Successful lead nurturing programs have good planning, proper process and great content. Unfortunately, many companies never get to the “great content” step in lieu of perceived difficulty in creating lead nurturing material. We thought we would share a sample lead nurturing email and highlight unique points about the email that are generally applicable to all your lead nurturing content.
Sample Lead Nurturing Email
Jeff,
I thought you would find this short presentation interesting given your interest in protecting software applications. Ben Jones of Alegis Group discussed how to secure software applications from the most common threats. Ben covered three topics:
• Threats facing software applications
• Impact of having software compromised
• What technology is commonly used to protect software
Learn more. View the on-demand webcast.
Take care,
Sue Smith
Sales Development Manager, Security Vault
+1.512.222.1212
What makes this sample lead nurturing email unique?
There are six unique aspects of this lead nurturing email that you can apply to any of your lead nurturing emails. Here they are:
There are no pictures.
It looks like a regular email sent from a human being since it’s in plain text. When messages are personal they’re more effective.
It’s personalized.
The sample lead nurturing email is sent from a person and addressed to a person. Lead nurturing is about building relationships from one person to another. It’s not about sending company to company communications.
It references 3rd party content.
Not all lead nurturing content needs to be proprietary. Expand your marketing content library. What can you leverage from the internet, Analysts or Consultants?
It’s short.
Only 73 words! If your emails are more than a few paragraphs you can forget about it getting read. People are busy and inundated with digital communications. Keep it simple and remember less is more.
It’s relevant.
The person’s interest was notated in a CRM. In this instance, we’re sending a relevant email about software security since that’s the prospects interest. Using marketing automation we can trigger tailored communications off of parameters such as this as well as future parameters such as how the person responds to this email or future marketing communications.
It’s casual.
It’s signed in an informal way, “Take care”. Again, when messages are personal they’re more effective as well as believable.
It’s educational.
Notice the purpose of the email is not to sell, but to educate. The timing of this educational-type message is better on the front end of your lead nurturing cycle. Hard sales tactics will turn off your prospect when you’re first building the relationship.
We’ve had other clients purposely misspell words to make automated messages appear as if they came from an actual person. We’ll leave that tactic up to you. ;-)
Hopefully this sample lead nurturing email helps you think of creative ways to increase effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What sample lead nurturing emails can you share with us? What are some of your tactics?
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Are you looking for marketing automation jobs? Lead Liaison might be able to help. We interact with a number of businesses searching for marketing automation solutions. Many of these business lack resources or the right marketing automation “intelligence” to get a project off the ground. Whether you’re looking for full time marketing automation jobs or part time consulting we might be able to help you make a connection. Feel free to provide your information in the form below and we’ll contact you if we see a match.
Marketers spend a lot of time on inbound marketing activities to drive traffic to their site; investing in SEO, thought leadership, trade shows, blogs, social media, and advertising are a few examples of inbound marketing. As awareness builds and new contacts enter the sales funnel it is important businesses define the right sales pipeline stages to manage, nurture, and distribute leads. Sales pipeline stages tend to vary across companies; however, we’ve established 6 sales pipeline stages appropriate for most businesses. Here at Lead Liaison, we use these exact stages to manage our business. Let’s explore how we’ve defined the 6 stages in the sales pipeline.
The 6 sales pipeline stages are
1. Just a Name
2. Engaged
3. Prospect
4. Marketing Qualified Lead
5. Sales Qualified Lead
6. Opportunity
Prior to adding a lead to your sales pipeline we suggest tracking the lead source. Marketing automation technology can help you identify whether the lead source is from a paid search, SEO, trade show, facebook, general website visit or other source. Lead tracking will help you report on marketing ROI down the road. Let’s briefly explain each of the sales pipeline stages.
Just a Name
As the name implies, these records are just a name. If you have the person’s name or email and no other insight they are simply a record, or a person, in your database. Often times marketing and sales have conflicting definitions of a lead. Separating these people from your marketing defined leads and sales defined leads helps avoid confusion over what is a lead and what is not a lead.
Engaged
When a person finally responds to an inbound marketing program they are moved to the sales pipeline stage, Engaged. For example, the person could click a link in an email campaign or fill out a web form to become engaged. Please note that just because someone is in the engaged status does not mean they are a lead as there’s a good chance they’re not yet ready to speak with sales. We suggest using marketing automation technology to automatically respond to the person with a personalized message a few hours after they respond.
