3 Reasons to Update Email Marketing with Marketing Automation Posted on August 17, 2016March 6, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 21, 2020. It seems like a new hot marketing tactic is popping up every day (do you need to be on Snapchat? Should you invest in video marketing?). So it’s easy to overlook email marketing – the old standby that businesses have used for decades to reach potential customers. However, email is still a very powerful and effective marketing tool for turning contacts into customers. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, “E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” So how do you harness the power of email? Email marketing software for small business has come a long way from the “batch & blast” email systems of the past. Today, email marketing software with integrated marketing automation technology helps small businesses to dynamically respond to the individual needs of their prospects and customers. Here are three reasons to embrace an all-in-one email marketing and marketing automation software as a critical component of your company’s toolbox: 1: Make the Most of Email Marketing Data Stand alone email marketing software tracks basic metrics like clicks and opens. While click-through and open rate indicate how effective your emails are, they don’t do much in the way of guiding your contacts to the next step in their customer journey. Marketing automation software is a tool that lets you do more with your email marketing data. Marketing automation tracks which email links your contacts click on, which pages they visit on your website, and even which forms they fill out. This data paints a picture of what your contacts are most interested in, allowing you to focus your marketing campaigns accordingly. 2: Provide Context to Each Email Send One of the reasons that many people overlook email sent from different businesses is that it feels generic. That is, the company is trying to cast such a wide net and reach as wide an audience as possible, but it leaves those who receive it feeling like the business sees them as anonymous walking wallets. However, email marketing software for small business allows you to add contextualization to every aspect of the email marketing experience. In a stand alone email marketing software, you might have lists like “Customers” and “Prospects” that you manually import from your email client, spreadsheet or database. When you use marketing automation, however, you can create dynamic lists. You can pull an up-to-date list based on your contacts’ interests, their demographics, or their contact status. By creating distinct groups of customers, you can send targeted emails to the groups likeliest to respond to these particular messages and offers. You can also set up triggered email that helps to follow up on earlier interest a customer may show. You can create entire nurturing email campaigns to organically move customers through the sales funnel while letting you monitor where they are at each step of the way. By sending relevant resources and solutions to those who need them, you show your contacts that you understand their needs, building trust – and eventually sales. 3: Take Advantage of Autoresponses and Transactional Emails When it comes to email marketing, naturally, the focus is building marketing emails and campaigns that drive conversions. However, transactional emails are opened far more than marketing emails. Think about it. When you send a marketing email, you’re pushing a message out to your audience – whether they’re ready for it or not. When it comes to transactional emails, however, you’re sending an email in response to an action from your contact (like paying for a service, or requesting more information from your website). Transactional emails therefore have higher engagement, giving them the potential to generate far greater revenue than marketing-focused emails. Transactional emails are the perfect opportunity to make a lasting impression on your prospects and customers. Personalize where it makes sense. Make sure they are in-line with current company branding. Opt for friendly language. Buffer, for example, does a great job of making a run-of-the-mill invoice into an opportunity to showcase their company culture: Not only is the Buffer email super personal, but the “P.S.” also provides a touch point with the customer – an opportunity to be heard. Marketing automation can help you offer a next step in your transactional emails to make prospects and customers feel more invested in your business so you can capture additional revenue. For instance, if a prospect fills out a form to receive an e-book from your website, send a thank you email with a link to the e-book they requested, but also take the opportunity to help them to learn more about your services. Ask them to check out a related video, for example, guiding them further down the path to conversion. Marketing automation software can monitor engagement with transactional emails. As with marketing emails, you have an opportunity to see what works and what does not and to make even this once-perfunctory part of your company communication more in line with customer expectations. Marketing automation is a powerful way to utilize email marketing to its fullest so you can squeeze every opportunity from your list of prospects and customers. With marketing automation, you send more personalized messages, building trust and nurturing relationships into more sales for your business.
