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

Comments

[twitter.com/fearlesscomp]

Interesting post, Kevin. I like the way you use content to encourage more content.

Good content is critical to lead generation campaigns. In fact, Avitage has a new Think Like a Publisher page at http://pages.leadlife.com/avitage/ThinkLikeAPublisherthat explains how marketers can solve the so-called Rubiks Cube problem of content marketing.

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

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