Personalize
B2B lead nurturing is not a one-size-fits-all email marketing campaign. Your leads are business managers and executives running against the clock to meet their objectives, and they only care about what’s going to help them get there. If you bore them with the wrong information, and they’ll quickly disengage.
Personalization, of course, requires that you get to know the living, breathing person behind the lead. And getting to know someone requires a two-way conversation where you ask questions and listen to responses. The information you gain can help you classify this person according to their interests, and where they are in the buying cycle. Are they just doing some initial snooping around, or are they in the process of narrowing down their options to a set of finalists?
If you’ve done persona research to determine how clients move through the buying cycle—the questions they ask, the content they consume, and the obstacles to moving forward—you’ll be able to classify each lead into a persona, and stage of the buying cycle, and have a plan for the content you need to offer to help them solve their problem.
Keep it Varied
Because one of the easiest, least costly lead-nurturing tactics is email marketing, it’s often used alone. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle, and it won’t single-handedly give prospects the full picture they need to make a decision. You need an integrated campaign that includes emails, phone calls, blog posts, white papers, webinars, demos and more. Each tactic has its own purpose. And the phone calls are critical for keeping your nurturing campaign on track and understanding what your prospect’s needs are today.
Test, Analyze and Optimize
If you’ve done your research, you have an idea of prospect information needs and what they’ll respond to. However, the proof is in how they actually react to your campaign. And marketing automation is a marketer’s dream because it quantifies the answers.
So ask all the right questions. For example:
- Which emails are prospects opening?
- Are they clicking through from the emails to your website?
- Which white papers and webinars are they responding to?
- How much are your phone calls speeding up the buying cycle?
- On which pages of your website are web visitors spending the most time?
Keep testing tactics and tweaking and optimizing your lead-nurturing campaign based on what the data tells you.
For more information about 3D2B, visit www.3D2B.com or call +1 718-709-0900 or +39 06 978 446 60 (EMEA).
