What would happen if you changed the cadence of your multi-step lead nurturing campaign? How would changing the campaign tempo affect response rates, sales conversions, opt-outs, etc?
We were asking these questions of our own lead nurturing campaign at Right On Interactive. We ran a test and realized a significant increase in campaign performance. I’d like to share the results.
When Right On Interactive initially designed its multi-step lead nurturing campaign for new web leads, we debated how often we should communicate with new leads in a given period. We didn’t want to “over-communicate.” We configured our lead nurturing software, 5Buckets, for this cadence: After a new web lead arrives, a follow-up email is triggered immediately. After waiting seven days, the second lead nurture email is sent. After another seven days, the third lead nurture email is delivered. That adds up to three communications in 15-days. That seemed reasonable. Response rates were above B2B marketing averages; conversions to sales opportunities were good; opt-out rates were low.
We decided to do a split-test to see what would happen if the lead nurturing campaign clock was tweaked. The email content remains unchanged. The only variable is the timing. We tested a scenario of three communications in 8-days. In this case, the follow-up email is sent the day after the initial web form is submitted. The second lead nurture email is sent two days later. Four days after that, the third lead nurture email is delivered. Comparing the two lead nurturing cadence scenarios, here are the results:
• Nurture #1 (follow-up email) response rate decreased 42%
• Nurture #2 response rate increased 40%
• Nurture #3 response rate increased 46%
• Opt-out rate decreased 75%
• Conversion of leads to opportunities increased 7%
Overall, we were pleased with the results. The faster campaign cadence increased overall engagement as well as sales opportunity conversion. It’s interesting that the one-day delay in the initial follow up had such a negative impact.
Our next test is forthcoming. We are testing a change in the lead nurturing email design. In a future post, I’ll let you know how that works.
In the meantime, remember the marketer’s mantra: Test, test, test.
In the recent webcast co-sponsored by Compendium Blogware and Right On Interactive, Chris Baggott, co-founder and CEO of Compendium illustrated how business blogging – done the right way – will maximize organic search engine rankings and will have a dramatic impact on your ability to generate marketing leads. I spoke about the equally important aspect of cultivating these new relationships through a progression of relevant email communications – a multi-step lead nurturing program. (View the webinar replay)
When generating leads via blogs or other social media initiatives, a lot of companies only reach out to these new leads via email or phone once or twice. Or, if a sales opportunity is created and later fizzles, the sales lead never makes it back to marketing.
Instead, the best lead nurturing strategy is an automated drip campaign that cultivates a relationship with each individual over time and automatically recycles inactive sales leads.
These lead nurturing campaigns can be time-based or response-driven where, based on how a lead responds to each step, a new path is taken – with an appropriate delivery cadence.
Multi-step Lead Nurturing Results
What’s the value? The results of multi-step lead nurturing campaigns are significantly higher than those with a single-step. For example, in a recent campaign, several thousand new web leads completed a six step process over a 15-week period. Each received a new article or whitepaper in a six part series. Engagement with this group was four-times the rate it would have been with a single-step campaign.
For your next blog or social media campaign, add a series of follow up email tactics that engage new leads with a series of related articles or other educational content. Marketing automation software enables you to quickly create this lead nurturing campaign, execute without manual intervention, and considerably improve business results.
With more and more customers establishing Saleforce.com as their marketing database, Dreamforce 2009 was a great opportunity to get tuned in to what Salesforce.com is planning for the marketing automation community. There was plenty of buzz, tons of vendors, and Colin Powell (a highlight of the conference). Read the Twitter stream at #df09 to get the personality of the show. I am going to focus on what I think were the key marketing automation takeaways.
