Customer lifecycle marketing recognizes that prospects and customers move through stages in their relationship with a company – from initial contact to fully engaged relationships in which a customer is an advocate. The goal of communications throughout the customer lifecycle is continuous movement toward a deeper, more engaged relationship.

In the first stage – let’s call it the Initiate Stage – a constituent initially engages with a company through any of several channels, the web, by phone, etc. Communications in this stage center on compelling people to engage further.

In our marketing consultations, we find that a lot of marketers are not satisfied with their current process for managing incoming leads. There is an initial response to the inquiry – by a thank you page on the website, an auto-reply email, and an inside sales call – but beyond that, too many leads fall through the cracks. Why? They lack a systematic, automated approach to incubate new leads over a period of time.

Using one of our own lead generation programs as an example, this article illustrates how marketers can easily automate a multi-step incubation campaign for new web leads using ROI.

ROI is the on-demand software service that enables marketers to easily segment, schedule, trigger, and deploy a series of communications and follow up actions through email, voice messaging, text, fax, and direct mail. ROI is designed to complement the applications and systems that organizations already have in place. This enables organizations to further leverage the investment they have already made with their existing marketing technology solutions.

Lead Generation Campaign Description

Right On Interactive invested in an online lead gen program to promote our whitepaper, Seven Steps to Effective Customer Lifecycle Communications. Using a number of online channels, our objective was to drive a highly targeted audience to our website to download the whitepaper. One of those channels was DMNews, The Authority for Direct Marketing. Subscribers to their “whitepaper of the day” newsletter could click-thru the email and register to immediately download the whitepaper.

The vast majority of people who initiate contact with a company by downloading a whitepaper aren’t ready to engage with a salesperson. To respect that fact, we designed an incubation process to further engage respondents before taking that step.

Time-based Lead Incubation

As seen in the diagram, the lead incubation campaign consists of up to three communications. One day after a DMNews subscriber registers for the whitepaper, we send a follow up email offering additional resources relevant to their interest in customer lifecycle marketing. The next two emails are time-released over a three-week period. Each includes an article with ideas for improving customer lifecycle communications. The call-to-action offers an on-demand ROI demo relevant to the article topic.

Configuring the Campaign Workflow

At any point over that three-week period, the person will take one of three types of action. Our campaign workflow manages each of these “if-then” conditions:

• If a lead clicks-thru any of the three incubation emails, a task is sent to the inside sales group to request a phone call. The person joins a segment targeted for lead nurturing.
• If a lead doesn’t respond to any of the three incubation emails, the person joins a segment targeted for later re-engagement.
• If a lead unsubscribes at any time during the campaign, the person’s record is removed from future communications.

ROI automates the time-based release of these relevant email communications, and manages the flow of the incubation process. All of the manual tasks associated with a multi-step drip campaign are eliminated.

So, you ask, did we meet our marketing return on investment objectives? In a word, yes. And this whitepaper campaign continues to generate value. In an upcoming article, I’ll share our metrics and results. I recommend you subscribe to our marketing automation newsletter.

Are you interested in how ROI can help your company automate web lead incubation campaigns – or any other type of multi-channel nurture campaigns? Request a personal demo with one of our sales consultants by filling the form on the right.

Sign Up Now!