B2B Lead Generation Blog

5 Lead nurturing tips to create relevant and engaging emails

A recent MarketingSherpa survey of email recipients found that 58% of those who stop reading, disengage, or unsubscribe after cite "lack of relevance" as a key factor. This is hugely important because most marketers rely on email as their main lead nurturing tactic.

As B2B marketers, we should have it drilled into our brains that relevance must be an essential part of our lead nurturing touches. But be honest: How well are you really connecting with your audience?

I encourage you to look beyond your unsubscribes and find a true measure. Start by considering all those prospects that are simply ignoring your emails. I read a blog post on by Steve Woods on "Emotional Unsubscribes" that's definitely worth checking on this topic. 

It’s a common phenomenon. I receive emails often from companies that “know” me, but their emails certainly don’t show it. Their creative and graphics-laden emails don’t speak to my concerns at all. And each irrelevant message I receive is basically programming me to ignore or delete future messages from them. I don’t even bother to unsubscribe. I'm sure that's not their intent but they are missing the key idea of relevance.

So, how do we align better align our email and nurturing messages with what is relevant to our audience? 

Consider the following 5 ways to build more relevance into your emails: 

Tip 1. Stage in the buying process: Be sure to provide different kinds of information to your prospect based on what point they are in the buying process. If you have a complex sale, the best way to I know how to do this is to combine a human touch to build relationships with your lead nurturing message. If they are an early stage lead and they are just starting to get familiar with the business issues you solve, don’t send them the same copy that you would send someone who is on the verge of making a decision.

Tip 2. Industry vertical: Industry information will more than likely tell you what pains your prospects are experiencing, while company size will give you a hint as to the resources they have available to tackle these challenges. Be sure to add this information to your marketing data often so that you can easily define your target segments based on these indicators.

B2B Lead Generation Roundtable Group on LinkedIn

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called 5 steps for using LinkedIn as a lead generation tool and step number five was ‘create your own LinkedIn group and share relevant content.’

Well, last Thursday I launched the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable Group on LinkedIn. I wanted to create a group to discuss and share ideas that focus on the many aspects of B2B lead generation such as lead nurturing, lead management, teleprospecting and more.
 
I’m jazzed at how fast the group is growing and even more excited about the discussions that are already taking place.

My first question to the group was if lead distribution should be fair or optimized? What do you do? Do you invest your hard won leads on your top performers or do you try to help your weaker sales people? In this economy should we take a Darwinian view of lead generation and focus on helping the strong sales people get stronger?

What’s your take on lead distribution? I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Join the B2B Lead Gen Roundtable group and let me know your thoughts.

Losing Leads and Sales With Bad Search Marketing Decisions

There are so many tools that help marketers with their search marketing but marketers have to know how to use the analytics in order to focus on the right things to generate leads and sales.

So often I find that marketers are only looking at conversion rates of how specific phrases or banners perform and are ignoring other valuable information. While conversion rate is one way to measure the effectiveness a search phrase, it can be extremely misleading.

I came across an interesting article by B2B Internet marketing consultant Todd Miechiels, and I liked what he had to say about those B2B marketers that make bad decisions based on “solid analytics data.”

Marketers need to look at more than the quantity of conversions. Quality is just as important. If you look solely at what phrases convert a higher percentage of whitepaper downloads, for example, you could be missing the fact that another phrase brought in 2 or 3 of your top prospects, which in the long run, could be better for your company.

Todd goes on to say: “If you are spending thousands of dollars per month on search marketing and not capturing visiting organizations (both those that convert and the many more that don't), you are shutting down phrases and scaling back campaigns by using only half the truth. Equally as dangerous, you are likely routing dollars toward phrases and ad creative that appear to perform better but in reality are merely clogging the marketing database and sales pipeline.”

According to Todd, there are three things you should remember:

• Make sure you're capturing and reporting on visiting organizations referred by specific search phrases.
• Factor in the number of legitimate organizations you've captured when assessing the effectiveness of your search terms and campaigns.
• Don't fall into the trap of optimizing campaigns based solely on quantitative conversion data.

 Don’t clog the pipeline. Take Todd's advice and take the broader view.

Here's some related posts:

Web analytics for b2b lead gen
Tracking ROI for web generated leads

Looking for a little marketing wisdom?

Well, I’ve got, oh about a hundred suggestions for you all courtesy of MarketingSherpa’s latest Wisdom Report.

Sherpa’s free report is filled with mini-stories from our colleagues in the marketing world who have learned through trial and error. The topics of this year’s report touched on just about every aspect of marketing out there – from tradtional tactics to Web 2.0 and mobile marketing.

According to the editors at Sherpa, there were three main trends represented in this year’s edition:
1.    Email  - It’s clear from this book that email isn’t dead. In fact, it’s far from it. Sherpa editors noticed that marketers are looking for ways to tweak their email correspondence. Marketers are personalizing messages more than ever, segmenting their lists to create the most focused targets possible, and are testing to the hilt. You could learn a lot from the stories included in the email section.

2. Build Social Networks - Marketers are starting to see the value of building relationships using LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs. There are some interesting “Case Studies” that will hit home for marketers investigating ways to integrate social media marketing into their 2009 plan.