Chatter – Chatter is the name for the new Salesforce.com Community Cloud, also referred to as the social network for the enterprise. Chatter looks a lot like Facebook, and allows you to watch conversations and post comments, and follow not only people, but other Salesforce.com objects. Marc Benioff’s vision (paraphrased) is to allow you to be as aware of what your co-workers are doing as you are of your friends. What was really interesting to me was that although the build up for Chatter by the Salesforce team was enormous, the reaction by the crowd was, how do I say this, subdued. My informal survey found no one that had identified a compelling business case for rolling it out. So why does it matter to a marketer? Because if Salesforce.com thinks it is important, it would probably be wise to keep your eye on it. Here is a pretty good post (Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage) that came out the day of the announcement that provides a nice perspective.
Campaign Management Features – There are a couple of useful marketing tools that have been released over the last 6 months that I think have some positive impact for marketers.
Campaign Member Types – Do want to capture different information based on the type of tactic that you are using in your campaign (what do emails, events, and web site traffic have in common – almost nothing)? Putting all those custom fields on your campaigns gives you a sea of empty fields in your user interface. Campaign Types are basically record types that allow you to assign specific page layouts to each type, and control the Campaign Member status pick list as well. Use this to capture more data without creating a usability problem.
Campaign Influence – Which is more important, the first campaign a lead responded to, or the campaign that caused them to convert? I don’t know and neither do you. The better approach is to make sure you can look at all of the influences that your customers and prospects have experienced and do tons of analysis to look for trends. Campaign Influence is all of the Campaign Member history that is associated with your contacts. If you tie weighting and scoring to each of these influences you can slice and dice the relationship between your contacts’ over all engagement with the resulting buying decisions in any number of ways. By the way, Jason Stewart of Demandbase did a nice job of explaining this, and he also has a great blog (Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation demandblog) that you should add to your regular reading.
Communities – Salesforce has provided a number of tools that can be combined to make a Salesforce based community platform a very attractive option for deploying an on line community. Salesforce showed their own community site, developed on the Salesforce cloud platform using such features as Ideas, Real Time Sites, and Programmable Cloud Logic. If you are anxious to begin communicating with your customers, but don’t have a place on your website to send them, you may not be as far away as you think. Look into the Force.com development platform as an alternative to expensive web development projects and start building your own online community by yourself, quickly and cheaply.
Salesforce is a great platform for using automation to develop more effective marketing to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. With the momentum on display at Dreamforce 2009, both from Salesforce and its partners, the marketing community that uses Salesforce.com is in a very good place.
Take a look at the online demonstration of the Right On Interactive marketing automation solution: 5Buckets for Appexchange
My conclusion after reading Chris Anderson’s new book , “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, is that Free is complicated. Don’t get me wrong, this is a great book and comes at a perfect time, since we continue to be greeted each day with fantastic new technologies without any hint of a sustainable business model in sight. Everything is Free. This is a problem in the Marketing Automation space, because the problems that we are trying to solve are complex, and the technology we use is expensive to develop.
Anderson has once again (as he did in The Long Tail) helped to make sense of a confusing array of factors in explaining how the “Free” model is not only inevitable but natural. Out of his numerous examples of historical precedence and recent trends two clear factors emerge from his book:
1) Information wants to be free – Knowledge is meant to be shared. Trying to hide it is like trying to hold a bowl of jell-o in your hands.
2) The force of economic gravity – Paraphrased, this states that as soon as the cost of a product is known, the price of the product will continue to drive downwards toward that cost.
These forces are very strong and acknowledgement of them should be at the forefront of your pricing and packaging strategies for your products and services. People will not expect to pay a premium for your expertise or your technology. That is why Free is so complicated, because that is where the cost lies. Anderson stresses that creativity is the only solution, and fortunately offers many examples and suggestions to help get the creative juices flowing.
What are the marketing automation takeaways? Here are mine:
- Quantify Time Savings – Time is still a valuable commodity that people will pay to preserve. If you are offering an automation solution, you better know exactly what you are automating and how much time you are saving our customers. You should be able to show this to your prospect s and back it up with some numbers
- Forget about Protecting Your “Secret Sauce” – Whether it is your technology, or your processes, you should operate under the assumption that everyone already knows it, or worse, nobody cares. Share your knowledge. Don’t spend your time trying to make it scarce, it is just not possible anymore.