Prospect
If the person meets the ideal profile of a buyer they become a prospect. Ideal profiles could be determined by demographics (location, job title) or firmographics (industry, company size, revenue). Again, we suggest using a marketing automation system to help qualify if someone should become a prospect. Lead scoring, a feature of most marketing automation systems, provides a mechanism to automatically qualify leads using an incremental scoring system. For example, add 10 points if their companies revenue is more than $50M and/or add 20 points if they are a Vice President. Conversely, scores can be decremented. For example, subtract 50 points if the person is a student.
Once the person becomes a prospect start lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is the process of creating meaningful dialogue with the prospect at each stage of the buying process. See the post under lead nurturing programs for 5 examples of this dialogue. The beauty of lead nurturing is that different lead nurturing “tracks” can kick in according to the prospects online activity and/or interaction with other marketing assets.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
We suggest using the score generated from your lead scoring programs to determine if a prospect makes it to the sales pipeline stage as a marketing qualified lead. Sales pipeline stages leading up to this point do not require human interaction; interaction has been personalized using lead nurturing technology. In our lead management model, we use a scoring threshold of 65 or higher. When the prospects lead score crosses that threshold we change the lead status to a marketing qualified lead.
At this stage in the sales pipeline, marketing will pass the lead over to sales. In some businesses marketing may have a sales development team or inside sales team manually qualify the lead further via a phone call or some other type of screening. At Lead Liaison, we do not change the status of the lead until sales accepts the lead and determines it’s qualified. A lead may also be put into the “Disqualified” status if there’s no match whatsoever.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Once sales accepts a lead and deems it qualified the lead becomes a sales qualified lead. Leads at this stage typically require high-touch, personalized interaction. Sales will call the lead to further qualify them. At this point, sales can move the lead to one of three statuses: Deferred, Recycled, or Opportunity. If the lead is not quite ready to buy sales should recycle the lead. Recycling puts the lead back into a lead nurturing program managed by marketing until the lead is sales-ready. Alternatively, sales can move the lead to a Deferred status if no additional lead nurturing is warranted and there doesn’t appear to be an opportunity. If marketing, and the marketing automation system, has done its job the lead should be moved to the Opportunity status. When the lead becomes an opportunity it will have its own opportunity sales cycle.
This is the most important stage of all sales pipeline stages since quick response to hot leads must occur. We strongly recommend using an alert system to make sure marketing and the rest of the organization holds sales accountable for follow up. A marketing automation system will help you setup a closed-loop accountability process similar to the one below:
1. Send an alert via email to the responsible sales person.
2. If within 24 hours the lead status has not been changed send an alert reminder to the sales person.
3. If another 24 hours pass, send another alert reminder to sales and copy the sales person’s manager.
4. If another 24 hours pass, send the same alert to sales and the sales persons manager but this time copy a C-level executive.
This closed-loop process ensures no lead falls through the cracks while holding sales accountable for follow up and providing marketing peace of mind as the person seamlessly transitions from marketing responsibility to sales responsibility.
Opportunity
The Opportunity status is important for marketing to measure cost per conversion, cost per lead, and effectiveness of various lead sources. Today’s marketer is being measured on results, not activity (email opens, web visits). ROI analysis on a person’s path through the sales pipeline stages from Just a Name through to Opportunity then Customer is vital to keep a pulse on revenue generation.
Graveyard and Contact
At any of the sales pipeline stages a person can be moved to the Graveyard or Contact status. Graveyard status is a person record with a bad email or incorrect contact information. Usually, this occurs if the person has changed jobs. Contact status is when a person is converted out of the sales pipeline stages into a contact management database and is not a lead. This typically occurs when the person is a partner, reseller, or just a contact in your system that you never plan to sell to.
Contact Lead Liaison to see how our revenue generation software can help you setup your lead management process to distribute, qualify, and nurture leads through your sales pipeline stages.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What sales pipeline stages to you employ? How do you manage your stages?
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Marketing automation is a very powerful solution for many sales, marketing, and executive teams. The value of marketing automation is amplified when used properly along with planning and a process. Studies have shown only 25% of users get the full value from their investment in marketing automation, which parallels the early days of CRM implementations. To help maximize your return on invest we compiled a checklist to help you start preparing for marketing automation.
What else should people to do start preparing for marketing automation? What is missing from the marketing automation preparation checklist?
Experts estimate that only 2-5% of all companies use marketing automation, a component of revenue generation software. Businesses not using revenue generation software are at risk relative to their competitors who use these platforms. In this article we’ll look at the disadvantages of not using marketing automation and revenue generation software.
