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December 2010

About the Pie Chart

The data presented in the pie chart is derived from the Q4 2010 Gleansight benchmark report on Lead Nurturing (n= 289). The data serves as the basis for this Gleansight Deep Dive, which provides analyst commentary related to a particular aspect of the topic. The objective is to provide additional perspective and illuminate certain key considerations regarding the implementation of the related technology-enabled business initiative.

To learn more about Gleanster’s research methodology, please click here or email research@gleanster.com.

Deep Dive

The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing CampaignsIn Q3 2010, Gleanster surveyed 279 business-to-business organizations on the topic of lead nurturing. Top Performing organizations were identified by segmenting respondents that reported the highest revenue, return on marketing investments and average click-through rates in email campaigns. While far more likely to use lead nurturing than Everyone Else, Top Performers also are early adopters of nurture-marketing techniques. What has become increasingly obvious from surveying and talking to industry practitioners is that there are a finite number of lead-nurturing campaigns that actually produce results.

43%The Percentage of Top Performers that regard “Generate

customer Insights” as a top reason to monitor Social Media

68%Percentage of Top Performers that regard “increase the relevance of marketing

communications” as a top reason to implement a lead nurturing initiative

Identifying which types of campaigns will have the most significant impact on revenue will help focus limited resources on activi¬ties that drive success. After all, increasing revenue was the number one reason cited by all companies for using—or planning to use—lead-nurturing techniques.

Top Performers indicated a primary driver behind lead nurturing efforts was a desire to increase the relevance of marketing communi¬cations (43%). This

suggests Top Performers are experienc-ing discernible benefits from more personalized, relevant communica¬tions with prospects and customers. In fact, respondents conducting personalized and segmented email campaigns reported an average click-through rate of 5% to 8%, almost double the perfor-mance from companies that indicated they only personalized the salutation of a generic email message.

But personalization can be a double-

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The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns 2

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Top Performers Defined

Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top Performers” from all other companies (“Everyone Else”) within a given data set, thereby establishing a basis for benchmarking best practices. By definition, Top Performers are comprised of the top quartile of qualified survey respondents (QSRs).

The KPIs used for distinguishing Top Performers focus on performance metrics that speak to year-over-year improvement in relevant, measurable areas. Not all KPIs are weighted equally. The KPIs used for this Gleansight are:

• 12-month change in revenue

• 12-month chane in lead-to-sales ratio

edged sword. We also know that there are diminish¬ing returns on personalized initiatives; at some point, click-through rates hit a ceiling, even with higher degrees of personalization and segmentation. But the effort and time it takes to develop personalized marketing content has left a dark cloud over lead-nurturing initiatives for many organizations. Marketing leaders often say they do not nurture leads or use segmentation because they do not have the resources to develop lead-nurturing content. Since lead nurturing results in positive return on investments for Top Performers, it is possible to tease out some finite milestones and best practices for Everyone Else.

Personalized content is not, by itself, the answer. The success of lead nurturing campaigns comes from relevance. If one delivers the right content at the right stage in the buying cycle, one drives a much deeper level of understanding about products and services. Therefore, existing content may be more effective, if delivered at the right time.

Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns The most common lead nurturing question from industry practitioners relates to content devel-opment. “How much content do we need to develop and how do we distribute it across our nurturing campaigns?” The answer is two-fold:

1. Go through the exercise of mapping the existing marketing content to the different stages of the buying cycle (See Gleanster Deep Dive: Mapping Content to the Buying Cycle). Chances are good there is already some content that will be appropriate for starting one or more lead-nurturing campaigns. Measur-

able benefits from lead nurturing can be realized with very little effort when the goal is to deliver the right content at the right stage in the buying cycle.

2. It depends on the types of lead nurturing campaigns that are most appropriate to the sales cycle. These will vary by company size, target audience, buying cycle and industry. Since content maps to prospect needs, delivering content is contingent on the type of lead-nurturing campaign.

In fact, there are seven different types of lead nurturing campaigns, and each accom¬plishes very different results and captures different prospects at different stages of the buying and sales cycle. (See Table 1.)

Taleo, a leading provider of employee capital management solutions, runs more than 30 lead nurturing campaigns in any given day (See the Taleo Success Story “Seeding and Cultivat-ing the Taleo Revenue Engine with Lead Nurturing”). In reality, Taleo is repur¬posing content within different types of lead nurturing campaigns and triggering these campaigns according to prospect behavior or drip-marketing techniques. Essentially, Taleo is sorting leads like automated coin machines sort handfuls of change and placing them into appropriate campaigns. This doesn’t necessarily require 30 different marketing messages, as one can re-use marketing copy and resources across different campaigns. At Taleo, marketers are compensated for their impact on the pipeline. Those 30 nurturing campaigns help ensure bookings are 4x revenue objectives for the next quarter, 3x revenue objectives for the quarter after that, and 1x revenue objectives for the next two quarters. That leaves

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The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns 3

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Figure 1: The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns

marketers directly tied to a forward-looking 12-month pipeline.

Table continued on next page...

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The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns 4

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Table continued on next page...

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The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns 5

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Table continued on next page...

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The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns 6

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A good rule of thumb for getting started is to consolidate campaigns in terms of functional objectives, and pick at least one type of campaign for each function. (See Table 2.) That way, nurturing campaigns will capture new customer acquisition, retention and up-selling revenue.

Top Performers typically engage in a handful of these campaigns at any given time or in some cases run a handful of identical campaigns with different messaging (by product, industry, role,

etc.). When used in conjunction with automated scoring and prioritization provided by lead management technol-ogy, prospects can be routed into different campaigns automatically. In fact, it’s simply not possible to manually nurture leads across all of these scenarios. This is the beauty of lead manage¬ment technologies. The tools allow marketers to create a series of rules for each campaign that determine how to route prospects appropriately to maximize conversion.

Figure 2: Choose One Lead Nurturing Campaign for Each Function

Deep Dive Talking Points• Respondents that personalized and segmented email campaigns reported

an average click-through rate of 5-8%, almost double the performance from companies that indicated they only personalized the salutation of a generic email message.

• There are seven types of lead nurturing campaigns

• Get started with lead nurturing by choosing one type of lead nurturing campaign for each function. Develop these three campaigns first and measure the impact on the pipeline

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The Seven Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns 8

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Related ResearchRecently published Gleansight benchmark reports that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners include:

Integrated CRM

Marketing Automation

Lead Prioritization

Social Media Engagement

Mobile Marketing

Lead Nurturing

Email Marketing Personalization

The Gleanster website also features Deep Dive analyst perspectives on these and other topics as well as Success Stories that bring the research to life with real-world case studies. To download Gleanster content, or to view the future research agenda, please visit www.gleanster.com.

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