- Search for Bigger Problems – As soon as you sense that solutions are becoming commodities, start looking for more complex problems to solve, that offer more value to your customers. Travel Agents, Newspapers, and Music Labels are just a few examples of industries that are being forced to find value, when their previously scarce products became free commodities seemingly overnight. Yours will follow sooner or later so don’t wait too long.
As I said, it’s complicated and I don’t have an easy feeling about how this is all going to play out. But at least it’s not boring.
You can get some other great perspectives on the book from two great minds, Seth Godin (read his post here) and Malcolm Gladwell (read his article here). Gladwell disagrees with Anderson, and Godin generally concurs. I encourage you to read these opposing viewpoints, and form your own opinion. No matter what your conclusion is, it is definitely time to figure out how a price of “Free” affects you.
| December 3, 2009 |
| 1:00 pm | to | 2:00 pm |
Blogs are fantastic inbound marketing tools to acquire new leads and prospects. Email is a fantastic tool to nurture and sustain these relationships. During the webinar learn how marketers are combining these two tactics to not only acquire new leads but nurture into closed business.
Join marketing leaders Chris Baggott Co-founder, CEO of Compendium Blogware, and Richard Cunningham, VP Marketing of Right On Interactive for a new webinar.
Learn best practices to:
- Generate leads through blogging
- Nurture leads to action
- Integrate blogging into customer lifecycle messaging
Register for the webinar now!
Title: Using Blogs to Generate and Nurture Demand into Closed Business
Date: Thursday, December 3, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EST | 12:00 p.m. CST | 11:00 a.m. MST | 10:00 a.m. PST
Length: 1 hour
When I talk to customers about Marketing Automation, the idea that is most exciting is adding Customer Engagement to their segmentation mix. Thinking about communicating to your audience based on their interaction with you adds a whole new dimension to the conversation and really stimulates the imagination. The most important engagement is an organization’s customer lifecycle. But once you dig deeper within an organization’s data you will discover that almost every object has a lifecycle: contacts, opportunities, support cases, products, contracts, etc. By digging into these lifecycles you can really help narrow the conversation and make it even more meaningful.
Unfortunately most data bases have this “lifecycle” information scattered about in many forms, multiple true/false fields, start and end dates, transaction files that need to be summarized, etc. When trying to make sense of this, use the following guideline. There are three basic pieces of information that you need to find:
Status
Status Date
Status History
Status
Status is another word for Stage. Think of the process that the object goes through and identify the main stages of that process. I am going to use a slightly different example to help illustrate the point. Let’s say that your organization involves some of your customers in an Advisory Committee. Is there really a lifecycle for this?
Yes, it looks like this:
A committee is active but maybe your committees are actually formed annually, or around specific topics and so they are disbanded, or replaced. But the history is important; these committees are now just “Inactive”. This may not be too interesting, but there is another lifecycle here, the Committee Member status. When you add that it looks like this:
Committee members come and go. They are “Active”, then leave and become “Inactive” So now you actually have 4 statuses to play with, and in fact eight combinations of status that are interesting.
Date
When looking at an object you will want to not only its status, but when the object reached that status. Simple questions like ”Who has been on the committee the longest”, or even more interesting “Who became active this year, and how does that compare with the interest level of last year”? You see what I mean when I say that your marketing automation projects can suddenly take on a new life. But there is one more piece of information.
Status History
The best situation is when your database retains the history of when the object reached (or left) each stage, including the stages in which is no longer resides. This lets you answer the following question “How many people have served on committees for at least two years.” That could actually include people who are no longer active in a committee. In fact it could include committees that are no longer active. But that group of people was engaged with your organization for two years, and that information is interesting. So you are looking for information like this. As I mentioned above, as long as you know the sequence of stages (see diagram above) you only have to know either when an objected reached a stage or left a stage. You can construct the rest.
