A big component of lead management strategy in B2B marketing is the process of building relationships with your prospects and engaging a prospect with meaningful dialogue that moves them through the sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer.
According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at Lead Nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost-per-lead. Here are some best practices for creating emails for lead nurturing and management:
- Knowledge – The content that you are providing your leads must be meaningful, providing opinions and thought leadership from key thought leaders. Remember that your emails should continue teaching your leads something new and they will want to receive your emails and continue engaging with your business.
- Keep it Focused – Each nurturing email should be focused around one topic and include a call to action to provide additional information or interest. Just be aware that providing additional content through increased communications does tend to increase unsubscribe rates.
- Natural Progression – A careful plan for the flow of emails will help you create well rounded campaigns that pull your leads through the sales funnel. The first email after the initial registration might be very educational, while subsequent emails should continue to educate while giving the lead an opportunity to provide additional data and areas of interest. In addition, it is important for marketing to be aligned with the sales team to determine "qualified" leads and the hand off process to sales team.
- Testing and Measurement – Testing and measurement is key to optimizing the communications, as well as collecting data. Apart from the standard operational metrics like Click Through Rate (the percentage of people who clicked a link in your email) and Unsubscribe Rate, more sophisticated metrics like overall conversion rates and average closing rate are critical because that reflects the overall health of the nurturing programs. Working with the sales team will allow for more sophisticated metrics and can also help with optimized campaigns and more relevant content.
