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Based on polling by marketing automation platform Salesfusion, more than two-thirds of B2B marketers in the US with less than $100 million in revenues were investing in marketing automation to enhance their ability to nurture leads. That made lead nurture the No. 1 reason for these B2B SMBs to spend on marketing automation technology. 
Nichole Carpenter's curator insight,
June 20, 2016 3:38 PM
Don't lose your leads. With automation you can nurture them through your sales funnel.
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Marteq's insight:
Stunning that nurture email perform as well as batch emails!
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Digest... While lead nurturing is becoming a bigger priority as of late, it is still a relatively new tactic for many B2B marketers. Preliminary results of Demand Gen Report’s Lead Nurturing Survey revealed that 38% of respondents so far have been developing lead nurturing campaigns for less than a year. Those that are using lead nurturing are becoming more sophisticated in their tactics, with the overwhelming majority going beyond the traditional “drip” campaign. Nearly three quarters (73%) of respondents to date have complex lead nurturing strategies, sending different series of emails based on the actions/interests of the respondent.
Marteq's insight:
Honestly, you can get lost down a rabbit hole with all the if/then statements you could conjure up.
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Digest... 1. Assess and Visualize In step one, look at the “big picture” and ask yourself who you want to target. Are you looking for net new prospects, to cross sell/upsell existing customers, or even re-engage past customers? Create buyer scenarios detailing out personal information, buying behaviors and other essential information.
2. Pilot Design Step two: pilot design. With a thorough understanding of the prospect base you can begin to create an implementation plan moving forward. Within the implementation plan you will need to develop tailored messaging for each audience. Messaging frameworks that highlight individual value propositions, pain points, and buying behaviors will assist in building a meaningful relationship with prospects by offering them engaging content.
3. Campaign Development Step three: campaign design. With your segmented messaging and implementation plan in place, you can begin to prepare best-in-class customer communications to provide your audience(s) with targeted content for amplified engagement.
4. Execution and Measurement Step four: execution and measurement. In this phase, leverage your implementation plan and communications calendar to ensure timely and flawless execution of the pilot program.
5. Optimization Finally, step five, optimization. The optimization phase permits the opportunity to take key learnings from the nurture engine pilot and make recommendations to improve the program before the broader roll out. Take pilot learnings to refresh content, creative and make broader campaign recommendations. Apply learnings to iterative campaign waves to ensure success and a high return on investment.
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Marteq's insight:
The selection of the target is often influenced by internal factors, e.g., new product offerings, need for product revenue, regional revenue support, etc.
Sameed Ahmad's curator insight,
September 11, 2014 11:41 AM
Good idea!
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Basic/ Excerpt... The same marketing automation technologies and analytics you use to promote products and services can be used to support customer nurturing. Before these technologies existed it was hard to capture enough information to make these programs effective and some vendors discovered that their attempts through generic email or direct mail, only aggravated customers. Also businesses relied more on customer service to provide some nurturing but waiting until there is a reason to call for service limits your ability to offer other products and services. Finally, in a self-service world, the opportunities for contact are diminishing. So in a sense, marketing automation has given us a new avenue to the existing customer.
You should start by collecting financial and use data about customers from other departments, and you have a good idea of your customer lifecycle then you have the elements you need to discover which customers might be happy and which might need some form of assistance or which could benefit from new information. With that you can tailor nurturing programs to different populations.
If you already have marketing automation and analytics it’s really just a matter of developing some meaningful campaigns and content. If you don’t yet have marketing automation, it’s another reason to look into it. Customer nurturing can help turn more marketing programs into revenue generators. And with analytics it’s easy to track the results and prove the value.
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Marteq's insight:
NSM: never stop marketing. Never.
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Intermediate/ Digest... Here are five types of nurture marketing programs that you can deploy for your organization, which will help to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing department. 1. Drip Nurtures: This is where most marketers start dabbing with nurture programs, sending out an email every week or two. Every recipient receives the same message, usually containing new product announcements, company highlights, or upcoming events.
2. Multichannel Drip Nurtures: Similar to an all-email nurture, multichannel drip nurtures incorporate other marketing channels, including traditional "snail mail," phone calls by an inside sales organization, or even SMS messages.
3. Data-Driven Nurtures: Begin collecting important information from your prospects and customers such as industry, company size, and/or biggest challenges. Store these values in your marketing automation database and use these elements to customize your nurture. Incorporate dynamic content to personalize each message.
4. Persona-Driven Nurtures: Analyze all of your top customer segments and determine the contacts that are involved in the buying decision. Then, dig a bit deeper and understand their challenges and what is important to them. Finally, examine all of your existing content and align it with each persona. Don't be surprised if you have an abundance of content for one or two personas, yet very little for others that are part of your buying cycle.
5. Specialty Nurtures: Once you get the hang of setting up automated nurtures, the sky is the limit for how you might use these capabilities! Consider new customer on-boarding, lead recycling, or even sales rep initiated nurtures.
Marteq's insight:
Interesting take, as if there isn't a soul in the DB that has not reacted to a campaign, product, etc. Nurturing is about communicating content pertinent to that which is of interest to the target.
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Buyer personas help you target prospects with surgical precision and nurture them with custom content they care about. Condensed... Read on to learn seven tips for integrating buyer personas into a lead nurturing campaign: 1. Personas first, content second Response rates plummet when you send generic content to a broad, untargeted audience. So before building a lead nurturing program, figure out who you are trying to reach. After all, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to before creating your marketing messages.
2. Put the person back into persona Buyer personas may be fictional, but they uncover key insights into the real people you’re striving to connect with. Personas can help you craft messages that make your prospects feel like you’re speaking directly to them. This is especially important when employing an automated process, like lead nurturing.
3. Uncover pain points Think about the challenges your personas face. Your lead nurturing messages should explain how you will provide relief.
