How to Optimize and Test

Lead Nurture Campaigns

Introduction to Lead Nurturing

Congratulations!

If you’re reading this guide, we assume you are creating or improving upon a lead nurturing program for your organization. This is something worth celebrating!

Developing and refining effective Lead Nurturing Campaigns will provide more opportunities for your organization to convert prospects to leads and leads to paying customers, empowering your marketing and sales teams to gain an advantage over your competition.

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Companies with strong lead nurturing programs produce 50% more sales-ready leads at a third of the cost.

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Forrester

The Basics

Lead Nurturing: The Basics

Lead Nurturing is the process of strengthening relationships with current and potential customers by providing helpful information as they evaluate your products or services and move closer towards making a purchase decision.

What is a Lead Nurture Campaign?

A Lead Nurture Campaign is a series of prepared emails scheduled to be sent at specific time intervals, like once per week or at varying time spans after a lead is entered. A Lead Nurture Campaign keeps your organization top-of-mind during the buying process, keeping your customers engaged and helping them determine if your products and services are right for them.

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57% of marketers say lead nurturing is the most valuable feature of automation software.

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Phased Approach

Phases of a Lead Nurture Campaign

If done correctly, a lead nurture campaign can work wonders to boost business, send timely messages and close leads. Check out the steps below to see how a visitor on your website evolves from a stranger to a loyal customer throughout the phases of a lead nurture campaign.

Optimizing Lead Nurture Campaigns

5 Ways to Optimize a Lead Nurture Campaign

Now that we’ve covered the basics of lead nurture campaigns, let’s discuss how to make them even better by optimizing them. There are many ways to optimize a lead nurture campaign as we’ve listed below.

Segment Your Leads:

Segment leads into groups to provide the most relevant content at the best time during the buying cycle. You can segment by many variables including industry, level of engagement, budget and price sensitivity all of which are customizable in your automation platform.

Implement SEO:

Help search engines serve your content to people actively looking for what you offer. Insert your offer keywords in the URL, title, headings, meta description, image alt tags, body and links of your landing pages, forms, thank you pages and uploaded content.

Prepare for Omnichannel Engagement:

Your leads explore the internet on a daily basis. Capture attention on channels most frequented by your audience including email, social media, search engines and paid ads on the web and within apps. Keep a consistent tone, design and branding for experiences they’ll remember when it’s time to complete their purchase.

Personalize Content Based on Actual Data:

Your automation platform has been collecting data directly from your leads. Use this data to create variables of your webpages so leads instantly see relevant information when they visit your website. You can personalize content for any data collected from leads.

Ensure leads are in the right campaign:

Automation platforms provide endless capabilities to get your leads the right information. Workflows are directions you set to tell your platform how to respond to lead activity. Set workflows to move leads to other campaigns based on changes in their level of engagement or behavior.

Testing

The Key to Testing Campaigns

When testing campaigns, you can use different versions of one campaign to see how changing small variables can make a big difference in your conversion results. To identify what works and what doesn’t, you’ll need to compare and measure results, right?!

The key to testing variables in your lead nurture campaigns lies in setting up A/B testing and tracking results within your analytics.

A/B Testing & Lead Nurture Campaigns

A/B Testing is the process of serving variables of content to see which variations convert visitors more efficiently. You can A/B test with many variables within your lead nurture campaign including your webpages, forms, landing pages, emails, social media posts and ads.

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Narrowing down the most effective elements of a promotion and then combining them can make your marketing efforts much more profitable and successful.

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Kissmetrics

Variables

Which Variables Should I Test?

Focus on testing elements most likely to impact the visitor and stick to testing one element at a time so you know what change made a difference.

Overall Campaign Variables:

Overall campaign calls-to-action (CTA), CTA button colors and text, highlighted text, image used to promote campaign, etc.

Webpage and Landing Page Variables:

Call-to-action (location, text used, button color, image vs. text CTA), headline, imagery, product descriptions, personalization, copywriting body and length, etc.

Email Campaign Variables:

Email subject lines, From name, imagery, callsto- action within the email, CTA button colors or text, highlighted text, sent time, time between emails sent, personalization etc.

Social Media Post Variables:

Call-to-action (text used, button color), post date and time, post length, imagery, hashtags, mentions within post, copywriting, etc.

PPC Advertisement Variables:

Headline, link, SEO, quality score, copywriting, word order, ad with or without pricing, keywords, bidding strategy, etc.

IMPORTANT: Change only one variable during each test for best results.

Testing more than one variable at a time could be confusing because you won’t be able to tell which one made the difference in converting your new lead.

Monitoring

Monitoring Test Results

Set up A/B testing in your automation software and periodically check the analytics to see which variations are working best. You can also drill down in your analytics to see if certain audience segments respond better to certain variables than others and further refine your campaign.

What metrics should I track?

You need to know which metrics to track per channel in order to determine which campaign variations are the most effective. Then, you can make adjustments to improve customer experience and increase conversion rates in the process. See below for a list of metrics per channel to determine effectiveness of your campaign messages.

Metrics of Success

Overall Campaign:

Revenue generated, conversion rate, cost per lead, return on investment, revenue per sale, customer acquisition cost
Webpage and Landing Page:

Conversion rate, page visits, referral source
Email Campaign:

Total opens, open rate, click rate, unique clicks and opens, click to open rate/p>
Social Media Post:

Referrals sent to website, follower growth, click rates, optimal engagement times, overall reach and engagement
PPC Advertisement:

Cost per click, click through rates, quality scores

Conclusion

Lead Nurture Campaigns are the best way to strengthen relationships with your organization’s current and potential customers. Staying in touch and demonstrating the benefits of purchasing from your organization is a surefire way to increase revenue and conversions.

To get the most out of your Lead Nurture Campaigns, you want to make sure you optimize your campaigns by segmenting your list of leads, implement search engine optimization, syndicating content across multiple media channels, personalizing content and responding to changes in engagement and behavior from your leads.

To further refine your campaigns over time, you should test variables within your campaign and monitor metrics of success. Depending on what platforms you are using to publicize your campaign, you’ll want to test overall variables of your campaign, webpage and landing page variables, email campaign variables, social media post variables and paid ad variables and then monitor their metrics of success to take note of what is working and refine your campaigns from there.

Companies with strong lead nurturing programs produce 50% more sales-ready leads at a third of the cost.

Follow this guide and implement the optimization and testing procedures for your lead nurture campaigns and you’ll be on your way to dramatic improvements in your sales process and improved customer loyalty.

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