Marketers face lengthy time spans as they progress from lead generation to conversion, making it difficult to nurture prospects while moving them through the pipeline. This chart highlights the percentages of leads in each stage of the pipeline that are likely to advance to the next stage.
One of the most challenging obstacles to marketing is the time span from lead generation to sales conversion.
These long sales cycles put pressure on marketers to streamline the lead nurturing process. When prospects first enter the pipeline, they may be months away from defining specifications, a budget or purchase timeline.
It is marketing’s responsibility to identify and fulfill the information needs of prospects at each stage and to advance prospects through the pipeline to a sales-ready stage as rapidly as possible.
What percentages of leads in each stage of the pipeline are likely to advance to the next stage? As this chart shows, on average, nearly four in 10 leads move from initial inquiry to being sales-ready, and approximately the same ratio advance from sales-ready to qualified prospect. As might be expected, the trend deteriorates moving to the next stage where only three in 10 qualified prospects convert to a sale.
The internal sales force has an edge – albeit slim – over top channel partners in percent of distributed leads closed. An organization’s own sales force is also three times as likely to close leads distributed to them as are their average channel partners.
The Deal. The Close. The Win.
Ultimately, making the sale is up to your sales team, but by implementing a sound nurturing and scoring process, you have helped them by establishing a relationship and positioning your company as a leader with the prospect. The Tools Just as a nice haircut and a manicure prepare you for that first date, every marketer should prepare for that introduction. You’ll need easy to use tools to help you nurture leads, including email, landing pages, forms, and lead scoring: essentially, a lead management solution.
Send triggered emails
Send a series of emails as part of a drip marketing campaign, or triggered based on specific prospect activities. Each email offers a document (or webinar, or trial software, etc.) that helps move your target along in their decision-making process.
Use custom landing pages
Don’t forget that custom landing pages can increase conversion rates by up to 48% during your lead nurturing as well as your lead generation activities. You only have eight seconds to get their attention, so use bullets, short forms, and no external navigation. And have only one call to action!
Use smart forms
You will get better response rates by using a form as the call to action on your landing pages, but why use the same form with the same fields over and over? Just like you wouldn’t ask your date for his or her name every time you see them, you shouldn’t ask for contact information again and again. Smart forms recognize known visitors and can fill in the fields you already know. Since you don’t have to ask for this, ask for other info, such as company size, time until decision, etc. Building the profile over time will help you in scoring the lead.
Use web analysis and lead scoring
Knowing which pages your prospects visit on your site can be very beneficial to determining their interest as well as their level of engagement. Being able to connect anonymous visits to actual prospects? Priceless.
Automate and measure
Salesforce.com and other customer relationship management (CRM) products are great, but they typically fall flat in their marketing capabilities. As marketers we need to automate the everyday tasks of building and managing lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. We also need to more objectively score leads according to their company demographics as well as their activities on our websites, landing pages, emails and other campaigns. And a single lead source doesn’t cut it when lead nurturing. It’s great to know where we first encountered the prospect, but knowing what happens between that first meeting and closing the sale is imperative in these days of marketing accountability.
Evaluate
As you move through the nurturing process, you’ll probably discover that some of the assumptions you made are incorrect; for instance, that downloading a particular white paper means that they are close to buying or that sending a particular email would elicit a good response. Don't forget that lead nurturing – and marketing in general – is constantly changing. You'll want to stay flexible and be ready to change your lead nurturing process as you experiment with new tactics and learn what works.
What are you doing to lessen the cycle from lead generation to conversion?
By Jennifer Pricci
Showing posts with label CRM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CRM. Show all posts
May 25, 2012
The Loyalists Shall Take You To The Promised Land
Members pay an annual fee to belong to a retailer's loyalty program and they receive discounts on the retailer's most popular products, invitations to member-only events, and reward vouchers for reaching certain spending levels.
What other creative ways can this retailer reward its loyal customers?
Your customers are swimming in messages. And they’re being pursued by countless brands. How can you keep their attention, their time, and their dollar?
Gone are the days of a one-size-fits-all loyalty program. Building a creative campaign that your customers will respond to can only begin once you have a clear understanding of their buying motivations. By using real insights you can cultivate stronger relationships customers so your brand stands out. Ultimately your message motivates action… then your bottom line.
Depending on what inspires your customers craft programs which also meet your internal objectives along with actionable metrics for program refinement. More common loyalty program objectives include:
- Stimulate sales and improve gross margins
- Encourage purchase of new and better/best products
- Establish competitive differentiation
- Motivate employee performance
- Boost retention of high-value customers
- Build stronger long-term relationships
- Drive key behaviors
The mandatory requirements for an effective loyalty program are – Creative Conceptualization, Feasible Program Development, Systematic and Time Bound Program Execution and Measurement.
