Every database has leads that convert relatively quickly with little to no nurturing and leads that progress through the funnel at a more measured pace. For the slower-moving leads in your database, it’s essential to design content that will nurture them and keep them engaged until they are ready to convert to a sales conversion. For most organizations, it is a high percentage that likely falls into the “slow mover” category, so it’s critical to implement a nurture program. The messaging for email marketing nurture campaigns makes a huge difference here.
In many databases, such as Marketo, every lead entering the database is classified into a category. For example, those who convert within the first 30 days and “everyone else”. The Marketo team has found that, of the leads entering their database, a small number become clients within the first month. A vast majority don’t. While conversion rates vary by industry, most companies’ lead databases tell a similar story, with a small percentage quickly converting and most requiring much more time and nurturing.
Whether you’re running a nurture campaign or sending out marketing emails, relevant messaging will impact your leads the most. Having relevant messaging will also increase the success of your email marketing and nurture campaigns. Here are a few quick tips and strategies for creating relevant, impactful messaging.
Define Your Audience
The foundation of getting the right message to the right people is segmenting. When creating segments you need to establish what characteristics are important. For example, the demographics, firmographics and psychographics. These different characteristics will alter how and what you need to communicate to them. Databases can be segmented by various attribute-based and behavior-based traits, including geography, language preference, job role, stage and interest. For each of different segments your organization creates, your positioning/messaging will change. For example, if a company sells to business leaders, the positioning/messaging for the CEO will be different than for the finance executive or the IT executive as each represents a different segment.
Before you narrow down who your audience will be, take a step back. Marketo suggests taking a “10,000-ft view” of your database. After filtering out invalid contacts such as those who have unsubscribed and those with pending or invalid email addresses, who do you have left? Taking an overhead view and understanding who your audience is can make a difference in helping you determine who your audience is. After you establish who’s left, you can start profiling your segments and prioritizing them.
Address Their Pain Points
Pain points are ultimately the key problems that an organization and/or areas within an organization are facing and are so “painful” that a solution is needed to resolve it. Examples of pain points could be financial (needing to optimize cash flow or improving customer services to reduce customer churn), people focused (needing to hire faster or train better), operational (needing to develop or streamline processes), productivity focused (need better/more tools to automate activity, minimize errors)or sales focused (needing more leads to drive sales growth or accelerating sales cycle length). There are many more and the important things to figure out are for your audiences, what are the pain points of each segment you target? Addressing those with how your solution, product or services resolves the pain points is important.
Optimize Timing Based on Engagement
Where are your leads in the process? Have they been in your database for a while? What do their levels of engagement indicate? It’s key to track your leads’ activities and communicate with them accordingly. Knowing when they are ready to speak with a sales rep is just as important as knowing when they’re ready to receive the three strategic nurturing emails that get them to that point.
Analyze Email and Messaging Effectiveness After Sending
With any tool, tracking lead movement in the funnel will indicate who you are influencing and what opportunities are being created. To stay relevant and promote a culture of constant improvement, continually measure, test and recalibrate your messaging accordingly based on engagement.
Also important for getting a feel for email and messaging performance overall, analyze both ends of the spectrum: the lowest-performing emails and top-performing emails.
For your emails that didn’t perform well, ask yourself these questions:
- What was my message in this email? Did my audience understand what I wanted to convey?
- Why did they perform so poorly? Was it the subject line? Was it the email copy? What was it?
- How did my call-to-actions fare?
- What can I do to improve performance?
For your emails that performed well, ask yourself these questions:
- What was my message in this email? Did my audience understand what I wanted to convey?
- What about this email made it perform so well compared to others? Did I do anything different for this email?
- What call-to-actions performed the best?
- What can I take from this email and implement in others to boost performance?
To be effective in the messaging in your emails, remember these three things: segmentation, relevancy and consistency. Segmenting your audiences by common characteristics and delivering relevant and consistent messaging can help effectively nurture them in your database.
Get Started On Creating Your Messaging
Are you ready to create messaging for your organization? Check out Marketing Pro Series course, Craft Brand Messaging and Positioning for Better Business Outcomes. This course provides step-by-step guidance on key messaging fundamentals, comprehensive exercises and templates as well as offers coaching sessions with a marketing expert. Establish your brand messaging and elevate your marketing