Good news for Salesforce.com users
Those of you that use Salesforce.com as your marketing database can use a simple tool to make capturing this information easier: Field History Tracking. First of all, make sure objects in your database have the following fields:
Status
Status Date
Identify the process that the object goes through and identify stages of the process (see the lifecycle diagram above). Make those Stages pick list items for the Status field (put them in chronological order rather than alphabetical order to enforce understanding of the process with your Salesforce users). You will also want to make the Status Date, which represents that date that the object entered that selected statge that the Status field represents, a required field.
Once these fields are created, set Field History tracking on the Status and Status Date field. Salesforce will automatically keep track of any changes for you (see below).
This information can be accessed through the standard reporting, by Selecting “Other Reports” and finding your object with the “History” option. You will be presented with the history shown above as fields that you can select and filter on.
The Marketing Automation takeaway here is to keep digging into customer engagement data. The more you find, the more you can target your message. And the more targeted your message is, the more likely it is to be heard.
Any successful marketing automation strategy requires lots of content, especially emails. Usually, you are in too much of a hurry generating this content to worry about how it is organized. You often end up with a folder structure that looks like this:
Product Launch 2009
Monthly Newsletters
Sales Stuff
Bill’s Test Emails
Almost every organization gets into this predicament. You always have content before you have a plan so you have to put it somewhere before you are ready. By the time you are ready, it is too late, and anarchy has set in. The problem with this organization is the same one we all face: No one can find anything. This organization style has no commitment to a particular approach, so everyone is forced to remember where everything is, which is not very efficient.
Part of the problem is that organizing your content always seems like a daunting task because there are an infinite number of ways to do it. At least that is what it seems like. The good news is that there are not an infinite numbers of ways. There are only four. Every piece of content has these four attributes:
Subject (New Product, Company News, Event, Partner, Major Account, etc.) – The subject describes the purpose of the campaign for which the content is targeted. Subjects typically contain reference to both the audience (New Customers, Partners, etc.) and what it is that your organization is delivering (products, events, organizational news).
Content Type (Newsletter, Promotion, Announcement etc.) – The type describes the format of the content. Newsletter, promo, customer service survey are all examples.
Organizational Owner (Department, Role, Person, etc.) – There is a department (or maybe a person) that is ultimately responsible for the content. This department may even be outside of your organization, but you know who it is.
Delivery Date (Month, Year, etc.) – This could be the date that the content is being delivered, or maybe the date the content is being developed. Either works as long as you are consistent.
If you are organizing your content in a folder hierarchy then there are two simple rules that you must follow:
1) Every piece of content must have all four of these attributes identified in some way
2) You can only pick ONE of these attributes as your primary hierarchy
Let’s go back to my example and see what method I used. It turns out I mixed all of the attributes in my hierarchy, which of course breaks rule number two.
Product Launch 2009 (Subject/Delivery Date)
Monthly Newsletters (Content Type)
Sales Stuff (Organizational Owner)
Bill’s Test Emails (Organizational Owner/ and a bad Subject)
Now comes the tough part, how do you decide what to pick for your primary hierarchy? The answer is surprisingly simple. Follow the steps below:
1) Identify who uses your content system the most. This may not be the person setting up the content management system, and is probably not the boss. It needs to be a content producer (or department) that is most often accessing content.
2) Go ask this person two key questions:
a. When you are looking for your content, what is the first thing you look for (it will be one of the 4)?
b. When you work on more than one piece of content at a time, how are they related?
Using the answers to these questions you can develop your folder hierarchy for storing your content. The primary folders should be the answer to the first question, and the secondary order should consider how to keep related content together in order to minimize navigation between pieces of content.
When naming your content, you are probably best off coming up with a scheme that incorporates all four of these attributes in some way (example: Newsletter-May-2009). If that naming convention mirrors your normal hierarchy, it helps further establish the consistency for all of your content producers. Remember, consistency is the key.
This scheme is not meant to replace more sophisticated content classifications features that many content management systems offer. But these guidelines can help those of you that don’t have the luxury to spend a lot of time coming up with a process for classifying content, and don’t want to have to reorganize everything six months later.
