Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

The short answer: because you want to nurture your leads, not to annoy them, to scare them away, or – equally bad – to neglect them.

We all know by now that lead nurturing is crucial for B2B marketers. Long buying cycles mean that many prospects take a long time and multiple touches to warm up to the point of being ready to buy. In the meantime, while prospects take their time making a decision and doing their research, you want to keep in touch with them, stay relevant, and make sure they remember you when it’s time to buy.

But to be successful, lead nurturing needs to be done right, and to be done right, it needs to be fine-tuned and tailored to each prospect.

Gone are the days of sending out weekly or monthly generic email blasts to all of your contacts. If you’re still doing that, you are risking getting more and more opt-outs, as B2B prospects are becoming more and more picky about the type of messages they are willing to receive.

Prospects now expect high quality, useful messages that are tailored to their exact business needs. They expect you to provide value long before they become customers and to never be too aggressive with them. The challenge for you as a marketer: If you pounce on a cold prospect, you risk losing them, but if you hold off on contacting a hot prospect, you risk losing them too!

Segmenting your prospects via marketing automation software helps you to avoid alienating prospects and losing them. It also helps you to avoid overlooking prospects that are ready to buy. By using tools such as prospect activity tracking and 3-D lead scoring, you get a real insight into your prospects and can tailor a sales plan which is focused on their needs and on their level of readiness. You are also able to automatically qualify potential leads by scoring each individual prospect based on their engagement with your company, demographic profile, and timing.

Segmenting prospects enables you to send different messages to different prospects that show different levels of readiness, and to adjust the frequency of your communication as well. The result is a lead nurturing process that truly nurtures leads rather than neglect them or scare them away. This type of fine-tuning can be done manually if you have a handful of prospects in your database, but for most companies, automated marketing tools are the only way to do lead nurturing properly.

There’s no doubt that drip marketing, or more specifically closed-loop marketing, are vital tools for B2B marketers. Because of the long buying cycle in the B2B space, marketers are faced with the challenge of keeping in touch with prospects over extended periods of time. One of the best ways to do that is using drip marketing. The regular delivery of scheduled messages containing high quality content helps to ensure that the company is seen as relevant, and that it is top of mind when the buyer is ready to make a purchase.

Closed Loop Marketing works even better, because the communication is finely tailored to each specific contact and is based on that contact’s previous actions and on where they are in the buying cycle. This is the type of fine tuning that makes sure your communications are never seen as spam and that the material you deliver is timely and useful to the recipient. It is also the type of fine tuning that is best done via marketing automation systems, because if you have more than a handful of prospects in your database, doing it manually is nearly impossible.

Drip marketing CAN get annoying and spammy if you’re not careful though, so keep in mind the following tips for doing it right:

1. Provide value. Dripping messages to your contacts will not work and could in fact backfire and result in opt-outs if the content is perceived as not helpful or as low quality. Make sure the messages your contacts receive are truly helpful. Your goal is to avoid being seen as a company that pushes hard to sell. Instead, you want to be seen – and to be! – a trusted source of information that helps your prospects to solve business problems and to achieve their business goals.

2. Be relevant. Generic email blasts don’t work – even if the content is high quality. In addition to being top notch, the content you deliver to prospects needs to be relevant to them and to their particular business needs. This type of segmenting is of course easier to manage with a marketing automation tool. [http://www.etrigue.com/Products/Professional/]

3. Remember the importance of timing. How aggressive you should be with a prospect always depends on where they are in the buying cycle. We said it before: If they are looking at you to justify the purchase of another product, you had better get in there NOW. If they are three months out, put them on a moderate drip program, and if they are way out, nurture slowly and follow up with a periodic qualification call.

Drip email marketing, when done right, is one of the most effective ways for B2B marketers to nurture leads. To get it right, you need to do it right, and doing it right is easier with a reliable sales enablement or marketing automation tool.

They tell us that the recession is over, and we’re thrilled, but companies are still very careful with their budgets. While there are certainly less layoffs, companies are not exactly back to hiring either. Companies are still under a lot of pressure to perform well, generate revenue, and survive the challenging economy, despite being short on manpower and on basic resources.

Efficient Marketing

We believe it’s possible to not just survive the economy, but to thrive. If you can make your marketing organization highly efficient, if you can create effective marketing campaigns that deliver truly qualified leads to sales, you will see increased revenue.

