Featured Article
By Tim Wilson, Vice President, Services, Bulldog Solutions
You've probably heard or read all about the theoretical advantages of nurturing leads. Something like: Marketers have to both generate leads and nurture those leads until they have reached a point in their buying cycle where they are ready to be passed to Sales. Or perhaps: Nurturing is all about recognizing that the customer’s buying cycle and your sales cycle are two different things. Or even: Lead nurturing means having consistent and meaningful dialogue with viable prospects regardless of their timing to buy.
Of course, all of these statements are true. But I'll be the first to admit that they're somewhat abstract. How do you actually begin a lead nurturing program? How do you follow through on one? How do you end one? The key is to follow a deliberate process that emphasizes who you are going to nurture and what is meaningful to them. In this article I'll offer up some practical how-to's on this process.
Step 1: Who Are You Going to Nurture?
Almost by definition, it is impossible to nurture your entire database effectively with a single nurturing program. There is no practical way for a single program, even with a lot of dynamic content and dynamic communication rules, to provide timely and relevant information across your entire database. This can only come from a combination of distinct nurturing programs, one program at a time. Start with identifying the type of leads you want to target:
- New leads—If you have a lot of leads that are one-and-done, this may be a good program to start with.
- Leads not ready to buy—If you can identify leads that have explicitly or implicitly indicated they are not yet sales-ready, this may be a good group to target first.
- Trial customers—These leads are typically much farther along in the buying cycle, so they are a good group to focus on; however, if Sales engages trial customers directly, then it may not make sense for Marketing to roll out automated nurturing.
- Existing customers—Depending on your business, a nurturing program focused on customer renewal (customer retention), or on customer upsell/cross-sell (customer growth) may make the most sense.
- Dormant leads—If you have a large number of leads who have not interacted with you for a long time, you may consider a nurturing program that tries to reengage them. (Keep in mind, however, that this type of program can be tricky; by definition, you are dealing with leads for whom your data is stale, so providing relevant information to them will be your main challenge.)
Once you have identified the type of leads you are going to nurture, you need to consider the different database segments that fall into that lead type. This will vary dramatically from company to company, but it is where you consider the target audiences, personas and segments that you have already considered. See the audience segmentation article in this issue of Marketing Watchdog Journal for more about creating buyer personas). Examine which of these audiences are identifiable and exist in sufficient quantity for it to make sense to include them in the nurturing program.
Step 2: What Do You Have to Say That Is Relevant?
Now that you know who you are going to nurture, you need to identify what information you can provide that will be valuable to the leads in that group. At Bulldog Solutions, we use a simple brainstorming exercise—Post-it notes included!—to do this assessment. Here's how it works:
- Get a group of your best marketers together in a conference room and give them each a stack of Post-it notes.
- Explain who you will be nurturing (see above).
- Ask them to write down possible topics/content on their Post-its (brainstorming rules apply here—there are no bad ideas).
- Draw a 2x2 grid on a whiteboard. Label the vertical axis "Urgency of the Topic" and the horizontal axis "Relevance to Our Offering." Label the bottom left corner "Low" and the top left and bottom right axis "High"
- As a group, go through each of the Post-its and place it on the grid on the whiteboard:
- Urgency of the topic—This is how hot the topic is in the minds of the target leads.
- Relevance to our offering—This is how well the specific topic/pain point aligns with your product or service offerings. This is one area where you do want to put your needs ahead of the customer, i.e., providing valuable content and building trust and then not being able to provide a relevant product or service is altruistic, but not particularly profitable.
The Post-its that wind up at the top right of the quadrant are your best candidates for content within the nurturing program. The Post-its in the bottom right can be used as secondary calls-to-action. This is your ideal content set. Now you can assess which of that content already exists or can be created relatively easily. See the graph below for an example.
At this point, you will have a good sense of how much content you have for your nurturing program, so you are ready to actually lay out the actual structure.
Step 3: How Are You Going to Communicate?
There are several factors that drive which structure is most appropriate for you to use for your nurturing program. You should consider the complexity of the audience/segment that you are nurturing, the amount of content available and the capabilities of the tool you will use to drive the program.
Here are your basic options:
- Basic autoresponder—This is just barely nurturing, but if the nurturing is being triggered by a specific event (attendance at a tradeshow, download of a white paper, etc.), and there is limited relevant follow-up content to offer, then this may be your best option.
- Multi-touch/single track—This is similar to the basic autoresponder option, but instead, you can plan to send multiple communications; a "new lead" nurturing program, where you have limited information on the lead, is an example that often works in this structure.
- Multi-touch/multiple track—This includes multiple communications, but the timing and content of each communication varies based on information about the lead: their industry, their pain points, their activity, etc.
- Ongoing/perpetual—This is the most sophisticated type of nurturing program and requires a commitment to invest in ongoing content development.
An effective exercise at this point is to put together a flowchart of your chosen nurturing program. This forces you to identify what will happen when and will ensure that you don't have any "holes" in the program.
Step 4: How Will Your Leads Exit the Program?
Your nurturing program as depicted on the flowchart you just developed will have one natural exit: the end of the program. Plan for what you will do at that point:
- Are you going to assess the leads (via a lead score or some other mechanism) and send some of them to a telemarketing function?
- Are you going to end the program with a "special offer" as a stronger call-to-action to get the lead to engage with Sales?
- Is there another nurturing program that the lead should be fed into? For instance, at the end of a nurturing program geared towards new leads, you may want to send the lead to a "not ready now" nurturing program.
As important to planning the natural exit, consider ways that leads can exit the program prematurely:
- Are you including opportunities in every communication for the lead to explicitly "raise their hand?"
- Are you monitoring the lead's behavior—using lead scoring or some other means—to identify implicit hand raising (increased activity on your Web site, consistent response to the nurturing communications, etc.)?
- Are you monitoring if the lead has engaged with Sales—whether as a direct result of the nurturing program or not—and removing them from the nurturing program (or not) if that happens?
At this point, you should have everything you need to build out a nurturing program that delivers results.
Putting Your Nurturing Programs Together
Over time, you should be able to build up a series of nurturing programs. Some of these programs may be linked to other programs, while others may be completely standalone. Once you have more than three or four programs running, it makes sense to step back and map them out in relationship to each other: What areas of your database are being covered, how do they interrelate, and where are the next areas of opportunity?
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Tim Wilson is vice president of services at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and management company. Visit www.bulldogsolutions.com to learn more.
Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.
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