I went to ExactTarget’s Connections 09 convention this week. ExactTarget did a great job. There were a lot of excellent presenters and customer stories (my favorite part). I also got to hear and share marketing automation problems and solutions with new people, which is the best reason to go to a conference.
There are lots of posts and tweets (#ET09) out there if you want to find out more, so let me just share with you my main takeaways for Marketing Automation strategists. I have four:
1) Social Media is not a conversation, it’s where the conversation takes place – This statement in Jason Baer’s excellent presentation was a nice clarification for me of where social media sits in the Marketing Automation mix. It is not a channel with many individual messages to deliver (email), it is a channel with one message to deliver, that will be read by an undetermined number of people that come and go. It’s not clear for me yet what this means to automation, but I like the way Jason framed it. More to think about here.
2) Use Social Media to help further define your Personas – I am expanding on some topics that presenter Suresh Vittal shared, but I was struck by what a great and raw input Tweets and Blogs are for further defining the Personas of your target market. Reading your market’s conversions, both as discussions (Twitter) and problem statements and needs (Blogs) is a great source of vocabulary and terminology that your customers actually use. It’s free (there are many tools out there to capture this information), and is certainly more honest and open that survey results or even face-to-face interviews. Ultimately this helps you further segment your customers and prospects (one of Suresh’s points) in ways that you had not thought of before, which is the marketing automation takeaway here.
3) Start your email design with Social Sharing in mind – Social Sharing is a relatively new feature from ExactTarget, but simply sticking a Social Sharing link in your email is probably not going to get the results you are hoping for, real viral marketing. People will most likely want to share a specific part of your email, not the whole thing (especially with newsletters). The better strategy (good demonstrations of these in the Email Design Competition by Smith-Harmon, Mighty Interactive and ExactTarget), is to start your design by identifying specific areas of content that might be shared, and use this as input for the organization of the content in your email.
4) Hope is not a strategy – We talk about this all of the time here at Right On Interactive, and this was a central theme that Adam Justis (Omniture), and many others, used to try to emphasize the importance of testing your ideas before you do a full-fledged launch. Many projects are simply the results of a gut feel, or opinion of someone important, but do not necessarily represent fact. The problem here, of course, is that for many of your projects, no one has allowed time or budget to do this. While this is a big problem, the takeaway is not to be afraid to start small and make mistakes. But do something! The results will be worth it.
Here is a related post from our friend Doug Karr if you are interested:
ExactTarget Connections 09: Success By Design
Marketing Automation: From CRM to Email
Wednesday, October 21
Join me, Wednesday, October 21st, at the 2009 Masters of Business Online Conference. I’ll be joined by 22 other marketers as we bring you actionable strategies to to grow your business.
My session will focus on how to effectively utilize customer data and technology to solve your business challenges, and automate the process.
Click here to learn more about the Masters of Business Online event.
| October 8, 2009 |
| 7:30 am | to | 7:00 pm |
The Integrated Marketing Summit was formed around the core belief that the single most important role of marketing, whether you’re on the agency side or the client-side, is to drive revenue rapidly. The complexities of the business environment, both digital and traditional, reflect the fact that customers and prospects interact with companies, products and services across an increasing number of channels. IMS is designed to explore and provide information on the practices, technologies and expertise needs to create true cross-channel, integrated marketing. The one-day Summit is presented through 3 concurrent sessions including two keynote presentations across a broad spectrum of topics, including:
- Demand Generation / Brand Awareness
- Sales & Marketing Alignment / Brand Position
- Effective Prospect & Customer Management / Brand Loyalty
- Tracking Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI)
- Case Studies on Integrated Marketing Solutions
Expert speakers from agencies, service providers and companies on the leading edge of integrated marketing share their insights and lessons learned through interactive presentations, panel discussions and case studies
While some of our programs are one speaker, one topic sessions, others are panel discussions where you are given a chance to ask questions and share your pain points with the panelist.
Click to learn more about the Integrated Marketing Summit.
