Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

Pull versus push for more effective lead nurturing campaigns

I just read Ardath Albee’s interesting post on "Lead Nurturing is not about campaigns."

It reminded me that I wanted to comment about “Pull Lead Nurturing”. Let’s face it, many lead nurturing campaigns pour out offer after offer in the same sequence to all recipients. I would describe these as “push lead nurturing” campaigns. They fail to encourage the recipient to engage in any other way except to download or unsubscribe. Pull Lead Nurturing on the other hand encourages prospects to interact, offer feedback, to offer up more information about themselves in return for more relevant offers, and more control of the course of the lead nurturing program.

Relevant content is not considered junk

When I look inside what is left of my US Mail box (the City of Portland recently sawed off the front half with a roadside vegetation trimmer) and find a direct marketing piece about linens, I immediately categorize it as junk and into the big blue recycling bin it goes. Clearly the linen store knew very little about me and did a “spray and pray” mailing. The very next piece of “junk mail” is an astronomy accessory catalog. These folks bought their list from a magazine that knew something about me. The catalog avoids the big blue bin fate of the linen Direct Mail piece. The point is that the more you know about your target, the better you can segment and the more relevant you can make the content. So, ironically, the more you share about your interests and needs, the less “junk mail” you will receive! Your challenge is to convince prospects of that.

So let’s map this concept over to email based lead nurturing. We want to encourage our prospects to engage with us, to interact, to tell us what they are interested in, and what they are not interested in. If they do this we will offer them more relevant content and assist them in pulling more relevant materials from us.

Encouraging prospects to interact more and pull content from you

There are several things you can do to encourage prospects to interact and pull content from you:

• At the end of every offer, place a link to the next most relevant piece with a line such as “People who enjoyed this document also enjoyed that document” – shades of Amazon.com in there! Of course you should tag the links so you can see exactly how many people clicked, and on which links.
• As part of your next offer email, ask them to rate the previous offer – read it and liked it, read it and disliked it, didn’t read it, cannot remember, etc. You can do this with a single link for each rating in your email, so it is a one click feedback mechanism (Netflix does this for movie ratings).
• Add questions to your dynamic profiling, early in the sequence, to enquire about the prospect’s preferred cadence – how often do you want us to send you offers? Design your campaigns to use the prospect defined cadence.
• Ask questions about their areas of interest; are they more technical or business; are they in management or individual contributors?
• Ask them questions about the media they prefer: webcasts, webinars, whitepapers, seminars, etc.
• Allow them to opt out of a nurturing track and opt-in to a different one instead.
• Design campaigns that adapt to every new behavior, new download, new information
• Don’t offer someone something that they already got before - you don’t want them to think you are not listening.

As Ardath points out, lead nurturing can extend beyond the typical sales cycle length, so why not let the prospect have more control over how you interact with them. Think about how to encourage them to pull content from you. It will tell you much more about them, and your content quality.

And now here is my one click survey! What did you think of this blog post?

It was garbage
It was insipid
It was ok
It was interesting
I really liked it

See how easy that was,

Kevin

Lead Nurturing the C and D leads in your CRM with Telemarketing

Three events coincided this week that provided the inspiration needed for this post.

1. I met with Susan Linman, President of Dunthorpe Marketing, and we discussed the role of Telemarketing in lead nurturing, especially for C and D leads.
2. I read Craig Rosenberg’s thought provoking post suggesting that marketing “sells the connect” not the product. 
3. I read the release notes for Market2Lead’s upcoming call center module for our marketing automation system.

Telemarketing is not the same as appointment setting

Do you use telemarketing as part of your lead nurturing? What is the most effective way to use it and when?  I must confess I am not a big fan of appointment setting services. Yes, I am sure they have their place, and there are businesses for whom getting an appointment for $750-$1000 is a ‘good’ deal. I simply have not been in a position yet where I thought this was a good deal for generating new leads.  In a past life I examined the opportunity connect rate for these leads and it was no better than website leads or PPC leads, so why would I pay 10x more for them?  But using telemarketing to connect with prospects and nurture them, now that is different than attempting to sell to them.

Telemarketing is not telesales

We are talking about telemarketing, not telesales. I don’t want savvy sales people in this role, who know the product inside out, and are slicker than clean socks on a linoleum floor. I want people who know how to listen more than talk. Their role is to not waste the prospect’s time; they need to figure out where prospects are in the purchase cycle, what they need, and offer them relevant help.