Here are some proven loyalty concepts which can be customized to your customers buying motives:
- Club Cards (pay for membership for regular discounts, points programs, reward vouchers)
- Email Only Promotions
- Premium Shipping Clubs (for ecommerce)
- Subscriptions (asking customers to go steady and purchase product to be fulfilled at regular intervals)
- Service Extensions
- Recycling Programs
- Loyalty Affiliates
- Gift Reminder Service
- Value Propositions (Not loyalty per se, but extremely successful in customer retainment; think Zappos.com and their exceptional customer service)
"The dogs on Main Street howl
'cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land"
'cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land"
- Bruce Springsteen
June 26, 2011
Customer Data Is The New Black
Few assets are more valuable than a company's customer base. Yet most companies are more systematic about managing their office supplies than their customers.
According to a recent study conducted by eConsultancy, 98% of marketers use at least three channels to deliver messages to their customers, but more than half still store the data they gather from each channel in separate, siloed locations. In the same study, only 35% of marketers report that they collect data from different sources and store it in a single database. And when asked about the challenges of multichannel marketing, 71% cited maintaining high-quality data as a major challenge.
A company's customer base should be managed like an investment portfolio. Like good investment advisers, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service all share responsibility for maximizing the performance of that portfolio. And that requires a single source of reliable customer data that fuels the operations of each department.
That's why it's so important to manage information about every customer interaction in a shared business system that all customer-facing employees can access and use to communicate with and serve the customer. The customer can then be treated appropriately and consistently because Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service are all aware of her needs, interests, previous purchases, and value.
Such a single view of the customer not only makes it easier for employees to make smarter marketing decisions and interact with customers more effectively but also creates a better experience for the consumer.
Integrating cross-channel data in a single database creates an invaluable corporate asset and accelerates the ability to interact more effectively with customers in real time.
Customer Growth Requires Data
The primary job of Sales and Marketing is to attract and grow customers. Doing that successfully requires using customer data to support customer engagement strategy, interactive marketing technology, and sales and marketing operations.
In B2B marketing, for example, customer growth occurs via account penetration. That means identifying and connecting with more and more individual buyers within the account. In this context, think of the account as a network of multiple sites, composed of multiple buying groups and specific people with responsibility for specific applications—applications for which your products or services meet the customer needs.
Marketing to those very people who make or influence purchasing decisions is mandatory. But businesses tend to assign differing sets of responsibilities to people with roles that look identical from a functional-title perspective alone. As a result, reaching the right people inside an account is difficult, complex, and expensive. Relying on relationships within buyer groups is necessary for identifying other buyer groups and generating referrals.
That complex set of relationships can be visualized as a cube, with account plans being driven from decoding and mapping the relationship network.
Serving Has Become The New Selling
If account penetration is about achieving customer growth by selling your products to more buyers within an account, product penetration achieves growth by selling more products to each buying group. Product penetration is about more than short-term revenue enhancement. It is about creating sustainable customer relationships that are based on delivering value by serving the customer better.
To truly serve customers better, companies must learn to market to a "segment of one," because today's customer wants more control over the content that is being delivered via email, mobile, social media, and website channels.
No longer is it appropriate or acceptable to guess what information or offers the customer wants. In fact, it is destructive to the customer relationship. The recent Subscribers, Fans, & Followers research conducted by ExactTarget found that 90% of consumers unsubscribe, unfan, or unfollow when the communication received from brands is too frequent or the content is irrelevant.
When companies "unsilo" their old single-channel marketing strategies, commit to understanding individual customer needs and interests, manage that insight in a single database, and use it to deliver timely and relevant content, they don't merely sell more: They also create a community of brand advocates who become some of the company's most effective marketers.
By Jennifer Pricci
According to a recent study conducted by eConsultancy, 98% of marketers use at least three channels to deliver messages to their customers, but more than half still store the data they gather from each channel in separate, siloed locations. In the same study, only 35% of marketers report that they collect data from different sources and store it in a single database. And when asked about the challenges of multichannel marketing, 71% cited maintaining high-quality data as a major challenge.
A company's customer base should be managed like an investment portfolio. Like good investment advisers, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service all share responsibility for maximizing the performance of that portfolio. And that requires a single source of reliable customer data that fuels the operations of each department.
That's why it's so important to manage information about every customer interaction in a shared business system that all customer-facing employees can access and use to communicate with and serve the customer. The customer can then be treated appropriately and consistently because Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service are all aware of her needs, interests, previous purchases, and value.
Such a single view of the customer not only makes it easier for employees to make smarter marketing decisions and interact with customers more effectively but also creates a better experience for the consumer.
Customer Growth Requires Data
The primary job of Sales and Marketing is to attract and grow customers. Doing that successfully requires using customer data to support customer engagement strategy, interactive marketing technology, and sales and marketing operations.
In B2B marketing, for example, customer growth occurs via account penetration. That means identifying and connecting with more and more individual buyers within the account. In this context, think of the account as a network of multiple sites, composed of multiple buying groups and specific people with responsibility for specific applications—applications for which your products or services meet the customer needs.
