Category Archives: lead nurturing

Lead Nurturing for Software Trials

They signed up. What now?

This week someone asked me about lead nurturing for people who signed up for a 30-day product trial (for a SaaS/Cloud software product). This was in response to an article on trial conversion optimization that I wrote over a year ago. In the past year I’ve been heads-down on many Marketing Automation projects, and this email inspired me write a follow-up: I’ve included 7 practical tips to get started and a brief case study.

Tip 1: Start Sending Email Now

Are you sending follow-up emails to your trial registrants yet? If not, start doing so today. Even if it’s a manual process, NOT sending email means you’re missing out on revenue. Conversion rates will increase with even the most basic nurturing process. You can send email manually (once a week to all new registrants), you can use a simple auto-responder tool or use a marketing automation system.

Tip 2: Make Product Adoption Your #1 Goal

The one and only goal of the emails you’re sending out should be to get people hooked on your product. Feel free to try sending company overviews or analyst whitepapers, but in most cases you’ll see sub-par clickthrough rates. Instead, focus on tips and resources to make sure the trial users get the most out of your product. If you want introduce a human person as a support resource, make sure it’s someone who can actually help with the most common problems.

Tip 3: Send More Emails

Don’t assume that qualified prospects will read all of your emails, they’re simply too busy and get too much email. The only solution is to send more email than you may initially be comfortable with. How many emails is enough? There is only one way to find out, and that is to increase the frequency until you see the unsubscribe rate go up. Realize that your best customers will be the last to unsubscribe, so don’t worry about unsubscribes too much. As a guideline, the unsubscribe rate should be below 1%.

Tip 4: Choose a Good Call-to-Action

A good nurture email helps convert prospects into paying customers. So what should be in that email? Examples are a link to a piece of documentation, a usage tip, a link to the login page, or a personalized coaching call. In different emails, provide different call-to-actions: some can be low-commitment (e.g. a link to documentation) while others can be high-commitment (e.g. requesting a personal coaching session or attending a live webinar). If you worry that high-commitment offers may take too much time to deliver (e.g. 1:1 coaching), only extend them to the most qualified prospects.

Tip 5: Use Email Best Practices

In the subject line, tell people what they’re going to get by reading this email, but don’t use more than 50 characters. Once they are reading the email, make it easy for them to respond to your call-to-action: repeat the offer, use very little text and add a big button for the call-to-action. Also include a text link, because not everyone may load images. For technical audiences, consider creating emails with no images at all. Regardless of the formatting, you always want to include a button and link for the call-to-action, because that’s how you will measure the email’s effectiveness (using the clickthrough rate). Use only 1 main call-to-action per email, and optionally a secondary call-to-action, but no more than that: the average reader will give your email 5 seconds, and with too many options many will simply not respond at all.

Tip 6: Experiment. A Lot.

It’s hard to know beforehand which messages are most effective in increasing product adoption. You will simply have to try a lot of different messages and call-to-actions. Set yourself a goal to add a new message every 2 weeks, let it run for 4 weeks, and then look at click-trough rates to decide if it’s a keeper. Ideally, change only 1 thing at a time, so you know exactly what caused the change in email performance. Depending on the email system you’re using, you may have to create an all-new email instead of editing the existing email, so you will easily see the difference in click-rates before and after the change.

Tip 7: Know What You Want to Measure

A common question is: how do I know if my nurture campaign is working? Ultimately, it’s working when trial participants become paying customers. You can analyze this in two ways: (1) look at the people who clicked on certain emails and check if they are customers now or (2) look at the recently closed deals and see which emails those people responded to. This strategy allows you to look beyond clickthrough rates and optimize your nurturing campaign for your ideal prospects.

Example: 7-Day Trial Nurturing

Let’s finish this post with a brief example: a SaaS software company has a 7-day product trial and sends 1 email every day with a usage tip. The main call-to-action is a link to the login page. The secondary call-to-action is a personalized coaching session.

The first email has by far the highest clickthrough rate, which gradually tapers off. There is a small spike for the last email, probably because people realize that their trial will end very soon. The unsubscribe rate is highest on the first 2 emails (but still under 1%). It is really low on emails 3 to 6 and has a small spike for email 7.

Every single email (except 1) had clicks from people who later became customers. This underlines the importance of sending email frequently, because you never know which email people will respond to. However, the first email is the most important: it gets the highest clickthrough and those people are most likely to become customers. As an aside: it was interesting to see that few of them responded to any of the later emails.

More than twice as many people respond to the primary call-to-action (login) compared to the secondary call-to-action (coaching). Both convert at the same rate: clearly it’s important to have both call-to-actions, because different people respond to different offers.

Another interesting data point is that people who register with a work email address are 4 times more likely to convert into paying customers than registrants with a personal email address (like Gmail and Yahoo).

Conclusion

My previous article included some advanced trial nurturing concepts, such as nurturing based on the stage where prospects are in the product evaluation process. That is still a powerful tactic, but we shouldn’t forget the basics. That’s what the 7 tips in this post are about. Master these best practices and you’re probably already miles ahead of your competitors.