To do that, you need to move away from traditional, wasteful email blasts and to really focus on your prospects. Your goal is to improve your communication with your prospects and to identify those who are ready to buy.

Listen to Your Prospects

When you send a single generic message to a big list of prospects, you’re not really listening to them – so why would they listen to you, and especially when they’re watching their budgets so carefully? When you listen to your prospects and make sure you identify their pain point, then address it with your marketing communication, you will get a much higher response rate.

Give Them Value

In addition to getting people to respond, segmenting your prospects and targeting your communication to their needs is one of the best ways to give them value. In a tight economy, no one will buy from you unless you can convince them that your solution brings them near-term value. Can a generic email blast really achieve that?

Respect your Prospects

How do you feel when you receive a generic, non-personalized email? Do you open these emails? Do you read them? Click on the links they contain? We don’t know about you, but we ignore impersonal emails because to us, they seem like junk. To make sure people actually read your emails, always personalize your emails with a first name. A good marketing automation tool will take care of that for you.

Nurture, Don’t Badger

As enthusiastic as you are about your product, your prospects have other things on their minds and would appreciate it if you gave them some space. Sure, always be on their minds, but you have to space your communication in a way that respects their level of interest. If they’re obviously interested (opened your previous email, clicked on the link, spent seven minutes on your website), you should definitely follow up more often and with communication that answers the pain they demonstrated while on your site.  Marketing automation tools track down each Web visitor and provide you with this important information.

But if a prospect is obviously uninterested, or lukewarm, do tone down your communication and space it out so that it never becomes annoying and triggers an opt-out.

Demand Generation Systems More Important than Ever

Marketing automation and sales acceleration systems are essential for optimizing your marketing efforts. If you don’t know how a prospect responded to a previous campaign, it’s hard to tailor the next communication to their exact needs, and to improve your communication if the previous campaign has left them cold.

Sure, your budget is tight and you don’t have as many people as you used to have two years ago. But your marketing campaigns can still be very effective, especially if you use marketing automation solutions. A good marketing automation system tracks and nurtures your prospects, communicates with them effectively, identifies qualified leads and send alerts to sales as appropriate, prevents time wasted on chasing unqualified leads, and in general provides you with the information you need to close sales faster.

Demand generation isn’t as straightforward as one would think. When it comes to B2B buyers especially, the process of generating and maintaining interest in your products is a delicate dance. Make the wrong move, and you risk upsetting your dance partner. Here are two demand generation tactics that can backfire, and two tactics that work.

Demand generation: what doesn’t work

1.Generic emails, email blasts, and marketing pitches that aren’t directly relevant to your prospects’ needs. In the era of the Internet and of social media, B2B buyers are highly educated and very choosy. They expect a relationship and they expect value. They already gathered the basic info they need via the Internet. Treat them with respect, add value to their search process and address their pain points, and they’ll gradually come to respect you and trust you. Blast them with generic emails touting the features of your product, and they will simply opt out. Their inbox is already out of control. The last thing they need is another annoying sales pitch.

2. Cold calls. Cold calls used to work to some extent when sales people had all the info. The cold call would serve to educate the prospect about your product. Nowadays, the info is out there on the Internet. A cold call that introduces your product without adding value is downright irritating because it wastes your prospects’ time. Of course, it wastes your sales reps’ time too.

Demand generation: what works

1. Personalized emails that address your prospect’s specific concerns and add value in the form of targeted, relevant content. Your prospects obviously have a pain point (otherwise they wouldn’t be on the market looking for a solution) and will welcome quality information that addresses that pain point. But the information has to be current, relevant and add value beyond what’s available via search.

2. Real-time follow-up with qualified prospects. A prospect that clicked on a link in a recent email you sent them and just spent seven full minutes on your site reading about your product, downloading a white paper and perusing your FAQ section has just demonstrated a real interest in your solution. Having a sales rep contact them as soon as they leave your site, armed with the knowledge that they are indeed interested and that they have a specific solution they are looking for, is exactly what the sales organization is supposed to do: zero in on the most qualified prospects and contact them at the right time, with the right info.

NOT calling that prospect is a huge waste of opportunity and practically pushing them into the arms of your competitors.