We marketers love our buzz words...lead nurturing, automated emails, workflows, marketing automation, the list could go on forever. The idea of creating truly personalized, persona-centric messages customized to each specific lead's stage in the buying cycle is so exciting, we just can't find the words to express how we really feel!
But what does this process actually mean for your sales team? How can you be sure your salespeople are getting the most qualified leads they possibly can?
HubSpot's new three-part webinar series How to Create Qualified Leads with Lead Nurturing will teach you how to provide your sales team with the most qualified leads.
In the meantime, here are a few tips to consider before starting your campaigns:
Step #1: Acquire a Deep Knowledge of Your Company's Buying Cycle
Knowing and understanding your company's buying process is the most fundamental and important component of creating a successful and effective lead nurturing campaign. Understanding your buying cycle will help you:
- Determine the length of your campaign
- Provide targeted, information rich offers to your contacts
- Shorten the overall length of the sales cycle
- Deliver highly qualified leads to your sales team
- Earn even more credibility across departments in your company
Step #2: Set Clear and Measurable Goals for Each Campaign
What is the goal of your campaign? Are you looking to drive leads who will become customers? Are you looking to provide warm leads with valuable information so they convert to hot leads? Whatever your goal is you need to be sure they fit the SMART guidelines:
- Specific - Why is this lead nurturing campaign important to you? How does it contribute to your overarching goal?
- Measureable - If your goal is leads, how many leads? How many clicks in one email does it take for you to convert a lead? Deciding these factors will help you prove results and ROI
- Attainable - In your wildest dreams you imagine 100% of your email recipients to react exactly as you intend them to act. Realistically, they won't. With that in mind, what is a realistic, attainable goal that you can feel successful accomplishing?
- Relevant - Is the email you're sending them actually relevant to your goals? Does it make sense to email people about a free iPad when what you really want is for your leads to request a consultation and become a customer? How does a free iPad even fit into what they're trying to do?
- Timely - When do you need this goal accomplished? Is this a top priority? If it's not, what goals make sense to focus on first?
Step #3: Build and Launch Your Campaign
Now that you understand your company's buying cycle and have set SMART goals, it's time to get your hands dirty and build the actual campaign structure through emails and customized settings. In order to target and build out your campaign effectively, you need to:
- Create Smart Lists segmented by your targeted personas. This step is vital to creating an effective lead nurturing campaign. Targeted smart lists will help you create content and emails that identify with and solve your personas' common pain points. In return, your email analytics will show a positive trend in open and click-through rates.
- Develop the emails that will be sent out in your campaign. Remember to use email best practices. Each email should focus on one topic, have a subject line that sparks curiosity, and include a link to a landing page.
- Check your Workflow settings. Decide whether or not this campaign should be delayed by business or calendar days. How do you know which to choose? Refer back to your personas and their behaivor. Are they likely to check their email on a Saturday? If not, better to send out your campaign over business days.
- Decide if a lead should be removed from one workflow, especially if they are joining another workflow. This is an important step in the process to ensure that none of your leads are receiving the same content twice.
- Take your Workflow live. Is everything set up? Are you happy with the structure? Are you emails targeted to your personas? Great! You are now ready to take your workflow live and start seeing results.
Step #4: Analyze Your Campaign
Many HubSpot customers have questions about how to analyze their data once they start receiving it. What do all these numbers mean? What trends can I pull from this data? The webinar series will dive deep into these stats, but to get started here are a few places to start:
- What is the open rate of your emails? - This is important for a few reasons. If no one is opening your emails you could be targeting the wrong persona with this offer, the offer itself could be unimportant to your persona, or the subject line of the email could be lackluster.
- How effective are your subject lines? Nobody opening your emails? Chances are the subject line isn't working. Take a look and revise.
- What is the click-through-rate (CTR) of your campaign? So, we have people opening our emails. Now what? The next statistic to consider is how many of the people opening the emails are actually clicking on the offer. The goal is to reach, on average, a 15 - 20% (or higher!) click through rate on each email offer. This number is a guideline and not a rule. The takeaway is the more targeted your campaign, the higher the click through rate should be.
- Is there an opportunity to reoffer content? If your open rates are high, but your click-through rates are low, don't give up! This could be an opportunity to reoffer your content. Why didn't the persona click? What made them think this offer wasn't important to them? Refining the content of the email, repacking the offer with all new pain points, questions, and concerns and then resending the offer in a few weeks will encourage your personas to reengage. Reoffering content is a great way to ensure your hard work isn't wasted.
To learn more about lead nurturing and to discover whether or not your campaigns are working, sign up for HubSpot's free three-part webinar series in November.