Save Time with Marketing Automation Posted on February 22, 2016September 16, 2020 by Jessica Lunk This blog post was updated on February 7, 2020. Modern marketing campaigns are fragmented with different channels and lots of moving parts. An interested buyer might see your ad in a trade magazine, see your AdWords ad in a Google search, like your social media page, and subscribe to your email newsletter all before deciding to buy from you. It can get a little complicated. It’s no surprise, then, that small business owners want the most help when it comes to creating a sales and marketing process. Segmenting contacts, sending catered messages, nurturing, tracking, and converting can take a lot of manual labor and time. That’s where marketing automation comes in. Marketing automation is key to saving you time while making sure that every contact is being nurtured for your best chance to turn them into a customer and a loyal fan of your business. Let’s take a deep dive into the various features and areas of marketing automation that save you a ton of time. Tasks Marketing Automation Takes Off Your Plate 1. Lead Nurturing Wish you could regularly communicate with leads so that they’d move closer to being sales-qualified leads? One effective marketing automation functionality is a drip-email campaign. Pre-written emails are sent out to specific individuals at the right time when they perform a specific action. Once you’ve written them, your marketing automation software handles the timing and sending, allowing you to nurture leads without spending your entire day sending emails. Each customer has a path to take before making the decision to buy – whether it’s investing in new technology, partnering with a business consultant, or choosing the right insurance. That path – the buyer’s journey – can include blog content, social media, digital ads, emails, and phone calls. You can’t control exactly where buyers go, but you can help guide them in the right direction, shortening their journey. Once you’ve been introduced to a new lead – maybe from a trade show list, lead magnet or networking event – a lead nurturing process can automate the flow of information to the buyer. For instance, say you’re a travel agent who specializes in corporate incentive trips. You meet several great contacts at a networking event, including the CEO of a midsize business. After such a short introduction, it’s not the right time to proceed with a sales pitch, but you want to stay on her radar. You put her information into the CRM of your sales and marketing software and start her on an introduction campaign. The campaign automatically sends her an introduction about your company, then proceeds to send a sequence of your best blog posts regarding employee incentive programs. As she clicks blog post links and goes back to your website, she downloads your Incentive Trip Planning Checklist. The intro campaign stops, and she’s started down a more sales-focused campaign, sending a case study of businesses that have improved sales performance through your employee incentive trips. The case study is followed by a call-to-action to reach out to you for a free incentive trip itinerary. She follows through, and you’re on your way to winning another customer who has been warmed up with relevant, helpful information through the lead nurturing process. 2. Email Marketing Email marketing campaigns, quarterly newsletters, end-of-the-month sales incentives – there are a lot of emails to create. In fact, most lead nurturing campaigns include multiple emails and some can be super short, but some can include 10 or more. Email has been around forever, but it’s still the most effective digital channel for converting contacts into customers. Email can pay off, but getting bogged down in design woes can hinder your performance. Instead of reformatting every email you send, marketing automation lets you build and track email templates. Benefits include: Maintaining a consistent look and feel for every email you send to prospects and customers, boosting recognition and recall of your brand. Using merge fields to include personalized text in your emails, such as contact name, contact company, the contact’s sales rep and more. Tracking email open and link click stats for each email template Testing one template against another to see which templates perform the best. Many marketing automation systems provide an email template library of predesigned templates so you can start out with a format that adheres to best practices, giving you an even greater chance of reaching prospects and customers in their inbox. 3. Lead Scoring and Segmenting Not every lead is ready to talk to a sales rep. The quickest way to annoy your sales team is to send them the contact information of people who aren’t ready to make a purchasing decision. With marketing automation software, you can assign scores to leads based on what kinds of activities they perform. So if someone just visited your site once, they probably aren’t very interested in buying your product or signing up for a subscription. But if they signed up for your newsletter, follow your social media, tune into your webinars, and downloaded your ebook, they are clearly an engaged lead who may respond to a sales call. If you pulled a list in a standalone CRM, or even pulled up your contacts in Outlook, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which contacts where hot prospects, and which were cold leads. Lead scoring allows you to approach marketing more efficiently by spending your time on promising prospects. When you hook your CRM into marketing automation, however, you can track contacts’ activity and tally a score. With