 3. Search Engine Optimization - It seems that more and more marketers are focusing on making their websites search-engine friendly.  Marketers give advice on everything from making PPC more affordable to concentrating on niche keywords. One marketer shares how 2008 was the turning point that made him realize that after 25 years in the business he had to get with the program.

Download a copy here today

Coming on September 22: Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting? Four Viewpoints

To what extent can you substitute emails for telephone calls and face-to-face meetings when maintaining and developing relationships with clients and other key market contacts? The answer to this frequently-asked-question affects how you spend your precious business development time and money.  Getting it right will improve your sales effectiveness.  No wonder it’s so frequently asked.  But what is the answer?

On September 22, four bloggers will post their answers simultaneously.  They are:

1. Ford Harding, student of selling professional services.
2. Tom Kane, specialist on marketing and selling legal services.
3. Mark Buckshon, prodigious blogger and specialist on marketing and selling design and construction services.
4. Yours Truly.

We hope this attention to the issue generates conversation on the subject with all of our readers.

Lead Nurturing Best Practices Research and Data

MarketingSherpa just published data on lead nurturing best practices based on a survey of 1,000 marketers. Sherpa's research focuses on the following nurturing best practices:

• Using multiple tactics rather than relying on email only.
• Timing of teleprospecting response to web inquiries – the velocity of follow-up dramtically impacts lead conversion.
• Measurement of lead quality and the impact of lead nurturing.

I encourage you check out their advice. Read MarketingSherpa: Lead Nurturing Best Practices: New Data, Charts, Tips to Put More Punch in Your Cultivation Tactics

When it comes to lead nurturing, I find that marketers lose their momentum because they lack enough edu-focused content. My advice is to start building your lead nurturing library now. Here's a post where I share content ideas for lead nurturing and the best tactics to use. I hope you find it useful.

Related posts:
Lead Nurturing is about Relationships, not e-mails
Lead Nurturing as trusted advisors with the Human Touch

How to make B2B marketing messages more memorable

In B2B marketing, when you have many potential buyers who are involved in the buying process, how do you connect with these people in a memorable way?

If you look at most lead generation messages, they often contain industry jargon and abstract ideas. Interestingly, that’s part of the reason many of them don’t work.

Our future customers are weary of messages, pitches, hype, buzzwords, and corporate speak, that they quickly forget them. So how do you create marketing and lead generation messages worth remembering?

Podcast: Interview with MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland

Would you like some inspiration or some fresh ideas for your marketing and lead generation strategy?

If so, MarketingSherpa just released their “Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08” and I had the privilege to interview Anne Holland about this year's findings. Very useful stuff. Download the Executive Summary

During our in-depth interview, Anne shares some terrific insights and helpful data on numerous marketing and lead generation tactics.

Three data points that I found particularity interesting:

1. Teleprospecting works. As we all know, tech buyers are a notoriously tough crowd to cold call. Sherpa's findings contradict the "calling doesn't work" line we've heard for years. Their data shows that over 50% of tech buyers admitted to short listing a vendor after receiving a well timed and relevant phone call.

2. Sherpa's data shows that more decision makers (not just influencers) are attending webinars and watching archived events. This indicates the importance of relevant educational events and online content for lead generation.

3. Companies who provided fewer but higher quality "sales ready" leads to their sale people have better sales conversion rates than those that send lots of early stage leads and that creating a "cost per lead" culture just does not work.

Listen to podcast now (31 min MP3)

How Lead Nurturing Improves Lead Generation ROI

I know there's a lot of emphasis on lead generation (that's a good thing) but, getting a ton of leads doesn't guarantee that increased sales will follow. In a complex sale, my experience is, most of the selling actually happens when the sales person isn't there.

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from ten years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 80% of potential sales. You can increase your odds success by adding a lead nurturing program.

What’s lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is all about having consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution) regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following-up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet?” Lead nurturing about building trusted relationships with the right people.

Continue Reading at the INSPIRE SmartMarketers.com Blog (a new blog I'm contributing to monthly) presented by Netline.

On June 6th, I’m doing a webcast on a multimodal approach to lead nurturing as part of ON24's Wednesday Webcast with Experts Series. I hope you can make it. Register here.

Where do Your Email Newsletters go?

So I finally got a chance to catch my breath a bit and read some of the content on my "blogs I read" list.  I've often talked about how marketers can reuse content for lead nurturing.  If you currently are sending e-newsletters, here's an idea for you consider. 

Those who subscribe to this blog via my feedblitz e-mail notification are already familiar with the blogletter concept.  You can apply this concept to your existing e-newsletter.  Chad Hornfield writes on his Anything Goes Marketing blog, "How can you take your email newsletters to the next level to maximize their SEO effectiveness?" Try combining your email newsletter with your blog. 

Link: Anything Goes Marketing: Where do Your Email Newsletters go? Email Heaven?.

Another useful post on the same subject by contributing writer (and Web designer) Sarah Lewis for Debbie Weil's WordBiz Report on "How and Why to Combine an E-newsletter and a Blog."

Sarah writes, "In short, e-newsletters aren't as easy to create and update as blogs. That can make it harder to keep to a regular publishing schedule (ahem… you might have noticed that Debbie's publishing schedule has been a bit irregular of late). It makes sense, then, to take some of the easy-to-use technology that has made blogging so popular, and apply it to e-newsletters."

Link: WordBiz Report: How and Why to Combine an E-newsletter and a Blog