Lead nutrition nurtures leads to contacts who have already shown interest in your business
Leads nutrition consists of automatically sending a sequence of emails with content related to which the user expressed interest a few days earlier. The goal is to make Leads more ready to move on to the next step of the sales funnel.
This is the most important strategy that we use on Webtrends Agency to get more clients.
Did you know that most B2B Leads are qualified but not yet in the right time to buy? It is to stimulate the interest of those contacts who have already performed an interaction and lead them through the sales funnel that leads nutrition exists.
Want to understand all about this strategy and how to use it to leverage your results? So this article was made for you. Continue reading!
What is Leads Nutrition?
Leads nutrition consists of sending, automatically, a sequence of emails with content related to which the user showed interest a few days before.
The goal is to make Leads more ready to move on to the next step of the sales funnel. They receive information that conforms to each of the stages of the Purchase Journey: Learning, Problem Recognition, Solution Consideration, and Purchase Decision.
Thus, the seller wastes no time addressing contacts that are not yet ready to buy. He only gets involved when the Leads are really at an advanced stage, and service becomes easier for the professional and less inconvenient for the contact.
Benefits of Utilizing Leads Nutrition
The benefits of utilizing Lead nutrition are visible: Research shows that the strategy can increase a company’s sales volume from online contacts by 50%. That’s at a 33% lower cost than getting new contacts, according to Forrester Research data. That is: in addition to increasing opportunities and conversions, it ends up dropping the cost of customer acquisition (CAC).
Learn in detail the 7 key advantages of utilizing Lead nutrition in your company:
Ease and time saving of professionals
Because the process is automated (emails are pre-written and included in the system to be sent periodically to Leads with the same profile), it does not require the direct involvement of Marketing and Sales teams in submitting content suggestions to be accessed by Leads This saves professionals time and makes the whole process cheaper.
Sending targeted and relevant emails
The fact that sending is automated does not mean that messages are generic. Emails are extremely targeted: content conforms to what the user has downloaded on the site and material is relevant for the moment, since the first message is usually sent one day after the user has downloaded related content from the site. company. Which means he is still aware of the topic.
This accuracy in content ultimately ensures better engagement results. A survey by expert Dan Zarella found that the clickthrough rate rises considerably: it goes from 3% in a normal campaign to 8% in a Leads nutrition campaign.
Organized follow-up
The seller will not have to worry about sending emails to keep in touch with these Leads over the days. Automated shipping will perform this role very well and prevent potential shortages or professional forgetfulness.
Opportunity Volume
Since the campaign is produced only once for a group of Affine Profiled Leads, automatic submission allows these people to have close contact with the company for several days. The result, as we said before, is that the strategy ends up generating more opportunities for the sales team. It’s worth repeating: With a well-executed campaign, you can increase a company’s sales volume by 50%.
Generate more qualified opportunities
Because the content you submit is intended to clarify some topics of interest to Lead and bring it closer to the company, the result is that the strategy ends up generating more informed and informed contacts about issues that the company’s products and services help solve. This makes it much easier to sell to them.
Better and bigger sales
According to the Annuitas Group, Leads that were nurtured generate 47% more sales compared to those that weren’t. With more information about the advantages and how the product or service works, the potential customer clearly sees the benefits of buying and ends up buying more complete packages.
Ability to analyze results and adjust process
By conducting a nutrition campaign, you can have complete control over the results. Your company can measure which type of email is badly converted and reshape the message or change the email sequence for better results.
How to Run a Lead Nutrition Campaign
First, identify the content your business already owns (posts, eBooks, presentations, webinars, etc.) and how it can be leveraged in this process. Ideally, think well about emails and the sequence with which they will be sent from a specific offer that your company wants to promote.
The following are the points that need to be planned for the campaign to be well assembled:
- List what the main purpose of the campaign is
Does your company intend to provide information on how specific software works? What offer, event or content would you like to promote?
- Determine who the persona is
What is the customer profile of each campaign like? What is your position? What materials downloaded on the site?
- Flag which event is triggering
What content should the persona (potential customer) have downloaded to show interest for the software in question? Was it an eBook about Introduction to Email Marketing, for example? What kind of content this persona subscribed in your Company Website?
- Define which offers will be sent at each stage
This is the time to define what content your company has produced that is interesting to get Lead’s attention at each of the steps:
- Learning – Suggested reading of introductory eBooks on the topic are a good option;
- Problem Recognition – deeper content that leads to errors and opportunities such as checklists, assessment tools;
- Solution Consideration – case studies, free diagnostics, solution assembly guides;
- Evaluation and Purchase – budgets, comparison with competitors, free trial.
- Evaluate how long the campaign lasts and the interval between messages
Imagine that if your product’s total sales cycle time is 15 days, it is ideal to schedule the campaign for 10 days, for example. This way you can send 5 emails in total, sending them every two days.
- Compose the body of the email
Considering the logical sequence, it is interesting to mention some aspects of the previous email and demonstrate that with each message the content is deepened.
- Create the messages in the system.
After assembling the campaign skeleton and content, it’s time to insert the messages into the system. In RD Station Marketing, you can create emails by accessing the following options from the menu: Relate> Email.
- Assemble the nutrition flow
After writing each message, you should create a nutrition campaign and identify the order in which they will be sent. Using RD Station Marketing to create a nutrition campaign, go to Relate> Marketing Automation.