Marketing to those very people who make or influence purchasing decisions is mandatory. But businesses tend to assign differing sets of responsibilities to people with roles that look identical from a functional-title perspective alone. As a result, reaching the right people inside an account is difficult, complex, and expensive. Relying on relationships within buyer groups is necessary for identifying other buyer groups and generating referrals.
That complex set of relationships can be visualized as a cube, with account plans being driven from decoding and mapping the relationship network.
Serving Has Become The New Selling
If account penetration is about achieving customer growth by selling your products to more buyers within an account, product penetration achieves growth by selling more products to each buying group. Product penetration is about more than short-term revenue enhancement. It is about creating sustainable customer relationships that are based on delivering value by serving the customer better.
To truly serve customers better, companies must learn to market to a "segment of one," because today's customer wants more control over the content that is being delivered via email, mobile, social media, and website channels.
No longer is it appropriate or acceptable to guess what information or offers the customer wants. In fact, it is destructive to the customer relationship. The recent Subscribers, Fans, & Followers research conducted by ExactTarget found that 90% of consumers unsubscribe, unfan, or unfollow when the communication received from brands is too frequent or the content is irrelevant.
When companies "unsilo" their old single-channel marketing strategies, commit to understanding individual customer needs and interests, manage that insight in a single database, and use it to deliver timely and relevant content, they don't merely sell more: They also create a community of brand advocates who become some of the company's most effective marketers.
By Jennifer Pricci
June 25, 2011
What is The Social Funnel?...
And Why You Need to Build One
Social media channels increasing the venues of choice for consumers to collect information and connect with brands, presents a strategic opportunity for companies to create a “Social Funnel” above the traditional marketing and sales funnel – where consumers take the lead in finding information and content that ultimately drives brand preference and sales.
In Winning the Consumer Decision Journey, McKinsey & Company’s David Court shares that, in the new social and digital age, “the path to purchase and loyalty is now complex, iterative, and dynamic.” In this new environment, creating a Social Funnel allows brands to identify and have access to buyers long before the buying process begins.
The Social Funnel Defined
The Social Funnel is a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel. Developing a Social Funnel requires a systematic process of identifying and capturing consumer interactions across a variety of social media channels, aggregating this activity in a social customer relationship management (SCRM) infrastructure, and continually mining this insight to deliver relevant content to the right social profile at the right time. The chart below describes the Social Funnel and its tie to the traditional marketing and sales funnel:
To be effective, Social Funnels need to be tightly integrated with traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems to create a 360-degree view of a prospect to allow marketers to nurture this relationship over time using a combination of social and traditional, experts agree that this integration holds a lot of potential. “Integrating social deeper into existing CRMs is going to be very popular in 2011 – we expect to see a growing number of brands tying customer records to public social profiles and bread crumbs”, says Nathaniel Perez, head of social experience at SapientNitro.
The integration of social media with the traditional funnel is one of the key priorities for brands in 2011. Although only 6% of companies today report that they fully integrate social with traditional marketing funnels.
David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for digital marketing agency 360i, agrees but tempers things by saying that “we are still early in the process but tying social profiles to CRM systems will be big.”
We see a growing number of companies starting to tie social profiles to their CRM systems. As this process continues to evolve, we expect to see social media becoming more of a critical component throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Systems that support the integration of social with CRM will increase in adoption over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, giving organizations the ability to seamlessly combine data from multiple systems easily and efficiently.
By Jennifer Pricci
In Winning the Consumer Decision Journey, McKinsey & Company’s David Court shares that, in the new social and digital age, “the path to purchase and loyalty is now complex, iterative, and dynamic.” In this new environment, creating a Social Funnel allows brands to identify and have access to buyers long before the buying process begins.
The Social Funnel Defined
The Social Funnel is a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel. Developing a Social Funnel requires a systematic process of identifying and capturing consumer interactions across a variety of social media channels, aggregating this activity in a social customer relationship management (SCRM) infrastructure, and continually mining this insight to deliver relevant content to the right social profile at the right time. The chart below describes the Social Funnel and its tie to the traditional marketing and sales funnel:
To be effective, Social Funnels need to be tightly integrated with traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems to create a 360-degree view of a prospect to allow marketers to nurture this relationship over time using a combination of social and traditional, experts agree that this integration holds a lot of potential. “Integrating social deeper into existing CRMs is going to be very popular in 2011 – we expect to see a growing number of brands tying customer records to public social profiles and bread crumbs”, says Nathaniel Perez, head of social experience at SapientNitro.
The integration of social media with the traditional funnel is one of the key priorities for brands in 2011. Although only 6% of companies today report that they fully integrate social with traditional marketing funnels.
David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for digital marketing agency 360i, agrees but tempers things by saying that “we are still early in the process but tying social profiles to CRM systems will be big.”
We see a growing number of companies starting to tie social profiles to their CRM systems. As this process continues to evolve, we expect to see social media becoming more of a critical component throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Systems that support the integration of social with CRM will increase in adoption over the course of the next 12 to 18 months, giving organizations the ability to seamlessly combine data from multiple systems easily and efficiently.
By Jennifer Pricci
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