contact scores, you know who is ripe for reaching out to, and who could use a little more information about your business or their pain-point before starting a sales conversation. For instance, you might give every lead one point for clicking an email link, five points for filling out a form on your website, and -10 points for unsubscribing from your newsletter. Lead scoring your contacts with marketing automation gives you the information you need to determine what leads are most important to follow up on. You can intelligently prioritize people to contact so that no one will slip through the cracks. It also helps you understand what kind of activities you should perform (emails, calls, etc.) to move colder leads down the funnel. Marketing automation allows you to segment your leads into respective contact lists. For example, a common pain point or interest in services. With an automated process, these emails can be drip-fed to these designated contact lists. Again, relevant content at the right time! 4. Content Management Content is valuable, be it for your brand, your clients, or both. Prospects and customers want to be targeted specifically based on their interests, or they’ll pass you up for your competition. Marketing automation can help you manage that content efficiently and save your agency time by connecting the right content with the right leads. Below are several ways marketing automation software supports your agency’s content management: Dynamic Content Dynamic Content is “smart” content. It’s also your secret weapon. It adapts to the behaviors and interests of the lead, based on website data it gathers from your leads and customers. The content can be personalized based on the lead’s request or previous visits to your website. It also allows leads to submit information back to you, which will help you gain additional information on that lead’s behavior. And better yet, updating the materials is a lot simpler and less time consuming than doing it manually. Content Amplification Take that valuable, dynamic content, and break out of the traditional organic strategies. Integrate it with paid, earned and owned tactics across multiple channels, such as websites, social media, and advertising. 5. Troubleshooting With an automated process, it’s more apparent when you see a glitch or bottleneck in your system. You can identify these issues more quickly and find a solution in real-time, as opposed to waiting for next month’s report and seeing discrepancies that happen too late to make changes to. Not only does marketing automation take things off your plate, but it also has built-in features that streamline your efforts and make getting things done a breeze. Here are a few of those features and how they help you save time. Marketing Automation Features You Need 1. Tagging Few things stay static these days, and keeping tabs on your database of contacts can be a chore. Tags help you dynamically segment and filter your prospects and customers into lists you can easily target with hyper-relevant communication. For instance, with BenchmarkONE marketing automation, you can tell BenchmarkONE to add tags to your contacts based on the pages they visit on your website, or the links they click in your emails. So, if you’re a fitness center, you could tell BenchmarkONE to automatically add a “Yoga” tag to any contact that visits pages on your website that have information about yoga classes. With tag rules, you can then create a rule like “if the ‘Yoga’ tag is added to a contact, send them a yoga email.” As you learn more about your contacts’ preferences and activity, you can send them messages they can relate to and help them along the path to conversion in the most efficient way possible. 2. Tasks Attracting, converting, closing, and delighting (the stages of the inbound marketing methodology) take time. It’s a process, which means there are multiple steps. But, with hundreds or thousands of contacts to keep tabs on, it’s easy for processes to break – causing hot opportunities to slip through the cracks. Marketing automation helps keep processes and people on track with campaign workflows and tasks. So, if someone makes a purchase, downloads an ebook, or subscribes to your newsletter, your marketing automation software can automatically send the appropriate follow-up email, as well as create a task for a team member to follow-up. Then, your customer-facing team – whether it be a salesperson or account manager – can easily keep track of follow-up, like meetings and calls. 3. Tracking You can track engagement, lead source, contact status, sales rep and more, giving you precious insight into what’s working, and what’s eating up valuable resources in your sales and marketing process. Other items you can track: You can tell if one salesperson is particularly good at closing big deals. You can see what your top customer lead source is. You can tell which emails are getting the most click-throughs. With data at your fingertips, you can easily turn up the dial on your sales and marketing efforts. When the daily grunt-work of tracking, tallying and analyzing is all automated for you, your sales and marketing process actually gets less robotic and more personal. With marketing automation, you can free up time and resources to focus on growing key relationships for your business. Digital marketing can seem complex, but with marketing automation, you can standardize processes, deliver a consistent customer experience and save a ton of time. Rather than focusing on manual, administrative tasks, your team is freed up to create awesome marketing content, follow-up with hot leads, and build better relationships with customers.
