Drip Campaign for B2B Marketing

Drip campaign is a technique of slowly and steadily sending across messages to prospects over a certain period of time. This is done slowly to ensure that the prospect has enough time to read the message and understand why the product or offering would be suitable to his/her problem or need.

In drip campaigns it is important to understand the goal of each and individual email that is sent out. Email messages should be customized to suit the purpose of the drip campaign - whether it is for educating prospects or selling. The message must come across clear and concise and the recipients must have an idea what is to come in future emails.

The first step in drip campaigns is to establish trust. For this, every email message must have the option to unsubscribe. This is an effective way to filter out inactive or uninterested prospects as well.

Drip campaign emails must be devoid of promotional content. This will only annoy subscribers into opting out or hitting the spam button. Drip campaign is a great way to build relationships. So, email messages must be created in such a way that it creates and builds bond between the prospect and the company.

Be wary of the number of drip messages sent. Although some campaigns do require emails to be sent frequently, pace them well so that prospects have enough time for retrospection.

For effective lead management, post drip campaigns create a follow up campaign. This campaign should be nurturing in nature, till the prospect becomes sales-ready. This is highly critical since it takes care of those prospects that need to take time for making a purchase decision, especially since in B2B a purchase decision is a collective one.

Ensure that your drip campaign effectively tackles the challenges of your marketing endeavours by following these 6 essential tips for great email drip campaigns.

Don’ts of Drip Campaign
Below is a list of 10 things to avoid for every excited marketer embarking on a new drip marketing journey on a newly acquired marketing automation platform.

·         Don’t keep dripping the prospects who are sales ready
·         Don’t overlap the lists for different drip marketing tracks
·         Don’t over-drip a prospect to annoy him/her- don’t give a chance to hit unsubscribe
·         Don’t make the drip marketing template ‘sales-y’ in content
·         Don’t drip a contact who is not even remotely interested- don’t give a chance to hit spam
·         Don’t repeat messages/themes in drip campaigns
·         Don’t repeat HTML rich emails
·         Don’t make it impersonal- as drip campaign is a series of emails, it is easy to get lost
·         Don’t make a list too long – segment your list and have multiple drip marketing tracks
·         Don’t just send a ‘Thank You’ email in drip campaign- attach interesting content to engage further

Using marketing automation software for drip campaigns can be highly beneficial because it helps to easily tailor campaigns based on the purpose of the campaign. By making the lead generation activity of “bulk emailing” simpler and user-friendly, marketing automation software can be considered an ideal tool for drip campaign and lead generation.

 

Also read on - Marketing automation

Effective Lead Nurturing Best Practices – Raw Lead to Being Sales Ready

Lead Nurturing is a discipline that helps businesses maintain a healthy relationship with their customer, delivering content of relevant value to them so that they remain consistently engaged, thus helping convert prospective leads into sales ready customers. Almost 95% of the prospects visiting your website today are there for research, most of them may not buy at all, but as many as 70% of them will eventually buy maybe from you or your competitors. Lead nurturing helps you to track these leads and move them down your funnel, so that when they are ready to buy they purchase your solution.

Lead nurturing software allows leads to be tracked and content delivery to be automated through various marketing channels and helps convert prospective leads into sales-ready customers. It also addresses the challenge that marketing and sales teams face in establishing a strong bond with their customers. The biggest advantage of lead nurturing is that, it builds the brand and product preferences moving them gently along the path of becoming a customer, long before they are ready to buy.  

Here are a few effective lead nurturing best practices that needs to be followed at each phase of the sales cycle to ensure a successful sales conversion.

1.    Understand the Needs of the Customer and Map out a Strategy – You need to clearly map out your typical buyers buying cycle with an interesting and attractive introduction. It is the basis of any good lead nurturing campaign.  Plan out the kinds of content that you want your leads to receive, keeping in mind their interests. The kinds of content that can be sent include white papers/articles, case studies, data sheets, videos, podcasts, webinars, links to specific industry news/resources and interviews with experts/executives.

2.    Personalize Your communication – Start building relationship by personalizing emails. Send relevant content based on the interest in the prospect. Provide information they want rather than filling their inbox with information that is irrelevant to their need. You have a much higher chance of keeping your prospect in the fold if you provide information they want.

