Do You Have an Automated Response and Lead Nurturing Program in Place?

By learn­ing to suc­cess­fully nur­ture inter­ested prospects that haven’t yet com­mit­ted to buy, both B2B and B2C com­pa­nies can increase cam­paign response rates, max­i­mize lead con­ver­sion rates and increase the num­ber of closed sales for a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in rev­enue. Sir­ius Deci­sions stated that ~80% of inter­ested B2B prospects will pur­chase the prod­uct and not nec­es­sar­ily from the same provider within a two-year time frame (even if it isn’t imme­di­ately). So how do we ensure that we stay “top of mind” for them? Nur­ture. Some com­pa­nies call this drip mar­ket­ing or lead mat­u­ra­tion.

Despite the above sta­tis­tic, most com­pa­nies today don’t have a lead nur­tur­ing strat­egy in place — or if they do, they are not mak­ing the most of their efforts: B2B mar­keters have low con­tact rates, end­ing their efforts to con­tact a poten­tially inter­ested prospect after just three to five attempts and hav­ing reached only 20 per­cent to 50 per­cent of their leads. The leads are often not highly qual­i­fied, and they are all treated the same, no mat­ter what level of qual­i­fi­ca­tion they have.

If this sounds famil­iar, you’re not alone. Over the course of the next month, I will be out­lin­ing in detail an auto­mated response and lead nur­tur­ing pro­gram over five to six posts that com­pa­nies can imple­ment them­selves in order to increase the num­ber of closed sales that are gen­er­ated from leads. I’ll give spe­cific tac­tics on how to increase rel­e­vance and con­ver­sion through per­son­al­iza­tion and profile-based con­tent. I’ll also give you plenty of exam­ples of what to do — and what not to do.

You’ll learn to bet­ter con­nect with your cus­tomers, based on their behav­ior and their needs. You’ll learn to use what you know about their demo­graph­ics in order to bet­ter tar­get your com­mu­ni­ca­tions. And you’ll learn how to inte­grate dif­fer­ent types of com­mu­ni­ca­tion — includ­ing auto­mated tele­phony, email, and direct mail — into your strategy.

Strat­egy for lead nur­tur­ing and response

So first, let’s talk about an over­all strat­egy. Bear in mind that this strat­egy is equally use­ful for B2B mar­keters as well as B2C mar­keters, espe­cially for those whose B2C sale is a more expen­sive con­sid­ered pur­chase (a car or a plasma TV) rather than an impulse purchase.

At its heart, a strat­egy for lead nur­tur­ing and response is sim­ple, and it’s based on five ele­ments. Lead nur­tur­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions must be:

1. Per­son­al­ized
2. Rel­e­vant
3. Well-Timed
4. Thor­ough
5. Auto­mated

1. Per­son­al­ized — the mes­sage comes from a spe­cific per­son and goes to a spe­cific person

A lot of com­pa­nies use the imper­sonal “Eddie Bauer” or “Costco” or “CDW” as the sig­na­ture and “from” address in their emails instead of a named per­son. At Omni­ture, we have tested per­son­al­ized sig­na­tures, and have dis­cov­ered that when emails come from an actual per­son, con­ver­sion rates are bet­ter – now we don’t do this 100% of the time, only if the lead score achieves a spe­cific thresh­old so as to not inun­date our sales teams with vol­umes of leads that may not be qualified.

When­ever pos­si­ble, you also want there to be a phone num­ber on the email that goes to the per­son whose sig­na­ture is on the email.

At a pre­vi­ous B2C com­pany, the mar­ket­ing depart­ment went so far as to actu­ally test using imag­i­nary peo­ple — the name “Sally” vs. “Susan,” for exam­ple — and found that con­ver­sion rates can be higher depend­ing on which name you choose. Of course, you have to bal­ance that with the fact that you’re being some­what disin­gen­u­ous by using fake people.

2. Rel­e­vant — it is based on a par­tic­u­lar behav­ior, or on your pro­file of the lead

It’s easy to mon­i­tor behav­ior online: if a con­sumer enters into the check­out process to pur­chase a stereo sys­tem, and then bails from the shop­ping cart process before com­ple­tion, you can re-market to them based on your knowl­edge of that individual’s behvior.

You might, for exam­ple, send an email ask­ing the cus­tomer to return to com­plete the pur­chase for the same stereo, and offer a 20 per­cent discount.