Getting Started with Marketing Automation in 5 Easy Steps Posted on November 3, 2015June 18, 2018 by jmiller If you are moving from an email marketing strategy to a marketing automation strategy, it can be overwhelming the first time you see how it all works. Once someone sees the level of sophistication of a marketing automation tool, it can cause spontaneous paralysis and a quick retreat into the old way of doing things. Don’t give in! Be ready to make a change…and…EVOLVE. I speak with customers every day about how to get started with marketing automation and how to avoid getting lost in the details. Marketing is not an exact science. You have to test, try new things, learn what works and improve. A solid foundation is the best starting point. Here are 5 steps to get started: Make an Offer Capture Leads Engage your Audience Stay in Touch Keep customers up to date Make an Offer The best way to attract a new client? Offer something that you have that they don’t have and want to have. Identify what that offer is and give them a taste of it. Come up with an enticing incentive, or lead magnet, to offer people in exchange for their contact information: Your offer could be something like: White paper Case study Report Free sample Free 30 minute consultation Leveraging existing content/expertise is the most efficient way to go. If you have multiple offerings, use them all. Test out different offers to see what works best to attract the right audience. Protip: Don’t give more than two offers on a single webpage, or more than one offer on a landing page. Capture Leads Putting a white paper on a website for instant download can limit perceived value. Don’t give away valuable content for free; require information in exchange for the offer. Design and embed a lead capture form on your website or landing page. The more value you offer, the more information you can request. For example, require an email address to sign-up for your blog, but request more information if you are offering someone 30 minutes of your time for a consultation. Protip: Make sure the information you request matches the offer. Engage your Audience Now that your contact has requested information, send them a little more information. An engagement campaign is a short term campaign that ultimately leads to a specific call to action, like request a meeting, signing-up, or downloading information. This type of campaign can be 3-7 steps over a 2-3 week period (this can vary depending on content available). Emails within an engagement campaign can include, but are not limited to: An introduction to your company A case study A testimonial Educational material The goal of the engagement campaign is to drive the contact into your sales process. Protip: A simple engagement campaign can have 2 emails and 1 phone call to follow up. Stay in Touch Not everyone is ready to buy right away, but it doesn’t mean that they never will. Build out a long term nurturing campaign to stay in touch will all of your contacts on an ongoing basis. A nurture campaign may include an email every 30 – 60 days. The goal of a nurture campaign is to educate your audience, offer validation as to why they should do business with you (case studies, testimonials) and simply to stay top of mind. The nurture campaign may have calls to action or offers that can pull someone into an engagement campaign or directly into the sales process. And, with marketing automation, you can track engagement activity; if someone starts to engage, a good marketing automation tool will trigger actions that can pull contacts into your sales process over time. One tip to help build out nurture campaigns is to use a resource like www.alltop.com, where you can leverage 3rd party articles and recommend them to your audience. Protip: 1 email sent every 60 days means that you only have to build 6 emails to stay in touch with your contacts for a year! Keep Customers Up to Date Don’t forget to share your blog, a newsletter or a deal of the month. “Just in Time” communications offer you the freedom to communicate when the mood strikes you. The objective here is the same as a nurture campaign but includes timely information; a new product offer, PR updates, recent newspaper articles, upcoming events. “Just in Time” communications can also be influenced by the season or time of year. Protip: Returning customers spend 20% more than first time buyers, so staying in touch with your customers is just as important as staying in touch with prospects. Getting started with marketing automation can seem like an enormous task. But, by taking a step-by-step approach, you can easily tackle attracting new leads, nurturing prospects, and staying in touch with customers.
The Difference Between “Selling” and “Nurturing” Posted on October 15, 2015October 21, 2022 by Jonathan Herrick Rushing Right In: Is It Only For Fools? The Difference Between “Selling” and “Nurturing” The song, “Fools Rush In,” offers a sentiment that can sometimes be applied to small business sales and marketing strategies. While some products and services can be sold with a bold, brash approach, many larger investments need a more subtle, nurturing sales technique. The inbound marketing trend actually plays well in the areas that require a nurturing type of sales. How do you know the difference between selling and nurturing and when should you apply either strategy? Assumption vs. Reality We tend to make assumptions regarding the positive or negative connotation of a situation. For instance, we often view “selling” as an image of the stereotypical car salesman: In your face, and slightly annoying. In contrast, the common image of “nurturing” may be a mother cradling her child. It is clear that selling, in this context, has a negative connotation, while nurturing has positive one. The truth is that both selling and nurturing can have positive and negative aspects, but it is the job of the sales representative to determine which approach is the best fit. Most people take their time making what they consider a major purchase for their home or family such as a car, house, large appliance or vacation. Smaller purchases are made more quickly. Therefore, logic dictates that smaller purchases should be handled with a sales approach and major purchases with a nurturing approach. Like many assumptions, this one is only partially true. A person’s upbringing, cultural background and income level all influence what they consider is a small or large purchase. Other influencing factors are whether the purchase has emotional value to the buyer. A gift for a significant other can be cause for much deliberation even if the price is low. As a salesman, you need to know which type of sale this one is for your customer. Selling The art and science of selling has been studied from time immemorial. What we know now is that the better you know your prospect or customer, the better you can find the best fit for them. Happy customers refer their friends, and return for future business. Finding the right fit for small purchases is the matter of matching the value of the product or service with the customer’s needs. If you can show your customer why your product is the best choice, and it fits in their budget, they will buy it from you. Therefore, the buying cycle is short and you need to answer their value-based questions before they walk in your store. While price is a large factor, there are other reasons that people will select your product including superior customer service, convenience and relationships. Nurturing When we consider the word “nurture,” we associate it with our first experience of nurturing, our memory of growing up with a nurturing mother. However, marketing strategies for small business require a different kind of nurturing. Because of the easy access to the Internet, prospects are searching for information on their major purchases long before they contact a salesperson. You can provide them with the information they request in return for contact information in order to add them to your drip email campaign. Marketing automation is an ideal tool for this type of selling. You can feed the information you have about your prospect into the system and it will determine how to nurture them. As you slowly offer your expertise to your client, you will be building relationship that will pay off with a major purchase in the end.