4. Follow digital footprints Measure, test, track, and combine data from your customers’ online behavior to get a feel for the habits and motivations of each buyer persona. Where did they go for information? To which messages did they respond?
5. Update regularly Remember when you created those buyer personas five years ago? Chances are, they no longer fit today’s customers. The buyer’s journey — how customers search for a solution, interact with you, and respond to sales — is constantly evolving. Make sure your personas and lead nurturing tracks line up with their behavior.
6. Include your sales department Sales has the most direct access to your customers. They understand pain points and motivations — so get their input on personas. You’ll craft marketing messages that are more cohesive from the top of the funnel to the bottom. If sales isn’t aligned with your messaging, the conversation will feel disjointed.
7. Segment based on personas Finally, it’s time to plug your buyer personas into your lead nurturing tracks. At its simplest, you can segment your database so that each prospect is labeled with a persona.
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Marteq's insight:
MA is not a part time job: just one aspect of it such as the above takes a significant effort. The question is: what's the return on the investment? The acquisition of MA can be justified with the basics, but the return on these value-add tasks are gravy to your organization.
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Lead nurturing doesn’t necessarily have to stop with a onetime purchase. Condensed... Why should you invest in nurturing your existing customers? 1. Cut costs. Acquiring a new customer is usually 6-7 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. In Econsultancy’s recently released Cross-Channel Marketing Report, 70% of respondents agreed that it’s cheaper to retain than acquire a customer. 2. Increase profit. Repeat customers spend, on average, 33% more than new customers. Additionally, according to Marketing Metrics, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, compared to a 5-20% chance of selling to a new prospect. 3. Your customers are your best promoters. 4. Marketing automation solutions can help you turn your customers into promoters.
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Marteq's insight:
Fairly simple: keep the dialogue going. You always want your customers to maximize their usage of your offering as that build loyalty. And that's the focus of your ongoing nurturing.
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Marteq's insight:
Scooped if you needed basic, high-level stats to support your 2014 budget.
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Many B2B marketers are missing the long-term opportunity available in their marketing automation and nurture programs. Here are 7 different nurture programs or scenarios you need to consider. Summary... Long-Term Nurture Programs These programs reach potential prospects that are not in market today and may run for years. Rather than identifying every piece of content and communication that will be sent (which 24 months later may be completely out of date), you will need to define the structure and criteria for your content and communications and continue to update individual touches. 1. Background Nurture 2. Lost Opportunities Short-Term Nurture Programs What happens once someone begins to actively engage with your long-term nurture programs? That’s when all of the short term nurture campaigns you have likely already created kicks in! Here is a snapshot of the short-term nurture scenarios you will need to accommodate. 3. Welcome Track 4. Event Followup 5. Active Prospects 6. Sales Triggered 7. Warm Up
Marteq's insight:
Generally speaking, this covers it. However, there are nuture programs that are specific to your business and your vertical that may not be listed above. So please be open-minded and creative about your programs.
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Here are five issues that marketing automation is immediately going to drop in your lap:
1. What does your database look like? Thanks to over a decade of outbound marketing, many marketing organizations have already got a database of prospects. Unfortunately, after years of willy-nilly email campaigns, that data’s pretty much scorched earth. Pumping tens of thousands of scruffy leads into a marketing automation that charges by the lead (as some do) feels like a rookie mistake.
Weed out that list by segmenting, cleaning and applying filters to the data (region, title, dead addresses, etc.). Then do as one client did: send an opt-out to your whole database. If they ask out, strike them.
2. Sales hand-off So the whole purpose of this exercise is to groom undifferentiated prospects into great sales leads. Doyens of marketing automation have been saying this for years and it bears repeating: you need to work out with sales what a sales-ready lead looks like for your business. Your sales people will know.
Once you’ve worked that out, you’ll have a much better idea of how to score your leads (see next point) and what to do with prospects that return to the leads pool.
On the technical side, marketing automation will need to be integrated with a CRM (at least if you want to be able to map eventual sales and revenue back to marketing activities – and who doesn't want that?).
3. Scoring The whole nurturing aspect of marketing automation systems is facilitated by applying a scoring system to different actions that relate to prospect demographics and most importantly, behaviour – across your site, emails, content, social channels, events and beyond.
Obviously, you can’t manage scores of thousands of leads by hand; you’ll need good rules.
At first blush, you’ll want to start giving people points for everything. But it might not make sense – the guy who comes to your site daily may not be much of a sales prospect. Every point you score should ideally indicate significant progression to a buy. (And this may also differ by demographic – another scoring dimension).
In our own experience – for Velocity and for clients – a nurtured lead converts 5-10 times better than a cold one.
4. The flows Every single campaign within a marketing automation system requires a flow, or multiple flows. There are two very time-consuming parts to this: 1) Understanding what logic you want to apply to your flows (what happens to who, when?) and 2) Building those flows.
For all their efforts to make their tools simple, complex actions are complex. I’ve built the kinds of simple flows that draw the veil to one side – this sucker gets very, very complex in a big hurry. Our own experience states that you want only to automate and create a flow where automation is called for. Look at your existing marketing and sales processes. Try to simply speed up or improve what you’re already doing to begin with. Too many companies that start with marketing automation set up flows and processes for their own sake, because they can.
5. Mapped content There’s content that draws in new leads (stuff that’s good enough to get an unknown to fill out a form), there’s content that gives a known lead greater understanding of your story or value proposition, there’s content that quashes those niggling doubts in the hearts of someone close to buying, and all kinds of content in between.
Marketing automation’s a hungry content beast, as an expert on the topic wrote recently. There’s a pretty linear relationship between the sophistication/complexity of your marketing automation system, the amount of content you need to incorporate in it and the beauty of what comes out.
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