The
days of Mad Men-style shout and wait marketing are over. Buyers are more
sophisticated than ever and have higher expectations from brands than ever
before. Technology has enabled companies to have more direct interactions with
customers in a scalable way – a concept that would have been virtually alien to
people only a few decades ago.
The
downside with this advancement, however, is that successful marketing is harder
than ever before. If you are stuck in an outbound-only model, you have probably
been facing higher customer turnover in the last few years. While some turn is
inevitable, let’s discuss how to retain those customers that you worked so hard
to win in the first place.
Imagine
if each customer bought one more widget each year, or opted into a higher
service level. And imagine if you could double or triple your conversion rate
on new customers. Would that make a difference to your bottom line? Damn right
it would! Those increases just so happen to be some of the benefits of
developing an inbound marketing strategy.
If
you’re unfamiliar with the term, read our recent post on What Is Inbound
Marketing. Now, let’s talk about how to develop a successful strategy.
Clean up Your Existing Data
If your database is old and hasn’t been maintained well,
you may have a lot of emails for people who have left their companies, are no
longer interested in what you offer, or are otherwise poor prospects for your
products. The first thing is to clean what data you already have – strip out
old email addresses that haven’t opened an email in over a year. That may make
many marketing executives cringe – “that would shrink my list size!” – but
in reality, the size of your list means nothing if it’s full of junk.
A larger list with bogus or outdated info in it can
actually harm you – with lower open and clickthrough rates, resulting in lower
future deliverability rates, spam complaints, and eventually blacklisting.
Spend the time now to ensure you’re starting with good data.
Get ‘em Cookied
You can’t track and nurture people properly if you don’t
know who they are, so the first task is getting them cookied properly using a
tool like HubSpot. Send an email to your clean list, with the single goal of
getting them to click to your website – thereby setting the tracking cookie. A
few options that have proven to be successful in the past:
• Visit our discounts page for a code to receive 10% off your next
order
• Download our newest eBook/Guide on something that matters in
your industry
Again, the goal is to get the click to associate the known
user (the email) with their browser – everything from here is based on that
cookie being set.
Structure your Plans to Explore Various Types of Content
There are many ways to build and distribute content, and
the more ways you try, the better. Some may be more effective than others in
your particular industry, so try everything and see what sticks. No matter how
you distribute your content, ask yourself this question – what would my
prospect find interesting or helpful? Don’t bother with boring content because
that’s how your brand will be viewed if you do. Here are some ideas to get you
started.
• Webinars
• Top 10 lists
• “Big data” summaries
• Infographics
• Blog posts
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Case studies
• Expert user guides
• FAQs
• Demo videos
• Review videos
• Short podcasts
Not every type of content may make sense for your
business. For example, case studies may be an inefficient use of time if you
sell socks for $5 at retail stores. Determine what would provide value and
start there.
Repurpose Content for Different Mediums
Let’s say you spent 20+ hours writing and polishing the
perfect eBook for a particular segment of your audience. It would be a shame to
stop there – with all the different platforms we have today, you can make it
work much harder for you. Take interesting screenshots or infographics from
your eBook, create landing pages exclusively for them and share those (bonus –
that will also help increase the number of downloads of the eBook itself
because it’s teasing the quality content locked within). Or expand on different
chapters in standalone blog posts or evergreen articles (articles which are
always timely). You’ve already spent the time and effort to create good
content. Now figure out how you can leverage it better!
There’s no reason you can’t have similar content displayed
in multiple locations, as long as you address duplicate content issues for
search engine indexing purposes. If it’s good content, make sure people can
access it from as many (relevant) places as possible. Review your existing
content to see where you have opportunities to repurpose it.
Are your Landing Pages Converting?
All the traffic in the world is useless if your landing
pages aren’t converting, or you’re not capturing their email address and
tagging them for lead scoring and tracking going forward. Decide which content
should be freely available and which content should be gated behind a
registration form. The greater the perceived value of the content, the more information
you can generally request. For example, an expert assessment request can get
away with requesting more personally identifiable information (PII) than a
newsletter signup.
Set the Tone Early for the Relationship
When asking for PII, set expectations early and don’t be
too pushy. Will they be receiving emails from you daily or weekly or monthly –
or less often than that? Will newsletters be anything more than veiled sales
pitches, or will they actually contain useful information?
If they are signing up for a discount offer email, they
are expecting to get discounts in their email – set and follow those
expectations. This is often your first opportunity to engage with potential
customers so don’t start off with poor communication.
Align Sales & Marketing: Define Aspects of a Good Lead
Every salesperson wants qualified leads. Often times
marketing and sales teams are not well aligned and friction exists between them
because a qualified lead means one thing to marketing and another thing to
sales. The best way to handle this type of situation is to have both teams sit
down together and flesh out what is considered to be positive and negative
indicators, and then rank them in order of importance. This is the first step
in building a lead scoring model.
Set up Lead Scoring
If your content is good and you’re sharing it well, and
your landing pages are converting, you are going to have a lot of people to
contact. By setting up lead scoring based on what salespeople want to see or
avoid in a prospect, what pages people are visiting, how often they engage with
the content, and more, you can quickly determine who is a hot lead and needs to
be contacted right away. For example, people visiting a pricing page are often
much further down the buying funnel than someone who visits the About Us page,
and therefore should be given a higher score. On the other hand, people who
immediately look for the careers section are generally not good leads.
By incorporating lead scoring across your entire known
database, you will be able to quickly determine who to contact and when. As a
side benefit, you will start seeing patterns in what generates different types
of conversions, which may help you further refine your marketing efforts going
forward.
Start Developing your Content
All the planning in the word won’t bring in a single lead
– eventually you need to build the meat that makes inbound marketing work.
Write an eBook or some targeted blog posts, create some social contests – it
doesn’t matter as long as it’s compelling content. Just get started … it will
get easier as you go, I promise.
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