16 Dec Lead Nurturing Campaigns Can Nurture Your Bottom Line
A lead nurturing campaign, also called a drip campaign, involves a series of touchpoints with prospective leads to inform them about your products or services through engaging content with the objective of moving them down the sales funnel.
A series of e-mails to potential customers who you believe would be interested in buying what you are selling but need to be coaxed a bit constitute your target audience. Providing them information about the value of your products will increase awareness about what you have to offer and increase your chances of making a sale. The idea is to spur action, positive or negative. It is better to know that someone is just not interested in your product than not knowing and keep wasting time and resources on that party in vain. A side benefit can be that uninterested parties may tell you why they are not interested which may help you refine your products in their future iterations.
Steps for your drip campaign:
- Develop a list of businesses that may be interested in your product or service. For example, you might have a product that would be of interest to cancer centers or cancer departments at major hospitals.
- Now, and this is probably the most difficult part — determine who makes purchasing decisions at these establishments and find their contact information, generally their e-mail. The person of interest could be in the C-suite, a medical director, or in the procurement office. Once you know who the likely decision-maker is, develop a persona based on important motivations generally associated with a person in that position and use this information to craft messages for the individual drips.
- Take an inventory of content and informative or marketing pieces that you already have that may be sent to the prospect. These pieces could be whitepapers, studies, infographics, slides, news articles, press releases, etc. This will be your toolkit. You may realize you need to develop some of these pieces to create the buzz. We recommend having at least 5 types of pieces for engagement, which you can mix and match based on how the recipients are responding.
- Determine what a good sequence would be to share your toolkit. Always go from general to more specific, informative to more sales-oriented, simple to complex, and less time-intrusive to more exhaustive.
- Develop a grid for the campaign, which would describe the entire process. What will be sent first, what to do if customer responds, and what to do if they do not respond.
- Send an introductory e-mail stating why it would be a good idea for you customer to open your e-mail and receive subsequent e-mails. Always ask to opt-in to be CAN-SPAM compliant.
- For opt-ins, start the campaign. For non-opt-ins, try re-engaging.
- Use a tracking tool to closely track the campaign.
- When customers show interest in your product, pass their information to the sales team.