If you work for a B2B com­pany, your vis­i­tors might fill out lead-generation forms on the Web site and answer ques­tions about their inter­ests. You can then choose to com­mu­ni­cate with them based on the answers to those ques­tions. For exam­ple, if some­one comes to the Omni­ture site and says that they’re a retail con­sumer site, it wouldn’t make sense for me to remar­ket to them offer­ing B2B-specific guides. I would mes­sage to them specif­i­cally about online retail mar­ket­ing and pos­si­bly send them reports on how to increase shop­ping cart con­ver­sion rates, etc.

You can also ask more ques­tions to fur­ther qual­ify the leads, which will help in future com­mu­ni­ca­tions with them.

If they’ve reg­is­tered with the site, you know their name, per­haps some demo­graphic infor­ma­tion, per­haps the types of prod­ucts that inter­est them by what they’ve clicked on or have pre­vi­ously pur­chased. From that infor­ma­tion, you can offer rel­e­vant communications.

3. Well-timed — com­mu­ni­ca­tion comes quickly fol­low­ing a par­tic­u­lar behav­ior or event (after achiev­ing a lead score thresh­old), and it is well-spaced thereafter

In a B2B sce­nario, how often is your inside sales team able to com­mu­ni­cate with a lead who had expressed an inter­est at a spe­cific point in time? If they wait more than five min­utes from the ini­tial point of inter­est, chances are they are gen­er­ally not very suc­cess­ful in reach­ing the lead. The same goes for B2C exam­ples where leads are gen­er­ated and then fol­lowed up by a call cen­ter. We did a straw poll and found that out of 10 leads, less than 1 was able to be con­tacted, even if the leads were fol­lowed up within 48 hours.

Research shows that the first con­tact attempt should come within five min­utes. (let’s link to the spe­cific study here if pos­si­ble.) Let’s think about this intu­itively, if you’re at work and down­load some infor­ma­tion or fill out a web inquiry form, chances are that you’re in a meet­ing or focused on your next project within an hour. Your down­load or request form infor­ma­tion after an hour is now out of your mind. When I receive calls from some­one fol­low­ing up with me within two to three days and I actu­ally take them, I have to go through a “remind me” rit­ual for them to even con­nect they’re rea­son for call­ing with my pre­vi­ous behav­ior. We’re most likely to reach a per­son within 5 min­utes while they’re still at their desk in a B2B exam­ple or at home in a B2C exam­ple and upon reach­ing them, I guar­an­tee they’ll remem­ber what their behav­ior was to pos­si­bly elicit a call.

Dur­ing the “response” period (the first two weeks after you get an online lead), it is most effec­tive to have attempted to call up to 5 times within the first 24 hours, and to have left one voice mail message.

If no con­tact is made after one to three hours, an email should be sent, with three or four more sent through­out the first two weeks (that may be too many; these are things you’ll want to test).

Through­out the first two weeks, a good follow-up strat­egy includes three dial attempts per day, with a voice mail every three days or so.

Dur­ing the nur­tur­ing period (after the first two weeks), con­sider one email per month and one voice mail per month.

4. Thor­ough — attempts to pen­e­trate thor­oughly and then back off

Good response and lead nur­tur­ing means attempt­ing to reach your poten­tial cus­tomer with the opti­mal fre­quency quickly after an exhib­ited behav­ior with a rel­e­vant offer, but then not pes­ter­ing them if they don’t respond. Then you will con­tinue to tar­get them with per­son­al­ized, rel­e­vant con­tacts over a pro­longed period of time as men­tioned above, per­haps once per month after the two week response period (see Nos. 1 and 2).

5. Auto­mated

When you have a com­pre­hen­sive response and nur­tur­ing sys­tem all in place com­prised of : 1) a mea­sure­ment sys­tem (dis­cussed in the first posts around B2B mea­sure­ment), your auto-dialer, CRM sys­tem, and email/ direct mail sys­tem are all synced, so that you’re not try­ing to do any of this man­u­ally, you’ll be more thor­ough, your com­mu­ni­ca­tions will be well-timed, you’ll be able to be rel­e­vant and per­sonal, and you will waste less time.

Typ­i­cally, sales does not wring the most value from leads because they do not con­tact the lead often enough (3 to 5 attempts rather than 26 or so in the first two weeks), they have low con­tact rates (20% to 50%) and their com­mu­ni­ca­tions are not per­son­al­ized and relevant.

Worse, email com­mu­ni­ca­tions fol­low­ing a sales lead are often, frankly, horrendous.

Have you ever got­ten emails like these? Images are bro­ken, there’s no per­son­al­iza­tion, for­mat­ting is wacky and the offer is irrelevant.

In my next post, I’ll offer a bet­ter solu­tion to the typ­i­cal autore­spon­der email, with sam­ples for both B2B and B2C companies.