And as always, there are tons of questions that I didn’t address, so please leave a comment with your suggestions or questions.

Drip Campaigns: Tips From Marketing Automation Monday

Almost 30 people showed up for the first two Marketing Automation Monday meetups in San Francisco and Palo Alto. The topics for these meetings was drip campaigns and lead nurturing. Lots of good ideas and best practices were exchanged, and I wanted to give you a quick summary in this blog post.

Database Segmentation

Segmentation came up several times. You need to tailor your drip campaigns to different audiences. Often, this is based on product, company size, industry or sales channel (direct, partner, affiliate). Some companies were actively capturing more information on prospects (e.g. via progressive profiling), so they could run more targeted campaigns. Another company was pulling revenue information from their billing system into the CRM system.

A recurring theme is that you need to really understand the prospect. Several people had worked with the sales team to better understand the buying process, and one company even started a user experience group to better understand the customers.

Segmentation on Lead Source and Search Keywords

An email marketing vendor found out that people searching for "newsletters" are less sophisticated than those who search for "email software". That's useful info to fine-tune your nurturing programs.

Also, lead source can give valuable clues to the desired length of the nurturing process. One company measured how long it took from initial lead creation until an opportunity was created:

Organic search: 30 days
Paid search: 60 days
Purchased list: 250 days

Interesting enough, once the opportunity was created, it took the same time for the deal to close (6 months), regardless of lead source.

Lead Nurturing Based on Product Usage

Being in the Bay Area, a lot of the attendees worked for software companies. Many of them have trial programs, so potential clients can try the product before they buy. Several people mentioned they were feeding product usage information to their Marketing Automation system to tailor the drip campaigns. Often, this was an automated process, using the Marketing AUtomation system's API.

Some of these same companies are also collecting statistical information on product usage of existing clients, and are running upselling campaigns based on that information.

Pipeline Nurturing

One company found that qualified leads were falling off the sales person's radar when they were not buying within one or two weeks. Therefore, they started a nurturing campaign 3 weeks after the last contact by a sales rep. This resulted in a 7 times increase in close rate, compared to not having the nurturing. Of course, these leads were already qualified, but it shows that nurturing can actually directly help sales people meet their targets.

Email Sent on Behalf of Sales Reps

Talking about sales people: email sent on behalf of a sales rep seems to be used by almost all companies. Everyone agreed that plain formatting worked the best for these "sales" emails. Often, the content of the email is kept short. In one case, the best performing email was actually just one line. Best of all: the unsubscribe rate of these emails is very low. One company even created a fake female persona (including LinkedIn profile), because their prospects were responding way better to a female (IT audience, I guess).

Measuring Replies to Nurturing Emails

However, it's a challenge to measure how many recipients are replying to those emails, as the email goes straight back to the sales rep. One solution was to create an email alias that forwards the email to both the sales rep and another mailbox. That mailbox has to be monitored manually. Another company was saving those replies straight into Salesforce.com.

An additional challenge is to pull prospects out of the campaign after they converted: however, this often depends on a manual action by the sales rep, which is not always happening. One company specifically trained sales people to do this.

Preventing Too Much Email

At one company, product managers for the different product lines could request email campaigns. However, they often specified overlapping segments of the database, causing too much email to be sent. It was a manual process to review the campaigns and prevent annoying the leads.

Another company wanted to automate this. They have multiple automated campaigns that would possibly overlap: they were looking for a way to manage this, having some kind of "traffic cop". This is definitely an area that could use some best practices.

ROI Calculations

Even though the topic of these two meetups was Drip Campaigns, reporting came up as a important topic. Some used customizations of Salesforce.com, others add-on products from their Marketing Automation vendors, one company was using a Business Intelligence tool, and yet others developed a custom solution.

We also had some discussion on campaign attribution, to measure the effect of your lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. One company decided to do ROI calculations only based on the original lead source, not on campaign influence. They found this was much simpler, and gave approximately the same results.

Next: December 6th – San Francisco & Austin, TX

We had some great discussions at these meetups, so we're already planning the next ones. It looks like we'll have a meeting on December 6th in San Francisco. This will be during Dreamforce in a nearby location. We're also planning a meetup in Austin, TX that same day. Also on the list: New York, Boston, Washington DC and Raleigh-Durham. If you're in any of those areas and you're interested in helping to organize it, please let me know (jep at leadsloth dot com).

Also, if you're not a member yet, please sign up for the Marketing Automation Association LinkedIn Group.

What Lead Nurturing Content to Send When?

On Thursday I’m presenting a webinar with Treehouse Interactive, called “Lead Nurturing 101”. One of the registrants sent me the following question:

How much of this webinar will be about content, i.e. exactly what to say in each subsequent email in a series designed to move someone from prospect stage to buying stage?

The webinar will only cover this briefly, so therefore I’m giving some more details this blog post. By the way, you can still register for the webinar.

