Did you know that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales? Marketing Sherpa has found that the cause of this poor performance is due to a lack of lead nurturing. If you haven’t implemented nurturing sequences for your engaged leads, you need to start following these steps to convert those leads and generate more customers!
Our President, Kim Albee, along with our V.P. of Sales & Marketing, Margaret Johnson, have been sharing insights and ideas into how to plan, implement, and extend lead nurturing. This process produces results and increases your sales-ready leads. So let’s continue this process with Step 2 – Implementing Nurturing Sequences!
Implementation: The Exciting Part of Our Process
So how do you begin to implement? Last week we planned our nurturing sequence by discussing a broadcast email with 2-3 clickables to your attractors, and the homework was to start putting that broadcast email together, along with a short diagram showing the topics and actions you want leads to take in response. This email must provide value to your audience. The actions become clicks, and are are how you segment and learn from your recipients and start to understand what information they are interested in.
Remember: Segmentation is vital. After you figure out which leads are interested in which attractors, you can start to create a path for them to take. For now, we’re focusing on simply creating a single path to get the process started, and that’s what this session is all about.
When you add your clickables, make sure to score them. The point scale is ultimately up to you; however, you need a base to properly segment your interested leads from your uninterested. In the first step, we would recommend you score all of the clickables in your broadcast email, but you’ll only trigger a nurturing sequence off of one – the one you deem is most important (more on this below). This allows for a simpler entry into this seemingly overwhelming process.
Create the Nurturing Sequence
After you have decided which attractors and clickables are going to be in your broadcast email, it is now time to set up the sequence. Yay! Pick ONE of the clickables to focus on. You’re going to want at least three emails in your sequence, expanding on the topic they clicked on.
Everyone who clicks on that link should get follow up emails based on that subject. We find the best sequence to send these emails is within a 7-day period, but you should test with your audience. If someone is interested in a subject, you won’t annoy him or her by sending out emails everyday for a short period of time. So go ahead and make sure you strike while the iron is hot! Make sure your follow-on emails have links to either a blog post or a download – so you can continue to gauge interest.
Where Do Smart Rules Come In?
At Genoo, we are incredibly fortunate to have our Smart Rules that can automatically take behind-the-scenes action on the leads who take action in the email.
We did a nurturing sequence for people who had WordPress as their website CMS and were interested in learning more about what’s possible with it. So we had that as the main attractor in our broadcast email, and then when people clicked on it they were sent to a lead capture form entering them to win a $100 Amazon Gift Card. (Who doesn’t want a $100 Amazon Gift Card?)
Here’s the thing, when people filled out the form we set up a rule to automatically update the Website CMS field in their lead profile to “WordPress”. We knew that because they completed that lead capture form.
This is helpful because now we can segment those leads much easier. If we want to target all our leads with a broadcast email (and another nurturing sequence off of that broadcast email) we just have to search for all leads whose Website CMS equals WordPress and BAM!
What About Lead Scoring?
Scoring your leads along the way is not only helpful, it is CRITICAL! You need to know where your leads are at when nurturing them. Scoring allows you to measure interest and know exactly what actions to take next when targeting a segment.
You’ve got to score even if it is just to separate the people who are doing nothing from those who are doing something. You can easily separate them based on these variables, and it will help you understand who is actually interested. Make sure you vary the points based on the actions they take and the value those actions have. This will show you who is engaged (and the degree of engagement), which is the main purpose of setting up a lead nurturing sequence.
So start implementing this process, and look forward to the next blog post on Extending your Lead Nurturing!