Revenue generation software can provide a considerable advantage for a business. With this software, B2B marketers have the ability to interact with leads in ways their competitors cannot. For example, competitors not using revenue generation software might dismiss a lead while the marketing automation adopter would place the lead into a lead nurturing program and close a deal later in time when they lead matures. Adopters can also take advantage of the opportunity to become experts on revenue generation software to stay one step ahead of their competitors. The longer companies wait to adopt these types of tools, the longer it will be until they establish expertise. This is even more relevant as revenue generation software adds more features and capabilities. It will be hard to learn all at once vs. learning iteratively.
In addition to gaining competitive advantage, there are many disadvantages of not using revenue generation software.
What are the risks of not using revenue generation software?
1) Website traffic will continue to be monitored at a macro level (a la what Google Analytics provides) instead of at the visitor level. Read our article entitled “track your website” to understand how lead tracking results differ from macro analytics packages.
2) Leads will continue to be passed from marketing to sales without proper qualification. Sadly, 80% of all marketers continue to send unqualified leads to sales. Read our article on sales and marketing alignment for more background.
3) The salesperson may have to manually check in with a large number of prospects on a regular basis. This is a continual problem and will only get worse as a company’s database and business grows.
4) Pulling reports may be tedious and sourced from incomplete or inaccurate data.
5) Sales and marketing people become inefficient as resources spend too much time on tasks that could be automated such as lead follow up, lead distribution, lead nurturing, email marketing, and sales prospecting.
6) Execution is slowed as the creation of new marketing resources like landing pages and web forms may be slowed down by the need for IT or web developer assistance.
Small, medium, and large sized businesses will greatly benefit from revenue generation software. Lead Liaison’s technology can help your business reduce the risk of not using revenue generation software. We can help your business save time and money while increasing revenues and leaving your competitors in the rear view mirror. Take the next step and see more benefits of revenue generation for marketers and more benefits of revenue generation for sales and contact Lead Liaison today.
What do you feel are the risks of not using revenue generation software?
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Marketing automation has been around for over a decade. However, it’s only recently that awareness and adoption of marketing automation has increased exponentially. In this article we’ll discuss one of the major issues facing marketers when adopting a marketing automation system. By reading this article you’ll get a better understanding of how to make marketing automation successful.
Although adoption is skyrocketing, analyst data suggests marketers still face some of the problems which marketing automation solves.
Analysts take on challenges facing marketers:
In 2010 Marketing Sherpa conducted a survey that showed 78% of marketers list generating a high quality lead as their top challenge
In 2010 Frost & Sullivan reported 44% of those who own marketing automation said that insufficient processes was an obstacle to success
Furthermore, Jonathan Block of Serius Decisions provided research in December 2010 that compared companies using marketing automation with a process in place vs. those that did not have a process in place. The results are astonishing. Companies that had a process in place yielded the following benefits:
A 366% increase in sales accepted leads
A 416% increase in closed deals
$570,000 in more revenue
Our take away from this data is that marketing automation cannot stand alone without a proper process supporting it. You can buy the nicest sewing machine on the market but you’ll never make the best clothes unless you learn how to use the sewing machine and have a design, implementation and execution plan in place. The sewing machine will not sew the clothes for you without proper training and management. Similarly, marketing automation will not automate marketing for you. Don’t fire your marketing staff quite yet.
Three steps to marketing automation success
What process should companies follow? It’s really quite simple actually and can be accomplished in three steps.
First, companies must understand what processes they currently have and, more importantly, do not have. Conduct an audit on your organization to better understand your lead management process. Document your findings. Focus on how leads enter and exit the sales funnel.
Second, define your new and improved process in a document. We suggest creating a Service Level Agreement, or SLA, to accomplish this. The SLA is a single document that governs the lead management process established for your business.
Depending on the scope of your business and needs, the SLA might include ideal customer profiles, definitions of a lead, lead scoring models, how to respond to a lead, how to distribute a lead, lead nurturing programs, metrics to measure, and sales and marketing responsibilities. Your SLA should serve as a working foundation for your sales and marketing process and be approved/supported by your executive team.
Finally, adopt a Revenue Generation Framework that delivers solutions to satisfy your process. Lead Liaison’s provides Revenue Generation Software that accomplishes just that. The Software includes the following solutions:
Sales Prospecting
Database Segmentation
Lead Tracking
Lead Qualification
Lead Distribution
Lead Nurturing
Inbound Marketing
Metrics
By leveraging a revenue generation system such as Lead Liaison to provide the proper framework and adhering to the policies defined in your SLA you’ll make marketing automation successful.