What Is Lead Nurturing Content?

Lead Nurturing content contains information that prospects need to make a purchase decision. It can come in various formats: (blog) articles, whitepapers, webinars, videos, podcasts, and so on. The content can be on the vendor’s website, it can be sent out via email, or sent out by sales people. In this post I’ll focus on content that is sent out via automated email campaigns (drip campaigns).

Mapping Content to Buying Stages

Different people need different content at different times. You can develop buyer personas and describe the content they need in the various buying stages. This process is called ‘content mapping’. Steve woods wrote a great primer on content mapping. With content mapping you can make sure that you cover all questions and objections that typically come up during the buying process.

However, it can be hard to apply content mapping to email nurturing. On your website, prospects will select the content they find interesting themselves, but in an email you are making a choice for them. So how do know what content they need at what time?

One option would be to assume that all new leads are just starting their buying process and need 6 months to make a decision. But that’s not how it works in real life: different people have different needs and are on a different schedule. The solution is to learn more about your prospects before you decide what content to send to them.

Content for Nurturing Emails

So to send the right content by email, you need to monitor prospects’ behavior. Web visits, document downloads, form submissions and email clicks will all give you an indication of the stage prospects are in. Based on their actions, you can enter prospects in the most appropriate nurturing campaign.

For example, if prospects download a whitepaper on the trends in your industry, they may also be interested in analyst reports or customer case studies. Or if they register for a demo of your product, a logical next step my be a product trial or a free consultation.

Once prospects have been entered in a particular lead nurturing track, keep monitoring their responses. For example, if prospects who downloaded a whitepaper earlier are now registering for a demo, you may want to switch campaigns. When the drip campaign has come to an end before the prospects are ready to buy, enter them in a long-term nurturing campaign.

The Best Email Sequence

Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter. If you know the email campaign, how do you decide which content should be in it, and in which order? I can share some approaches that work well for me in my consulting practice.

To determine the pieces of content, make a list of all the questions people typically ask in this stage. If you don’t know, ask your sales people, or simply call a couple of prospects and ask them. Also try to find out typical objections. Ideally, you provide content that addresses all questions and objections that prospects have in this stage of the buying process.

In your email campaign, start with a couple of educational emails that contain helpful content. The tone-of-voice of these emails should also be helpful (as opposed to being sales-oriented). Then start mixing in some more promotional content, which could be offers or product-related content. Once the campaign is running, carefully monitor open rates and click rates so you can optimize your messages. You’ll have to iterate a couple of times: it’s hard to create the ‘perfect’ campaign from the start.

Keeping It Manageable

There are only so many campaigns that you can realistically create. How can you keep it all manageable? My first recommendation is to focus on the most promising customer segments first. It’s better to do a great job nurturing the most important 20% of your prospects than do a bad job nurturing your entire database.

Second, keep the campaigns relatively simple. A simple but consistently executed campaign will give better results than a complex campaign that is hard to manage. It’s often best to start with linear campaigns: just sending one message after another, rather than branching based on the prospect’s behavior.

Let me know your tips for creating email nurturing content!

Live Webinar: Lead Nurturing 101

Learn how to nurture your leads and bring more revenue to your company. This webinar shows what you can do today to begin or enhance your lead nurturing programs. Thursday at 1pm PDT.

Register now »

Email Newsletters: a Best Practice That Needs to Die

DemandBase has just announced a webinar series called B2B Marketing Best Practices that Need to Die (I will present one of the sessions). Today, I’m working on my presentation for Monday’s lead nurturing webinar 7 steps to finding untapped revenue in your marketing database, where I’m presenting real best practices.

That made me think: in lead nurturing, are there any common “best practices” that are actually ineffective? Yes! For example, the monthly newsletter.

Today’s prospects are “crazy-busy” and “frazzled” according to Jill Konrath in her new book SNAP selling. I totally agree. If you send prospects an email, it better be relevant. If not, your email will be ignored, deleted or – worse – flagged as spam.

Monthly newsletters were a best practice in the early days of email marketing. They were designed to “stay in touch” and offer something of interest to everyone. In other words: it tried to be everything to everyone!

Newsletters break the primary rule of effective email marketing, that is: you need to segment your list to make messages relevant. A monthly newsletter is undifferentiated, and won’t please anybody. Instead, create unique messages for smaller segments of your database.

If you’d like a response to your email, you need to have a call-to-action. That works best if you have only 1 call-to-action per message. Again, this is where newsletters often go wrong: they try to promote a webinar, a whitepaper, and a new product, all in the same message. The result: terrible response rates for all of these call-to-actions.

Instead, segment your audience, figure out what they’re interested in, and send them targeted emails with only 1 topic and 1 call-to-action. And stop sending that monthly newsletter.

Learn How to Create Effective Lead Nurturing Campaigns

To learn more about creating effective lead nurturing campaigns using real best practices, please attend Monday’s webinar 7 steps to finding untapped revenue in your marketing database, hosted by Act-On Software.

Click here to view the webinar recording »