Getting started with lead nurturing can require a lot of work. There’s creating content that encourages a website visitor to convert on a form, then you have to write all of your workflow emails, and you might even have subsequent content offers that need created: CTAs, landing pages, more emails. It’s a lot. So when your lead nurturing campaign doesn’t create qualified leads, it may seem like you did a lot of work for nothing. Not true.
In fact, there’s no such thing as a failed campaign. You learn just as much about web leads when they don’t convert as you do when they request to be contacted by sales. Thanks to the analytics behind your lead nurturing campaigns, you can see what worked, what didn’t and what it will take to fill the gaps.
How do you bounce back? Here are a few tips:
- Review the Moment of Drop Off: Is there a specific piece of content that no one converted on? Was there a high number of unsubscribers on a specific email? These indicators will let you know where your lead nurturing campaign lost its effectiveness. Try new email copy or subject lines, or create a new offer that will encourage users to stay engaged as they move through your campaign.
- Review a Visitor’s History with Your Brand: You may have a visitor who matches all the hallmarks of a lead that sales would accept. The company is the right size. They look to be a decision-maker. That visitor’s information is crucial to understanding what you need to do to keep them engaged with your brand. See what they visited, or even downloaded, on your website and curtail content creation to those needs.
- Create New Content to Meet a Visitor’s Needs: You can never have too much content. A serious lead nurturing machine has enough content to provide something for a specific type of visitor and additional content to launch on the fly if necessary. Between what you know about the buyer personas from interviews and what content is working on your site, you can create new offers that will re-engage users who didn’t make it through your campaign.
Remember, with lead nurturing, your job isn’t just to create one campaign and hope the leads start to flow; your job is to be able to change tactics quickly if you’re not reaching your goals. While that idea may be counter to how most people have done marketing for decades, it’s actually easier than you think:
- Have a Content Bank: You should always have a goal of creating one piece of content per month, maybe a white paper or maybe an eBook. But what happens if your lead numbers start to slide even though you created and released that one download? What happens if your sales team needs more leads immediately? You should always have two or three evergreen pieces ready to go at a moment’s notice to boost those leads.
- Write More Blogs: Blog posts serve two purposes: First, they are one of the main ways that you will promote the content that begins the lead nurturing process. Second, they can give your insight into the demands of the day. Review what blog posts are the most successful and create content with those topics in mind.
- Create Highly Targeted Lists: The more personalized you can make a lead nurturing campaign, the better. If you can write email copy for a specific persona, that will increase the likelihood that they stick with the campaign. You can also double down by repurposing an existing offer and writing it for a specific persona, then making it available in a campaign. But you need to have those lists to succeed.
The more agile you can make your marketing, the more likely you are to succeed. Constant maintenance of your segmented lists, regular review of your lead nurturing campaigns and content creation for quick tactical shifts will help you generate more qualified leads—even if your current campaign isn’t producing results.
Photo credit: su-lin
