Lead nurturing campaigns can be great: moving leads down the customer journey and through the sales funnel (to grandmother’s house we go!) while delivering powerful content that will eventually convert the lead to a customer and enhance your demand generation efforts. The idea is glorious and ultimately, possible. But getting there can be challenging and overwhelming. Here are four pointers on overcoming the ugly, to get to the good, of lead nurturing campaigns.
Let’s start with the ugly.
There are three factors to a successful lead nurturing campaign that are most influential and most difficult to pin down: knowing who your leads are, what content will speak to them, and when the best time to send each email is. The old adage is true, “Right Message, Right Person, Right Time.”
1. Right Person
Knowing who you are talking to is one of the most important, and challenging, elements of a successful lead nurturing campaign. There are a multitude of ways for a lead to enter into Oracle Eloqua: they submit a form, attend an event, and, what the heck, they visit your website and read a whitepaper! Knowing the details of how they engaged in the past is a great way of knowing how to engage with them going forward. You don’t need to know their favorite color, but knowing how they feel about the elements of your business, what content speaks to them, and where they’ve originated will help to place them in the right stage of their customer journey.
If you’re looking to develop customer personas but don’t know where to start, check out our blog on audience profiles.
2. Right Message/Right Time
You and your team have spent countless time and money curating, designing, and writing content that you believe will really move the needle with your audience. But the email falls flat with little to no engagement. Super frustrating, but don’t give up! The likelihood is that it’s not the content’s fault but rather when and to whom it was sent. The contact needs to be “in the mood” to receive and appreciate your hard work. If the message is delivered too soon it could overwhelm, disinterest, or even be ignored and forgotten by the contact. As the song goes, “Let´s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.” Most new leads know little to nothing about you so selling them something at the start won’t be meaningful.
Starting out by educating on a topic or issue that is not product specific helps to warm the lead so that they see you as a resource and partner and then, by the time you deliver the original content you worked so hard on, they are finally ready to engage.
Who’s ready for the good stuff?
Once you’ve jumped through the hurdles of developing an effective lead nurturing campaign, it’s time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
3. Always on, or Evergreen campaigns
The beauty of working hard to develop a proven lead nurturing campaign is that it is evergreen, continuously moving marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into conversion campaigns within Oracle Eloqua or through program builder or program canvas and into your CRM for sales follow-up. You can (and should) check in every so often, primping your content and making small adjustments, but mainly, you have a campaign that is doing the heavy lifting for you, freeing your marketing organization to help drive in more leads while automating your marketing process.
4. Next steps: Scoring your MQLs with Oracle Eloqua’s co-dymanic lead scoring
This is so great! Your campaign is running smoothly, contacts are engaging with your messaging, and leads are being sent to CRM for sales follow-up. But, wait, there’s more. Now is the fun part of picking these folks apart and really determining what engagement qualifies a lead as an MQL so that you’re only sending the most viable leads to sales. Developing a lead scoring program doesn’t have to be scary and is the cherry on top of the nurture sundae. Ready to take on the challenge? Reach out to your R1 consultant to get started.
Learn more about the in’s and out’s of nurture campaigns here.
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About the Author: Jen Yurman