Cultivating Ripe Sales Leads: Lead Nurturing Strategies for Small Business Posted on July 31, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Maybe you’ve over-watered a perfectly good tomato plant and watched it shrivel up and drown. Or maybe an overdose of fertilizer has burnt up your yard. Whether it’s water or plant food, too much of a good thing can be, well, bad. See, in nature (and in sales), there’s a fine line between nurturing and smothering. A little TLC can create a flourishing environment, while too much fuss can stifle growth. Not all of your sales leads are ripe enough to convert to customers right now – but someday, a lot of them will be ready to be harvested (according to Gleanster Research, that number is around 50%) Will your business be poised to reap the benefits? With a balanced lead nurturing strategy, you can. Lead nurturing engages contacts with relevant, personalized content over a period of time until they are ready to buy. By sending digestible nuggets of information that strike a chord with their needs, you’ll build credibility over time. But just like too much fertilizer will burn up a plant, dumping too much knowledge on your contacts can cause information overload, spurring potential leads to pull the plug on your relationship. The Old School Sales Process – A Lead Landfill In a lot of businesses, marketing acquires leads from sources like list rentals, pay-per-click campaigns, tradeshows and other sources, then tosses them right over the fence to sales. Sales picks out the choice leads to try to close. Though many leads will be well qualified to buy, a good portion of them might not be educated about the product or service, or the timing may not be right. Sales will be able to close some of these leads, but for the rest, it’s like scorching a delicate begonia in the sun – it’s too much of a pitch too soon in the buying journey. The leads that don’t close just become waste, and marketing starts from scratch to deliver a fresh batch of leads again. It’s an inefficient cycle that uses a lot of unnecessary energy: Leads that aren’t ready to buy get tossed Marketing is always starting from zero to generate the next batch of leads Sales experiences volatility as they churn up leads Modern Sales and Marketing – A Greener Approach In lead nurturing, marketing consistently cultivates new sales-ready leads, turning sales volatility into systematic, predictable revenue. Instead of tossing every lead over fence to sales, marketing acquires leads, then nurtures them with a series of touchpoints until the leads indicate that they are ready to make a purchase. There are lots of advantages to this evergreen approach: Forming Relationships: By connecting with leads over time, they get to know you. You earn their trust along the way and when it’s time to buy, your business is already on their short list. Optimizing the Sales Cycle: As you keep in touch with your contacts, you can educate them along the way. Instead of waiting for leads to discover their pain-points and search for your solution, you have the power to inform them, shortening the sales cycle. Reduces Waste: With lead nurturing, you aren’t burning up your lead list every month. Hot prospects are handed off to sales while marketing cultivates the next batch into sales ready leads. Encourages Growth: As you nurture contacts through email and social touchpoints, your list actually grows organically through peer-to-peer referrals and brand awareness. Lead Nurturing Strategies Leads need the right mix of attention and education to grow into hot prospects. Lead Scoring: The purpose of each touch point with a lead is to move them closer to the sale. As you email your contacts, make sure they can take an action to indicate their level of interest. Actions such as visiting a link, watching a video, or filling out a form impact lead score so that marketing can systematically determine when a lead is ripe to send to the sales team. Timing: How often you should connect with contacts depends on the length of your sales cycle and their level of interest in your brand. If your sales cycle is 6 months, it’s probably more appropriate to send an email every two weeks, rather than twice a week. Also, contacts who engage with your emails are telling you, “we want more!” and can be communicated to more often. Segmentation: Create unique nurturing campaigns that deliver content based on your leads’ unique interests to maximize your yield of sales-ready leads. Lead nurturing is all about showing your leads the proper care and attention they need to become ripe for sales.