Use telemarketing to nurture C and D leads

Telemarketing can be a very powerful part of your lead nurturing strategy. Let’s say you have a marketing automation system, and it scores your leads. All the A and B leads are shipped off to the various Sales Channels, but the Cs and Ds are retained in the Marketing hopper. Does your system assign them to a lead nurturing track that pumps out unsolicited whitepapers, webcasts, and webinar invitations every two weeks for months on end until such time as the prospects surrender, unsubscribe, or sideline you with their junk filter?  Inoculation of your prospects is not a good idea unless you are practicing medicine.  An alternative is to engage them in Pull Nurturing, and you can also use telemarketing in the middle of this lead nurturing track to coax more Cs and Ds out of their shells, and into an actual relationship with your firm.The Market2Lead system enables you to include programs with telemarketing scripts in the middle of a lead nurturing campaign.

The telemarketer's role in effective lead nurturing

The effective telemarketer will, on the first call, introduce themselves as part of the Marketing team, they are NOT in a sales role.  Their role is to:

• Initiate the relationship with the prospect
• Help the prospect in their research, find relevant information
• Make them aware of upcoming events that might be of interest
• Collect feedback on the events or offers the prospect already accepted
• Update the prospects record, and influence future automated nurturing behavior
• And when the prospect wants to talk to a sales representative, make an appointment

Run a test; take a random selection of your C and D leads that your are actively nurturing and have some telemarketers call on them for a month or two in addition to the regular nurturing activities. See what percentage you can convert into Bs and As, and compare this to your control group. You may be surprised at the results. The purchase cycle behavior of prospects is evolving so that the Sales person may not be welcome until later in the cycle. This does not mean that the prospect doesn’t want some human engagement. Connect with your prospects!

-Kevin

How to stop bad data entering your CRM system

There are 3 primary ways the data in your CRM degrades in quality

1. Marketing enters incorrect, incomplete, or denormalized data, or corrupts good data
2. Sales people enter in duplicate, invalid, or incomplete data
3. The data just naturally decay in quality over time

The first source listed above is now largely fixable and is the subject of this post. The second is controllable with reports that find the issues, and management support to cajole the sales people into better behaviors. The third is fixable with regular data appends and cleanup.

There is no excuse anymore for marketing in the entering of bad or incomplete data. Marketing Automation Systems have the capability to validate and standardize data, rejecting data that does not measure up.  So what are the functions of a good response management funnel as it relates to maintaining data quality standards? If you have simple forms that use a web2lead like interface to jam data straight into your CRM, then you have a highway to data decay.

Here is a 90 second video on the Market2Lead Response Management process. Also here is a good second video, 3.5 minutes in length, on all the data validation and rejection features for keeping your data clean.

To maximize data quality, and richness over time, you will want your on-form capabilities to include:

• The combination of City, State, and Postal code is validated
• Email format validation (has to have a “@” and a “.” for instance)
• Phone number format validation
• Postal code format validation
• Rejection of common junk (asdf, xxx, abc, qwert, etc) in names
• Rejection of public domain emails for high value business to business offers

Once the form is accepted and submitted, there is still plenty to do. You are likely to de-duplicate with your database on email or some combination of name and company name and components of the address.  Only then do you send them to the fulfillment page (or confirmation page).

You still have more processing on the response however.  At Market2Lead we do another round of rejection, this time against a list of 600+ expletives and other junk words people enter into the name fields. The interesting part here is that this record is still sent into the database, but with a status of “Rejected”. The reason you want to  send “rejected” responses to the database is that it allows the marketer to identify common sources of junk submissions and also check for “false positives”. The rejected submissions are easily deleted at any time because of the “rejected” status.

The next step is augmentation. This is a fantastic idea, and highly undervalued. You can use it to do all sorts of stuff like assigning sales territories to leads, or converting state abbreviations into full length state names.  You could create a flag to indicate if the person used a public domain in their email address, or automatically tag registrants as competitors based on their email domain. You can recognize new leads from existing customers and flag them so they are sent to the account owner without delay.

After all the data rejection, augmentation, and suppression is done, then it is time to score the leads, and decide where to route them.  With strict data standards, documented process, and automation to prevent bad data from getting into the system, your marketing campaigns will be more successful, and your sales people will be more appreciative of the data they get from marketing.

-Kevin