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The term “marketing automation” has been used extensively and possibly incorrectly in the industry. Many definitions exist and many vendors claim they offer marketing automation. As a result, no one vendor offers the same marketing automation solution. We’ll clarify some of the confusion for you and help you answer the question, what is marketing automation?
What is marketing automation according to analyst Mac McIntosh?
“The use of technology to generate, nurture, score and qualify leads, and drive sales, using customized, multi-touch marketing communications tailored for each contact’s profile, level of interest, behavior or place in the buying process.” – Mac McIntosh”, sales-lead-insights.com
Marketing automation has been referenced as the “second coming of email marketing”. The truth is, it might be to email marketing companies; but it’s not, and it’s much more than that. In layman’s terms, what is marketing automation? Marketing automation is a broad description or category name for a set of features and/or technology which help reduce repetitive, high value tasks associated with marketing processes. Repetitive tasks are usually manual and include things such as marketing segmentation (database segmentation), campaign management, database cleansing, and lead nurturing. Marketing segmentation is the process of dividing a contact database into individual marketing segments commensurate with a marketing campaign. For example, dividing a database into companies in the financial industry interested in security solutions. Campaign management is the process of setting up, automating, and measuring campaigns. Setting up a landing page with a web form in conjunction with an email marketing effort is an example of a campaign that’s managed with marketing automation. Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships and automating prospect/customer engagement in a personalized way through a combination of email, web sites, micro sites, and direct mail. The variance in vendor’s marketing automation solutions is attributed to the multitude of features. As suggested above, basic components such as email marketing could be construed as marketing automation. Analyze marketing automation features and benefits carefully when deciding on a vendor’s solution.
What is marketing automation without a way to measure results?
“Without a measurement and analytics component, all “automated” technology is of little more value than a car without a steering wheel. Thus, in order for any customer engagement component to be valuable, it must return actionable data that can be analyzed and benchmarked over time to consistently improve performance…” – Ian Michiels
Marketing automation value is enhanced with lead tracking. Lead tracking “listens” to online visitor behavior to identify prospect’s relative interest to purchase. Tracking creates a digital fingerprint of your prospect’s activity. When combining analytics with marketing automation the solution becomes a powerful tool to help businesses make continuous improvement in their revenue generation cycle.
Surprisingly, a recent study conducted by Aberdeen Group showed that 67 percent of the 130 respondents indicated they relied on multiple separate silos or niche solutions for automating marketing activities vs. leveraging a single integrated platform. When researching what is marketing automation look for a holistic solution; basically, a platform not a product. Lead Liaison considers marketing automation to be one leg of a multi-leg stool that encompasses lead generation, sales prospecting, and automatic lead qualification (lead scoring). Together, these constituents form our revenue generation software platform. To learn more about how you can leverage Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software and/or further discuss what is marketing automation contact us.
To continue education of what is marketing automation reference our three part series on the need for marketing automation, benefits of marketing automation, and lessons learned from marketing automation.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What is marketing automation to you? To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button.
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In a series of three posts we share feedback from other senior-level marketers on why marketing automation is needed, benefits of marketing automation, and highlight their lessons learned from using marketing automation. This post covers the lessons learned from marketing automation.
Forrester Consulting interviewed 15 senior level marketers who use marketing automation. The data below shows the percentage of marketers surveyed who provided the answer. When marketers were asked about the lessons learned from marketing automation, here’s what they had to say:
Lessons learned from marketing automation – key takeaways and recommendations:
1. As mentioned above, a SLA will help you define your process and plan while revenue generation software will help you execute that plan.
2. When it’s time to get buy-in from sales and executives it’s important to convey the benefits of using marketing automation technology to each respective group. This data is a true testament from other marketers. Additionally, we wrote this article which talks about the benefits of sales and marketing alignment, which executives will like. The broad benefit of this technology will not only help executives but will help sales and marketing as well. See our article on revenue generation for marketers and revenue generation for sales to learn more. The reason we don’t call it marketing automation software and instead use revenue generation software is because this technology helps multiple teams. At the end of the day, what is important is revenue generation, something all teams care about – or should.
3. When working with a vendor to integrate marketing automation technology, make sure you get good, intimate support to help with training and overall adoption. Adoption is an iterative process as features are consumed over time.
