In my last post, I talked about creative campaign ideas for when you have no content to offer. Which leads to another question: do certain types of campaigns even need an offer in the first place? Take lead nurturing: is it strictly essential that every lead nurturing touch include a specific, gated, call to action? Or can you get away with a link to content, perhaps content that’s not even your own?
Over at Marketo, Jon Miller wrote a fascinating post recently on “The 4-1-1 Rule for Lead Nurturing” in which he posits (and here I’m paraphrasing) that lead nurturing campaigns don’t always need to feature the latest white paper, Webinar, or video, and that these kinds of offers or promotions are best interspersed with what Jon refers to as “educational or entertaining content.”
As further context, the 4-1-1 Rule that Jon references is a principle intended for Twitter and credited to Tipping Point Labs and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. The 4-1-1 Rule states that “for every one self-serving tweet, you should re-tweet one relevant tweet and more importantly share four pieces of relevant content written by others.” In his post, Jon proposes extending the rule to lead nurturing, and states that “some of the best (lead nurturing) emails provide useful and compelling content in the email itself” – that is to say: without an offer.
Jon wrote the book on lead nurturing (literally) but, personally, I have concerns about extending Twitter rules into the realm of email marketing. Here’s an excerpt from the comment I posted to his blog:
The very nature of Twitter and Facebook means that followers are used to seeing a wide variety of content, precisely as you describe: some if it self-promotional, but much of it informational, or commentary, or sharing of third party content that we think our readers will find relevant or interesting or even humorous.
I’m not sure the same expectation extends to email, a medium for which I would suggest the bar is significantly higher in terms of relevancy and value. Personally, if someone is going to clutter my inbox, relevancy is the bare minimum. I expect any marketing email to have a tangible offer of immediate value, not just a link that the company deems I might find of interest. If you want to share links, well: that’s what Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest et al are for. But maybe that’s just me.
I’m not sure I’d have much patience for a company, regardless of any interest I might have expressed in their product or service, that wanted to share links to educational and entertainment-type content with me via email, particularly if those links arrived with any frequency. Occasionally? Sure. More than once every couple of weeks? Not so much.”
What do you think? Is lead nurturing always about generating measurable response, increasing lead scores, progressive profiling, and moving leads to sales? Or can it also be about establishing trust, thought leadership, and affinity with the target prospect? If the latter, how often would you be willing to send your audience “educational or entertaining content” minus any kind of tangible offer attached?