Lead Nurturing Starts with Segmentation Posted on July 21, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Even though it’s July, I can’t help but have the winter holidays on my mind. It’s not that I’m itching to sing Christmas carols, or can’t wait to shovel snow. It’s that I’d like a relaxing holiday that doesn’t involve navigating icy mall parking lots at the last minute, or ringing up staggering rush shipping charges. You see, it takes time to find the perfect gift for each special someone on your list. It would be much simpler if you could just buy 25 pairs of lipstick red Isotoners in a ladies size small and call it a day. But imagine the holiday woes. Your teenage nephew would scoff, and your kids would probably cry. Even your aunt might be hurt that you didn’t remember that her favorite color is lilac, not red. Let’s face it, most of your fuzzy glove gifts will find their way to the Goodwill bin or the trash. In gift-giving, and in marketing, there’s no one-size-fits all solution. Just like an ill-received gift, a generic email blast is going to end up in the trash. That’s where segmentation comes in. Organizing your prospects by their unique preferences helps you tailor your message to their needs. It’s kind of like getting your aunt the right size slippers in her favorite shade of purple. It shows you care, and shows you can be trusted. For prospects, sending messaging that fits them like a glove keeps them engaged with you until they are ready to buy. So how can you start segmenting your contacts? First, think about organizing contacts by status. This designates their place in the sales funnel, from a fresh new lead, to a promising prospect, to a hot opportunity, to a new customer who hopefully buys from you again. Then, to get even more targeted, segment your contacts into two or three buckets using their unique characteristics and interests. At Hatchbuck, we refer to these unique buckets as personas, a realistic portrayal of your ideal type of customer. But wait…what if you don’t really know what your contacts are interested in, or which of your solutions might fit them best? This is where marketing automation really shines. With marketing automation, you can dynamically tag contacts using forms, link actions, and webpage tracking. So instead of manually updating your contacts, their online actions automatically sort them into the right bucket, based on the pages they visit, the forms they fill out, and the links they click. With your contacts segmented by their status and interests, and tagged in your database, it’s easy to determine the type of messages that will fit like a glove.
How to Stock Your CRM with Fresh Leads Posted on February 10, 2014October 2, 2020 by Jessica Lunk Catch and release is great for conservation, but when it comes to business, you’re playing for keeps. Don’t let great prospects slip by. Keep your small business CRM from going stale by capturing leads in person and online. 1. Convert Casual Site Visitors into Nurtured Leads If your website feels more like a static brochure than a lead generation machine, it’s time for an upgrade. Feed your CRM by placing forms throughout your site to convert the casual website visitor into a nurtured lead. Try one (or all) of these: The Contact Form If you have a web presence, chances are that you have a generic contact form. That’s a great place to start. Contact form leads are actually nice and warm. Someone has actively hunted down a way to reach out to you. They are aware of your business and your product or service offering, have done some research already, and are likely in a buying state of mind. But don’t stop here. A contact form only captures a fraction of the people who come to your site. What about those visitors who are just browsing, but aren’t ready to commit? They could be great opportunities down the road. Capture their info now so you can nurture them until they’re ready to buy. Newsletter Sign-Up Most businesses send out some form of correspondence on a weekly or monthly basis, whether in digital or physical form. So why not leverage that content to stay in touch with prospects? A newsletter sign-up form can capture leads on your site who are interested in your products and services as well as the expertise you share. To increase retention and conversion of your newsletter sign-ups, segment your leads by the type of content they’d like to receive, like: Updates on the latest deals and discounts. “Let me know when your resume-writing services go on sale.” Industry tips and tricks. “Send me the latest blog posts on sustainable urban living.” Specific product or service updates. “Share the availability of your seasonal beer.” Gated Content Use your expertise to generate helpful, informative, in-depth content. Then give it away in exchange for contact information. You’re producing content everyday, so re-package it in an enticing way: Bundle your best blog posts into an ebook or guide Share recorded webinars Create a whitepaper based on your most frequently asked questions Online Ads Whether you’re using banner or text ads, don’t simply direct visitors to your homepage. Instead, create a custom lead generation form with content optimized to convert visitors into leads. As a rule of thumb: Address how you can relieve the pain-points