Tech marketers have adopted nurture strategies as a means to fill the pipeline and establish customer relationships at a rapid pace. A well planned lead nurture program, will allow your organization to leverage your own captive qualified audience and increase your close ratios in a shorter sales cycle. These nurture programs are truly dependent on an organizations ability to monitor, manage and respond to the target audiences behavior. In other words, you need to dedicate the resources and stick with the plan.
There are two methodologies that are generally implemented with nurture strategies as outlined in Marketo’s Modern B2B Marketing Blog The Difference Between Drip Marketing and Closed Loop Marketing. Although each of these demand a commitment of resources, they do differ slightly.
Drip Marketing:
Drip marketing is all about scheduling your touches to push out various thought leadership and product/solution information. Most often,m these touches are scheduled in advance and tend to be delivered via email on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis. Many tech marketers rely on automated email systems to implement these activities. The Drip approach will always have call to actions or drive the intended audience to further content relevant to tier interest ( of course you need to create the content in advance).
Note that the audience targeted are opt-in and have chosen to receives these messages. This will allow you to personalize the messages and increase the potential for effectiveness.
In terms of measurement, Marketo does a great job of communicating this:
Metrics used in drip marketing will include email open rates, email click-through (when combined with offers), and opt-out rates. These will be compared the same metrics by others in your industry and to those not in your list that are not included in the drip campaign to compare success. Most importantly, the purchase frequency, amount and time to purchase will be compared between those in the drip campaign and those who are not so the marketer can see the overall results of the drip campaign. ROI will need to be determined for any email or marketing automation tools used for drip campaigns.
Closed Loop Marketing:
Although the premise of closed loop marketing is similar in terms of nurturing targets with multiple touch points, the success of the program relies on sales and marketing alignment with the effort. With traditionally different sets of customer data tracking, these two departments working together can integrate their activities to their fullest potential In closed loop marketing you are communicating with your contacts based on their previous actions and based on their place in the buying cycle. Marketer’s literally closes the loop, working in conjunction with sales, providing the right information at the right time, based on prospect’s responses and behaviors until or after final purchase.
After each marketing touch, both sales and marketing teams need watch customer reaction to marketing, to ensure their sales funnel does not have any leaks. While this can be done through direct mail, in-person, or through telemarketing, often the most cost effective and least intrusive way for marketers to participate in closed loop marketing is through triggered email campaigns that provide links to thought leadership relevant to the specific prospect. Integrated campaigns can include all these types of marketing, with the key to success being the tracking of each so that there is an understanding of the prospects interest at all times.