This is a more basic way to start sending nutrition campaigns to your customers. The process gets more advanced as you can identify the various stages of Leads within the purchasing process and, according to interest (downloaded content), define different campaigns to trigger for each group.
How to relate to disengaged Leads without damaging your domain?
Every day more than 200 billion emails are fired in the world. As you read this article, 2,572,256 messages should be sent over the network, according to statistics provided in real time by the Internet Live Stats website. Of this amount, 67% is spam, that is, unsolicited email marketing and sent to a large number of people or messages that are not interesting to recipients.
One of the most relevant information in defining whether email will be delivered to your inbox or spam is Leads’ involvement with campaigns previously sent by the same sender. That is, if the recipient did not open the previous email, it is very likely that the next messages from the same sender are not intended for the main box, but the spam box or the promotions tab.
Points of Attention for Measuring Lead Engagement
Email Marketing Open Rate is an unreliable metric for identifying who is interacting with your emails. This is because most email services cannot measure whether the recipient has read all the content or just one word, and only considers an open campaign when the recipient authorizes the display of images.
Also, there is no number that can be considered as a rule to identify whether or not Lead is interacting with your messages. Typically, companies often review 3 key metrics to measure Lead engagement:
- Email open and click rate;
- Percentage of Leads Requesting Unsubscribe;
- Number of messages marked as spam (recommended below 0.1%).
Having a cut-off criterion for considering who is inactive and tracking the percentage they represent relative to the base is critical to verifying that the content and subject matter of emails match the lead’s interest and profile, and the stage in the funnel. Marketing they are in.
For ease of analysis: Behavior Score
To facilitate this analysis, we created a tool in RD Station that measures Leads engagement, the Behavior Score. It considers Lead disengaged when it does not interact with the latest emails sent via RD Station or whose origin is unknown (when a list is imported or Lead is generated by an integration, for example).
The Behavior Score alerts you to the number of disengaged Leads at the time the email is triggered – but even if it is not advisable, it is possible to force sending to Leads who are not involved with company messages.
Tests we did here at Digital Results show that submissions made using the Behavior Score have a 99.8% deliverability rate against 99.3% when firing for the entire base. Campaigns sent only to Engaged Leads also have 11.3% higher open rate and double clicks.
Emailing Disengaged Leads Can Blacklist Your Domain
Internet Service Providers – such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail – analyze a set of information to decide whether to classify emails as spam or deliver them to your inbox. One of the most relevant information is the involvement of Leads with campaigns previously sent by the same sender and the quality of this mailing list.
When emails sent from the same domain are usually targeted to the spam box or when emails are sent to addresses that do not exist (hard bounce), email providers end up blacklisting that domain.
These lists group emails, IP addresses, and domains considered spammers. Once on a blacklist, the provider refuses to receive messages from this domain because it does not consider the trusted address. As a result, even those who interacted with your emails will no longer receive them.
To remove an email address from a blacklist you must request an unlock from the list provider, however, the request is not always fulfilled. Some lists do not have the option to release an email from the blacklist and others charge a fee to unlock it. Therefore, all care is little!
How to engage your contact base safely
To increase the engagement rate of your email campaign and thus achieve the goal you were sending – nurturing, selling, promoting something or simply communicating with your base – you must make an interesting offer.
This offer (content or your product and business) needs to be in line with the characteristics of the audience that will receive the email and be timely.
To learn how to keep your Lead base engaged, we recommend reading the Email Marketing Guide eBook. In order to warm up Leads that are no longer interacting with your emails, you should do the following:
Ask what content he would like to receive
Often the origin of a lead is very generic. He may have downloaded a funnel eBook or signed up for newsletters. This contact alone is not enough for you to realize what this Lead is really interested in. A welcome email, thanking you for contacting them and asking what subject they are interested in, can be a good strategy to engage them.
Invest in paid media
Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and LinkedIn Ads are great for engaging Leads. All of these channels allow you to find your Leads from their email. The goal is to get Leads to make a new opt-in through a conversion, making your email valid.
Avoid group emails
Generally, emails like financial @ and contact @ are set up to be delivered to the inboxes of different employees of the same company. Just one person in this group will flag the message as spam and no one else in the group will receive email from that sender. To avoid registering this type of email, simply enter a JavaScript code that invalidates these emails in the contact form.
Stay tuned for temporary emails
Created just to fill out a form and access content, temporary email is a strategy used by people who are afraid of receiving unwanted messages or spam. To avoid this type of signup, let Lead know that they will not receive spam or enter the opt in option.
Confirm Lead Membership
Ask Lead if they would like to receive emails from you. Enter the field to opt in on the registration form and only relate to those who are interested.
Clean up your mailing list
If your business is sending emails to addresses that don’t exist, it means the list is bad and servers won’t prioritize it, hampering the deliverability of your entire campaign.
There are several services that clean up mailing lists, such as DataValidation and SafetyMails, filtering out missing contacts. Also remember to always exclude from the mailing list contacts who marked your messages as spam or who requested that they no longer receive your emails.
The American OutboundEngine has done research to understand what people consider when opening or not opening an email. Most responded that the most relevant is the sender’s address, followed by the subject of the message. So take good care of your domain reputation: send relevant, targeted messages, appropriate frequency, and interesting topics.
Communicating only with engaged Leads, deleting hard bounces from your mailing list, and never sending messages to unsubscribers are also powerful actions to avoid being spammed and blacklisted.