3.       Build and Reinforce Brand/Product – Brand building is absolutely necessary today. If you are a known brand, lead generation will work better. With information in abundance online buyers are not dearth of information and choice. Web 2.0 has changed the brand building scenario. If the prospect has shown interest in your product, it is up to you to keep his attention with timely messages. Share white papers, videos or demos about your brand or product. Develop case studies and share success stories with clients. In this way you will be able to create an image about your brand.

4·         Create a Thought Leadership –By engaging prospects early, you build awareness and increase your chances that the prospect will respond to future demand generation efforts.  Develop a schedule for sending out information to the prospect. This helps you keep track of where you are in the lead nurturing funnel.

5.       Strengthen Relationship – Once the brand is built, you need to strengthen it and maintain that interest further. You now need to send a controlled communication to influence the prospect’s buying decision. This helps your prospects learn more about you and your background and helps build the foundations of a healthy relationship.  Use whitepapers, eBooks, demos, case studies and let loose yourself in the social media. Remember the first eight seconds are very important to get their attention, so be precise to the point, short forms and definitely no external navigation.    

6.   Close the Deal – Once the prospect is ready, it is time to pass them on to the sales team to close the deal.

Marketing is a dynamic job and you need to be malleable, ready to automate building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing best practices.  By nurturing your prospects database, it is easy to identify your most qualified leads that are sales ready. The ones who are not, regular follow up and regular consistent nurturing can help them move up in the pipeline.

Also read on - Marketing automation

Top 2 Lead Generation Facts B2B Companies Must Know

Fact 1 - Marketing qualified leads are baselines to measure marketing efficiency.

The Marketing funnel is a measure of investment versus return and defines the stages and processes involved in this journey of translating effort to results. The Sales Funnel shows how large volumes of leads entering the system get narrowed down as time goes on.

In the traditional Sales Funnel, which is basic and is focused on showing the transformation of leads to customers, a company drives various marketing campaigns to bring in interested Leads. Then, Sales takes over to find opportunities (purchase intent). The Leads which show interest are sent proposals and quotes and if the offerings meet their needs, the prospects, who have so far traversed the funnel, become the new customers for the company.

Websites started playing a crucial role in lead generation when Internet marketing became popular. Determining the source of the visitors, their level of engagement with the content on the site, their reaction to different calls to action on the site and their interaction with the company (via form fill or request form before the sale is made) became qualifiers which decide if a Lead is worthy of entering the Sales Funnel.
Marketing until now has always been considered as a cost centre, not playing an active role in primary lead generation efforts.  However, the entry of Marketing Automation platforms have ensured that companies are able to measure the ROI for their marketing activities, and marketing can stake a claim on part of the revenue.  ‘Marketing Qualified lead Rate’ will become a relevant measure for marketing efficiency and success, both from a marketing initiative perspective and from marketing’s ability to effectively screen out low potential contacts.

Fact 2 – Lead Generation is a Marathon; Marketing Automation makes it a Sprint.

A key reason for the Sales-Marketing disconnect is that companies are losing huge amounts of money because of a misalignment within their organizations. Today, there is a huge increase in the number of channels marketing uses for creating brand awareness and for generating leads.  Despite this, there is a visible shortfall in the number of quality leads generated by the marketing team. A difference in perceptions is where the divide between Sales and Marketing starts.

The Sales and Marketing disconnect largely reduces the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns and the efficiency of Sales’ efforts to pursue and close deals. Therefore, Marketing Automation makes lead management a real-time collaborative process. Here, the communication process is two-way where Sales provides input to help Marketing optimize its campaigns and, Marketing runs targeted campaigns to drive quality leads.

Marketing automation software platforms provide a solution for resolving the sales and marketing split and keeps both happy by ensuring a sales funnel full with qualified leads.

Used optimally, marketing automation can actually deliver extraordinary results in a short time-frame. Also, it significantly shortens the time between lead generation and lead closure because it recognizes the buying process as a group activity and hence takes into account all activities by an enterprise at different times before qualifying them as a ‘sales ready lead’.

