Robbert van den Heuvel is owner of the first Dutch Certified HubSpot Partner: Heuvel Marketing.
Heuvel Marketing is working closely together with other European agencies in order to be able to assist international companies with the development and execution of a uniform and cohesive Inbound Marketing strategy for their multilingual markets.
Robbert is Certified Inbound Marketing Educator and has access to a vast international network of high quality Inbound Marketing service providers in the field of SEO, copywriting, content curation, SEA, social media campaigning and marketing automation. Visit Heuvel Marketing website.
Every inbound marketing strategy has the following goals:
- Drawing more relevant visitors to your website.
- Converting the anonymous visitors into leads, by offering relevant ‘advanced content’, such as e-books, white papers and case studies.
- Optimizing the conversion rate from lead to customer, supported by specific lead nurturing campaigns.
So lead nurturing is an important element of inbound marketing.
By using the appropriate marketing automation software, such as Net-Results, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot or HubSpot, a lead nurturing campaign is quite easy to organize to your own liking, without help from the IT-department.
At this, you should take the buying process of your ideal customer into account.
How to accomplish this?
When you pay attention to the ‘the three E’s’, you are able to set up a lead nurturing campaign in a fairly simple way. You can link this campaign to the ‘advanced content’ (i.e. white paper, e-book, checklist), which was requested by your potential customer.
E 1: Education
In this phase, your potential customer is collecting information. It’s too early to make a specific offer. In the first messages after the download, you can send your potential customer additional information about the topic, like a checklist, cheat sheet, calculation tool, or a complementary white paper or e-book.
(Action: send follow-up mail 1 + 2, after 5 and 10 days)
E 2: Evidence
In the second phase, your potential customer is looking for a confirmation of a possible choice for the solution. Therefore, it is important to provide ‘proving’ information, like a research report or an expert-interview on the subject.
(Action: send follow-up mail 3, after 15 days)
E 3: Expertise
In the final stage of the buying process, your potential customer is looking for a suitable supplier who can solve his/her business problem. In this phase of your lead nurturing campaign, it’s wise to show your expertise, for example, by drawing attention to a successful case study, performed by you.
(Action: send follow-up mail 4, after 20 days)
Some common basic principles you can keep in mind during the campaign:
- Make sure every e-mail displays an ‘unsubscribe’ option.
- Include a ‘call-to-action’ in every message you send.
- Measure and analyze your campaign: look for example at the ‘click-through-rates’ (minimum of 1,5%) and to the unsubscribe-rate (maximum of 5%).
In this brief case study of Magic Software you can find an easy example of lead nurturing (which, however, doesn’t fully utilize all the 3 E's).
Do you think lead nurturing can contribute to a higher conversion from lead to customer? Or do you see no point in it? I invite you to post your comment!