your customers face Outline the key benefits of your product/service Create trust through testimonials, reviews, accreditation, certification, etc. Provide a strong call-to-action that compels prospects to act now Product Information Don’t forget to ask for what you really want – a sale. Capture hot leads by making it simple to get the product or service information that opportunities need to make a buying decision, such as: Demonstration Product trial or sample Consultation session Quote Social Networks Remember that you don’t own the followers on your social media platforms. Promote your lead gen forms to your social media followers. Once they opt-in through your form, you can keep them engaged with your brand no matter what new social network craze comes next. 2. Follow Visitors Out the Door Leads aren’t just captured in the digital sphere. You’re fielding inquiries and connecting with prospects in real life everyday. Don’t let them leave without collecting their calling card. Take advantage of touchpoints at your brick and mortar location(s) to capture: Business cards Newsletter sign-ups New customer emails 3. Keep in Touch with Attendees Whether you’re sponsoring a networking session, attending a trade show, or hosting a webinar, you can leverage events to convert attendees into leads. Capture attendee information through: Registration forms (online and onsite) Giveaways and door prizes Networking exchanges Your CRM should be more than just a storage bin for customer data. Don’t let the big fish get away. Turn your website, store front, and events into consistent lead generators that keep the top of your sales pipeline stocked with fresh leads. Flickr Creative Commons Image by Agustin Rafael Reyes
The How and Why of Lead Nurturing for Insurance Agents Posted on February 27, 2013June 1, 2016 by Nicci Troiani What is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is a marketing process designed to educate and build relationships with your leads and prospects who are not quite ready to buy yet. Why do agents need lead nurturing? 1. Only 25% of new leads are ready to buy and another 25% are not going to buy. You need to properly maintain communication with the other 50% without being the pushy, sales type that they are now conditioned to ignore. By sending them informative, educational information about insurance and financial products, you are building a relationship. The prospect needs to be able to trust your advice, so that when they are ready to purchase, they know where to go. 2. Automate your follow up Following up with new leads and maintaining communication with current customers is a problem that all insurance agents face. It is easy to only focus on “hot” leads and let all others fall by the way side. By using a system that will allow you to send automated email marketing campaigns and trigger tasks and reminders to you, you minimize the time and effort on your part to follow up with all of your contacts, which gives you more time to focus on those ‘hot’ leads and make more sales. 3. Score your leads Whether you purchase leads or simply collect business cards, all leads you get are at a different part of the buying cycle. Tracking behaviors such as email opens, link clicks, white paper downloads and webpage visits will give you an idea of who is most interested. You should be focusing on contacting people who have indicated that they are interested with behaviors like these. Ideally, using a sales and marketing software than can track and score this information for you will save you time and the headache of trying to keep track yourself. How do I start nurturing my leads? Use current marketing materials You don’t want to use material that sounds salesy and chances are, most of your current marketing material does. Your current marketing materials can make a good outline or starting point though. Use what you have and do some additional research if necessary to write a few short and educational articles about your industry. Give the prospect tips on buying but don’t mention your product or service. Leverage other people’s content Start following blogs and publications that write about insurance. They need to provide good, educational information (but isn’t written by a competing agent). Keep and archive good ones that your find (I like Diigo.com for keeping track of articles that I like). Start a blog A blog is a great way to not only attract people to your website, but to keep ideas in writing. Old blogs can be revamped into a new e-mail marketing campaign so its great to have content like this on hand. Send your content out to current prospects via e-mail You should develop an e-mail marketing campaign with your new content. Don’t put long articles into your e-mail, no one will read them. Stick to a short introduction and then a link to the article or blog. Again, this can be a link to someone else’s article as long as it isn’t a competitor. Give new leads your content via social LinkedIn groups are a great place to post your content. Find groups that make sense to post your content (writing about group insurance? post in small business groups) and write a short description with the link. Also, post your links on Facebook and Twitter. You never know who may click to read and become a prospect in the process.