Understanding the roles best played by your CRM and marketing automation platform is key to developing data-driven lead nurture campaigns. It’s important to set the actual content and design of your campaign aside for a moment and think about the data points you will use to build it.
But first a quick reminder of why we use lead nurture campaigns—not all leads are created equal. They fall within a spectrum, from complete stranger to your brand to sales qualified prospect with a need, desire and budget established. Somewhere along that spectrum, it’s appropriate for a prospect to be added to a lead nurture campaign. That usually occurs when you can track some sort of engagement with your brand that would indicate current or future interest in your product.
There are two key applications in the technical development and execution of a strong lead nurture campaign, your CRM and your marketing automation platform (in this case, let’s hope you pick the emfluence Marketing Platform!). Typically, your CRM should be your source of truth. It’s likely that you keep the most complete set of data about each lead in your CRM and use it to define the who, what, and when of your lead nurture campaign. There is no limit to the number of ways you can segment and target your leads, so developing your strategy is, as always, the most important part of your campaign. Your strategy will include bucketing your leads into segments and sending appropriate, timely, relevant messaging to each of those segments. A well-organized CRM will include some time-tested data points that are excellent for segmenting. For example, lead stage is a great data point around which you can develop your strategy and messaging. A lead very early in the funnel will likely be less receptive to messaging that is too salesy, while a lead who is farther down the funnel may be more receptive to content that is specific to the problems your solution can solve. It’s appropriate to craft nurture campaigns specific to each major stage in your sales cycle.
Your CRM will also be a key source of information for the personalization of your messaging. For example, if you want to send a personalized email with a first name greeting, a mention of the company your lead works for, and a reference to their industry, your CRM can supply this information to the emfluence Marketing Platform and it can be used in your messaging via contact data variables (for reference, emfluence has dedicated integrations to both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, as well as tons of options to customize for other CRMs).
This brings us to the role of the emfluence Marketing Platform in your lead nurture strategy. The platform contains any PII data you plan to use for segmenting and personalization in your campaign, and adhering to data minimization principles, it should include no more than that. It also houses contact scoring data which will also be useful in how you strategically target your leads as they progress through the funnel. In addition, the emfluence Marketing Platform is the engine behind automated decision making for the path a nurture campaign will take. For example, a nurture may switch from a very early funnel messaging tone to a mid-funnel tone when a prospect’s contact score reaches a particular level.
Planning nurture campaigns can quickly become complex. When executing your strategy, start with some low effort, high impact campaigns so you can gain confidence in your plan. Here are some examples:
How to Build a High Contact Score Campaign
As mentioned earlier, contact score can be a powerful tool when segmenting leads as they progress through the sales funnel and become more engaged with your content. Watch the video to learn how to automate emails to prospects who reach a certain score, and how to exclude your current clients from your automations.
How to Build a Website Page Visitor Campaign
Building a nurture campaign based on page visits on your website is a great way to connect with prospects throughout various stages of your funnel. Watch the video to learn how to create an automated campaign with dynamic emails based on website visits and dynamic branching based on website engagement.
Visit our Marketing Automation How To Video Library for more examples of simple but effective campaigns that can be built in the emfluence Marketing Platform.
If you need assistance, you can always reach out to us at expert@emfluence.com.