Also read on - Lead nurturing software

Lead Nurturing – Uncover a Gold Mine of Opportunity

Nurture is very simple word that means to supply with nourishment. Today, lead nurturing is immensely popular with marketers because it is a simple yet extremely powerful marketing automation software. Lead nurturing programs can be compared to a garden that will produce a good harvest only if tended well. Similarly it is not enough to just generate leads, it is important to nurture them to be converted into customers.

Organizations spend huge amounts of money marketing their products sending mailers, email and invitations to webinars or advertising heavily on TV and radio. The leads generated by this exercise are passed on to the sales team. As sales are responsible for generating revenue for the quarter, they tend to ignore the prospects that are not hot – thus sales teams ignores almost 80% of leads generated by marketing. That is 80% of the budget going to waste.

This gap between sales and marketing teams is the biggest challenge faced by B2B enterprises. Once the lead is handed to the sales team, the marketing team no longer follows up on these leads as they have already been handed over to sales. Hence it makes more sense for marketing to pass on only the qualified leads to sales. This is whereLead nurturing programs comes in.

Lead nurturing in the B2B space is the process of building long term trusted relationships with qualified prospects irrespective of whether they are interested or not, through a consistent dialog throughout the sales lifecycle. Thus we can say lead nurturing is a process that converts inquiries into leads and leads into sales.

Remember 75% of these unqualified prospects will eventually buy from you or your competitor. Yes, there are some who may be unqualified; those should be siphoned out of the system immediately. The rest we should care about and focus on. Lead nurturing best practices helps keep your finger on the pulse of those undeveloped prospects.

According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead.

Build a Relationship

Lead nurturing is used to build bridges and inspire trust between the lead and yourself. It helps you to provide valuable education and information about the product to the lead up front, in the form of letters, emails, case studies, white papers, articles, webinars and success stories.

By using this kind of lead nurturing campaign you relate with your prospect better and get deeper insights into their buying intent. Once you have built that trust you are looked upon as an expert. You don't sell; you only provide information and solutions. You space out your campaign depending on the lead time. You ultimately benefit from more and higher quality sales leads and increased conversion rates with an increased bottom line.

Thus if lead nurturing is done right fewer leads are lost, more qualified prospects get into the funnel and your sales team can focus their attention on the most promising of them.

Know more - marketing automation, lead nurturing software

Building Relationships with Lead Nurturing

Enterprises seem to be spending quite a lot on efforts to build online lead generation with an eye to ensure enhanced customer base and well-qualified leads, yet they are bothered by certain queries that compels to wonder if  generating leads are enough  for enhanced CRM. The queries these enterprises often ending up asking include:  

• Is lead generation enough to develop greater CRM?
• Does lead nurturing actually work?
• What are the actual parameters of lead nurturing and can they actually bring in optimum results?
• How does one bridge the gap of perception that exists between marketing automation teams and sales teams?

These questions are pertinent and are often drawn up because even as leads are being generated, lead-fatigue can set in among sales teams, if there is no noticeable progress with leads. So even as sales fails in interacting with the lead constantly, marketing automation software teams feel that once they have provided the lead to the sales, it is their baby, so to speak. Therein emerges a problem of a lead being lost because no one wants to nurture the lead or care for the lead.

Lead nurturing can be the key to enhanced CRM
Lead nurturing can actually help not just enable but also optimize sales effectiveness and enhance marketing campaigns. With the right kind of lead nurturing software you can build long term relationships with your prospective customers. Here are the benefits of a good lead nurturing software:

• It will help you understand your customers better, by giving you insights into the customers intention
• It will assist in informing you if your prospect is sales ready
• It will also pass on leads to your sales team automatically and help them with a solution that can further nurture the lead
• The software will ensure that your lead and their interest sustains, this will be ensured by informing and educating the leads with relevant information

To ensure that your leads are nurtured effectively one needs to ensure that they are informed of newer additions to your product, they need to be made involved, so keep them hooked by asking them to view a demo, take part in a webinar, read a blog etc. Educating your lead about the product, its effectiveness through a well-thought of email campaign also might work wonders. The onus lies on nurturing your relationship with your prospect, which means you need to cultivate your relationship and care for it continuously.

lead management, marketing automation solutions