4. When finding the right set of features to use, don’t be overwhelmed. There are a lot of capabilities within marketing automation. It’s vital to start small and think big. For example, start with a simple demographic lead scoring campaign. Alternatively, start by using lead distribution or lead response features to automatically deliver leads to sales and respond to inquiries. Next, progress to advanced nurturing campaigns that trigger off of changes in a lead’s activity and interest.
We hope this data on the needs, benefits and lessons learned of marketing automation were helpful. If you’re interested to hear how you can better align sales and marketing teams, gain control over marketing programs, measure marketing effectiveness, and strengthen your sales pipeline contact Lead Liaison. Our revenue generation software includes marketing automation as well as lead generation and sales prospecting technology to help your business.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What lessons have you learned from using marketing automation? To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button. Feel free to read part one, need for marketing automation, and part two, benefits of marketing automation.
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In a series of three posts we share feedback from other senior-level marketers on why marketing automation is needed, benefits of marketing automation, and highlight their lessons learned from using marketing automation. This post covers the benefits of marketing automation.
Forrester Consulting interviewed 15 senior level marketers who use marketing automation. The data below shows the percentage of marketers surveyed who provided the answer. When marketers were asked about the benefit of marketing automation, here’s what they had to say:
Benefits of marketing automation – key takeaways and recommendations:
“In my view, the primary benefits of B2B marketing automation are:
1) It allows marketers to accomplish more, usually at a lower cost, than they can get done manually;
2) It facilitates continuous improvement by allowing marketers to track and measure the results of their campaigns, then make necessary adjustments, in near real-time.”
Mac McIntosh, sales-lead-insights.com
1. The number one benefit of marketing automation is better leads/more robust pipeline. Marketing automation improves the quality of leads handed to sales, increases opportunity to pipeline conversion, and accelerates a prospects time to revenue. As discussed, lead scoring delivers better leads to sales. In addition to lead scoring, marketing automation provides lead nurturing to build relationships with new leads and your existing database. Businesses will increase opportunities and lower cost per lead resulting in higher margins and a “fatter” forecast.
2. Almost half of participants agreed that marketing automation provides better customer insight/data. Lead tracking helps sales and marketers identify what a prospect is truly interested in by logging pages viewed, search terms used, time on site, emails opened, and more. It’s like turning your website into a sales person. Sales can easily identify when a prospect is thinking about your solutions and what they care about, allowing sales to optimize their “pitch”.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. How have you benefited from marketing automation? To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button. Feel free to read part one, need for marketing automation, and part three, lessons learned from marketing automation.
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Marketing automation is gaining wide adoption as a standard technology used by sales and marketing teams of all sizes. A sea change in how B2B buyers buy and marketers market requires a new look at techniques to better align sales and marketing teams, gain control over marketing programs, measure marketing effectiveness, and strengthen the sales pipeline. In a series of three posts we’ll share feedback from other senior-level marketers on why there is a need for marketing automation, benefits of marketing automation, and highlight their lessons learned from using marketing automation. This post covers the need for marketing automation.
Before diving into the data, let’s first clarify some definitions. LMA stands for “Lead Management Automation”, which is an industry name for technology in the marketing automation space. At Lead Liaison we believe marketing automation is a feature of an overall solution. We use this feature to deliver a wide array of benefits as part of our revenue generation software (the solution).
Forrester Consulting interviewed 15 senior level marketers who use marketing automation. The data below shows the percentage of marketers surveyed who provided the answer. Forrester first asked what problems the marketers were looking to solve. Here are the results of the marketer’s pain points:
Need for marketing automation – key takeaways and recommendations:
1. The top two pain points revolve around how sales and marketing interface. To improve collaboration between sales and marketing teams start by creating a Service Level Agreement (SLA) then procure a marketing automation software solution. A SLA is an agreement between sales and marketing which defines how the two teams work together to leverage marketing automation technology. It’s a blueprint for success.
2. The number one problem is lead qualification. Marketing automation delivers lead scoring, which is an automated way to objectively qualify leads using technology. Without this technology the definition of a lead is purely subjective and will vary between sales and marketing. Define the universal definition of a lead in the SLA and use lead scoring to establish a point system for qualifying a lead against your criteria and lead definition. Lead scoring will assign points based on a leads activity and demographics to score the lead until they are qualified and ready for sales.
We welcome your feedback, comments and suggestions. What is your need for marketing automation? To be alerted of future posts, please click on the RSS button. Feel free to read part two, benefits of marketing automation, and part three, lessons learned from marketing automation.
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