The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all of us to find new and different ways to communicate with our family, friends, colleagues, clients, and prospects.
With the majority of us now working remotely, video conferencing, emails, and phone conversations have taken the place of water cooler chats, standup hallway meetings, and the battle for conference rooms.
Lead nurturing has always been an effective way to keep in touch with your customers and prospects, but it has become critical during the pandemic. Firms with active face-to-face sales teams have been sidelined, but the need to stay in touch with prospects and clients hasn’t.
An effective nurture strategy at all stages of the relationship can help bridge the communication gap and give you the edge over your competitors.
The goals of a nurture campaign include keeping your contacts engaged, providing information that is relevant to them and their stage of the buyer’s journey, and keeping your company and products top of mind. Below are examples of common nurture campaigns for both prospects and customers:
Examples of prospect nurture campaigns
- Educational: Early in the relationship, prospects are looking for more information to help in decision making. An educational nurture should provide content that focuses on the prospect and how your product or service will meet their needs.
- Wake Up: Do you have prospects in your database who haven’t responded to anything in a while? It may be time for a campaign to reengage them. Share a new offer — such as study findings, a targeted blog post, or limited time savings (if they’re ready to buy, but on the fence) — to get them to click through.
- Recycle: Sales marks prospects as Recycle for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they just weren’t ready to buy or didn’t have the necessary funding yet. It’s now Marketing’s responsibility to keep them interested until they are ready to take the next step.
Examples of customer nurture campaigns
- Onboarding: An onboarding campaign is a great way to help your new customer get engaged with your organization. This is particularly valuable when you are providing a service. The campaign can walk your customer through the setup process and make them aware of how to get help, if necessary.
- Upsell/Cross-Sell: In many cases, your clients are also “prospects” for another product or service you provide. Or they might be a target for upselling to a premium version of your offering. An upsell/cross-sell nurture campaign is a great opportunity to bring your clients deeper into your “product” family.
- Retention: As most of us know, it can be 5-7 times more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to retain an existing one. Don’t wait for renewal time to remind your client of all the value you provide. By keeping in touch, you can make sure they are using your service and encourage them to get the most out of their investment.
The examples above are just a sampling of the many ways you can keep your clients and prospects engaged with your company. Once they finish a nurture stream, add them to the next applicable campaign.
A word of caution: multiple nurture streams need governance and monitoring to avoid nurture fatigue or conflicting messages. A Nurture Monitoring System is a great way to manage the qualification hierarchy for active nurture programs and make sure contacts are only in one nurture stream at a time. This is especially important in situations where an individual may qualify for more than one program to ensure that they end up in the higher-priority program.
If you’re interested in learning more about lead nurturing, DemandGen has put together a comprehensive e-Brief that walks marketers through the basic recipe for a lead nurture and ways to nurture throughout the funnel to engage your buyers.
Ready to get started nurturing your client relationships? The DemandGen team is ready to assist. We can help you develop a series of activity-driven email messages to meet your nurture needs. Our team can analyze your existing content, make recommendations on how to fill any gaps, and structure the best framework for your organization’s nurture campaigns.
Angela Brock Schaffer is a Client Engagement Manager at DemandGen. She works directly with clients to help advance their business needs, develop long-range marketing plans, and drive ongoing success with their marketing initiatives. Angela is Marketo Certified and she is an Eloqua Product and RPM Master.
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