starting with a teaser, followed by more information on plotlines, actors and so on. Each email in the program offers up more information including accessing clips, until eventually recipients are offered the chance to fix a meeting or view the first episode at an event.

The effect of the email campaigns in raising interest is easy: ITV can monitor substantial increases in web traffic on ITV Studios’ client website around the time of the major events.

This is email is a follow-up to the introduction of the new Poldark series. It offers stats on viewing numbers, comparisons against other programs aired at this time, and commentary from the media and the general public. The CTA encourages email openers to watch the full first episode – so not only does the communication show quantifiable results, but it also gives an opportunity for ITV’s sales team to see who’s watched the episode and for how long. A great way to measure people’s interest and use it to go in with an informed sales pitch.

Case study: ITV Studios

With a high-value offering and a limited number of possible leads, ITV Studios has

developed a nurturing strategy to give its salespeople a really firm handle on their

prospects’ likely degree of interest.

This is the first in a number of emails sent out by ITV Studios, in a bid to raise interest in the new series of Poldark. It offers up an exclusive promo of the upcoming program – which, if watched, will give ITV’s sales teams a good indication of warm leads to contact.

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As you’ll have discovered from this guide, lead nurturing is a delicate and lengthy process. You’re not going to win new customers over night. Your strategy will need to span multiple channels, and the more relevant and personalized your marketing can be, the better.

By following our seven ‘dos’, we hope you’ll arrive at the beginnings of a nurturing campaign that strikes all the right chords. But that’s just the start of the journey – the key to success is to test, measure and optimizeuntil you’re running multiple nurture programs thatdrive more qualified leads to your sales team.

Strike all the right chords and win the race

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