Creating Successful Lead Nurturing Emails, Part II: B2B

As I’ve talked about in recent posts, a suc­cess­ful lead nur­tur­ing strat­egy improves the num­ber and qual­ity of the leads you can gen­er­ate — for a sig­nif­i­cant increase in revenue.

Last time I out­lined some impor­tant ele­ments nec­es­sary for a strong lead nur­tur­ing pro­gram — com­mu­ni­ca­tions should be per­son­al­ized, rel­e­vant, well-timed, thor­ough and auto­mated –and I offered an exam­ple of a suc­cess­ful B2C lead gen­er­a­tion email.

B2B com­pa­nies, both those that close the sale offline (the major­ity of B2B have field sales teams) as well as B2B e-commerce, can use the same rel­a­tively sim­ple ele­ments to improve con­ver­sions from leads, as well. Yet so many B2B com­pa­nies send follow-up emails that are noth­ing short of awful.

The images are bro­ken, the for­mat­ting is weird, text is cen­tered… in fact, with a great major­ity of follow-up emails that I see, it would be far bet­ter to send noth­ing than to send some­thing that rep­re­sents the com­pany so poorly.

But it’s not at all dif­fi­cult to put together a strong email that encour­ages a lead to move fur­ther through the sales funnel.

For exam­ple, below is an email Omni­ture might send to a poten­tial cus­tomer, Jason Smith, who had down­loaded a white paper on lead gen­er­a­tion. Notice how sim­ple the email is: it isn’t over-designed; it isn’t bla­tantly in-your-face; and it’s brief and to-the-point.  And it encom­passes a num­ber of the ele­ments of a suc­cess­ful lead-nurturing strategy:

Well-timed

The email is sent within 15 min­utes of the prospect down­load­ing the white paper.

Per­son­al­ized

The “To” line includes the prospect’s actual name, and the greet­ing uses his name again: “Hi, Jason.”

Per­son­al­iz­ing the email lets the prospect know that you are send­ing some­thing spe­cific to him and only to him (ecom­merce and many b2c com­pa­nies have been doing this for a while – it’s about time that the rest of the B2B world catch up).  It hints that the con­tent of the email will include infor­ma­tion of spe­cial inter­est to him.

The sig­na­ture reas­sures the prospect that a real per­son — “Jim Red­mond, Omni­ture” — is behind the com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  I want to be clear that this lead nur­tur­ing and mar­ket­ing automa­tion shouldn’t replace human inter­ac­tion, but rather rein­force it so that if the prospect hits “reply” in the email, it does in fact go to Jim Red­mond and can ini­ti­ate a mean­ing­ful conversation.

Rel­e­vant

The email is imme­di­ately rel­e­vant to the prospect: it acknowl­edges that Jason down­loaded a guide to lead gen­er­a­tion, and it offers some­thing of intrin­sic value — a use­ful For­rester report on lead gen­er­a­tion, as well. Note: The first para­graph does not give a sales pitch.

Because Jason was required to give a cer­tain amount of infor­ma­tion when he first down­loaded the lead gen­er­a­tion report, Omni­ture is able to cus­tomize the email even fur­ther, point­ing out in the sec­ond para­graph that other “high-tech mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies” sim­i­lar to Jason’s com­pany, Soft­ware Inc., have learned how to improve lead gen­er­a­tion through Omni­ture Test & Tar­get. The sec­ond para­graph offers a soft pitch, rather than a hard sell.

The third para­graph sets an expec­ta­tion, offer­ing to con­tinue to send use­ful infor­ma­tion sur­round­ing the topic of lead gen­er­a­tion (more rel­e­vance): “If you don’t mind, as I peri­od­i­cally come across rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion to assist you in your job, I’ll send it to you.”

Auto­mated

Email responses such as the exam­ple above can eas­ily be auto­mated using mar­ket­ing automa­tion (specif­i­cally lead nurturing/drip mar­ket­ing) soft­ware.  Sev­eral exam­ple com­pa­nies include:  Aprimo, Elo­qua, Market2Lead, Mar­ket Bright, Mar­keto, Neolane, Vtrenz, etc.

Cer­tain areas of the com­mu­ni­ca­tion are pre-populated auto­mat­i­cally by the tool, based on the infor­ma­tion the prospect has given when he down­loaded the white paper. For exam­ple, his name is auto­mat­i­cally entered in the “To” line and the salu­ta­tion. The title of the white paper he down­loaded is included. In the sec­ond para­graph, the indus­try Jason is in — high tech mar­ket­ing — is pre-populated, as is the name of his com­pany. His com­pany name is again inserted in the third paragraph.

Con­sider pre-writing all of your emails, for each indus­try you cater to (this can also be done by product/solution or other impor­tant seg­ments beyond indus­try). Then, your lead nur­tur­ing pro­gram sim­ply pop­u­lates the fields that you spec­ify based on the infor­ma­tion the prospect has given within the lead gen form on the web­site (land­ing pages), and sends the email within 15 min­utes of con­tact with the prospect.

Of course, the exact for­mat of the email will dif­fer widely from one com­pany to another, which is why each com­pany can and should run tests as they explore a lead nur­tur­ing strat­egy. At Omni­ture, we have found, for exam­ple, that the quan­tity of fields required in the lead form pro­vides us with valu­able infor­ma­tion that we can use to rel­e­vantly remar­ket to prospects. The extra fields required in the lead form mildly decrease con­ver­sion; how­ever, the addi­tional info gath­ered for remar­ket­ing off­sets any con­ver­sion decreases.  Another com­pany may have totally dif­fer­ent results.

By giv­ing prospects some­thing use­ful to them (a free report-call it com­pli­men­tary) – and no hard sales pitches , com­pa­nies can sig­nif­i­cantly improve con­ver­sions from leads to actual cus­tomers and simul­ta­ne­ously decrease prospects from unsubscribing.

Again, this type of automa­tion can be accom­plished by tying together CRM with mar­ket­ing automa­tion and enhanced with Web­site ana­lyt­ics for detailed analy­sis and report­ing to con­tin­u­ally opti­mize testing.

Next time, I’ll talk about when, and how often, you should be con­tact­ing your prospects.