Answering the “Now what?” question can be tricky. Just because someone downloaded your ebook or subscribed to your blog doesn’t mean they are ready for your sales team — in fact, Gleanster Research (pdf download) found that 50% of leads are qualified, but not ready to buy just yet. Effective lead nurturing campaigns can help you move your leads through the buying cycle, thus preparing them for the sales team. Below, we will cover:

1. What Emails to Send At Each Stage of Your Next Lead Nurturing Campaign
2. How to Nurture Leads at Each Stage of the Buying Cycle Effectively
3. Real-world Examples of Lead Nurturing Emails to Accelerate Your Sales Cycle

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Before we jump into what types of emails you should be sending and when, let’s do a quick primer on what lead nurturing is. Lead nurturing is a series of emails that you send to your leads in order to qualify them and move them down the sales funnel. Sometimes, you might hear lead nurturing referred to as a marketing automation campaign.

Unlike one-off email blasts, lead nurturing focuses on sending prospects the right content at the right time based on characteristics such as buyer personas and what stage they are at in the sales cycle.

Providing leads with the right content based on their stage in the buying cycle is essential for a successful lead nurturing campaign. After all, the content that resonates best with a new blog subscriber isn’t the same as what speaks to a lead close to a sale. Luckily, we’ve made it easy for you. Here are the types of emails you should be sending at each stage of your next lead nurturing campaign.

Educate & Inform To Convert Subscribers To Leads

Within your marketing database, you likely have prospects at all stages of your sales funnel. At the very top of the funnel, you have subscribers. These are people who have opted in to hear from you periodically. You likely have limited contact information for them, perhaps just an email address. A subscriber may have entered your database by subscribing to your blog or opting in to a company newsletter.

At this stage, the goal is to convert these subscribers to leads by getting them to convert on a landing page. While it’s great that you have a database of people who have voluntarily signed up to hear from you, subscribers have not invested heavily in your company yet, and it’s very easy for them to opt out.

Show subscribers you’re worth sticking around for by providing them with quality, educational content. Your focus on education will build trust between the subscriber and your company that will make them more willing to share information with you. Here are two emails to send in this stage:

1. Educational Content

Let’s face it, with just an email address, you really have no idea what particular issues a subscriber wants to learn more about. However, I bet as a marketer, you can think of a few common challenges that are keeping your customers up at night.

Send educational content that focuses on a broad issue the majority of your audience faces with the option to dive into a specific subject with blog links or offers. By tracking what links or offers subscribers are clicking on, you can then segment your subscriber list to further refine your content offers. For example, the email below includes data relevant to marketers along with an ebook offer to entice subscribers to convert to a lead

Go the extra mile here by using progressive profiling to make filling out forms easy as pie.

2. Industry News and Trends

One of the reasons people subscribe to industry blogs or newsletters is to stay abreast of the latest news. Help your subscribers have their finger on the pulse by sending out updates on industry news and trends. This will help engage your audience, and build yourself as a trustworthy knowledge source. When Pinterest announced its new analytics feature, we made sure to share the news with our subscribers with this email.

To strengthen this authority and encourage subscribers to become leads, create content that suggests how to strategize in light of changes. In this case, we revamped a Pinterest ebook to reflect the new changes. This strategy puts your company in the role of both informer and advisor.

Become A Problem Solver To Convert Leads To Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)

Leads are prospects in your database that have given more information about themselves than just an email address. Most people become leads after converting on a landing page, usually in exchange for a content-based offer. The goal for marketers in this stage is to get the lead to further qualify themselves for sales by acting on a specific call-to-action. Here are the types of emails you should be sending your leads.

1. Targeted Educational Content

Unlike the generalized educational email you would send a subscriber, now’s your opportunity to send targeted emails to your lead based on the information you know about them. This segmentation can either be by your company’s buyer persona or by the content they previously converted on.

For example, if someone filled out a landing page to register for a lead nurturing webinar we’re hosting, I would send an email like this, offering more content on the subject that the lead expressed interest in.

To make this offer extra juicy, don’t forget to tell your leads what to do next to learn more. Include call-to-action buttons and links to other relevant content within the offer to increase engagement and conversion rates.

2. Problem Solvers

Want to know the best way to convince me to invest in your company’s product or service? Show me you can solve my problem. If you can solve a lead’s pain points before they even become a customer, imagine how much more likely she is to listen to your sales pitch.

Not only will leads view your company as a solutions provider, but the leads who click through on this email are more likely to be qualified for your sales team. Problem-solvers can include HTML tools, a checklist, or an infographic of a process they have to do frequently — anything that you imagine they would print out and hang by their desks.

To help our marketing leads, we created a blogging calendar that assists them in doing their job better. Here’s an email we sent them:

Set up your sales team for success by having the email come from the prospect’s sales rep’s email address rather than a generic marketing alias. This builds trust on an individual level and can open the door to future conversation. Also, if the prospect responds to the email, it will go right to the sales rep’s inbox.

3. Social Proof

Motivate your leads to pursue becoming a customer with social proof. Social proof is the idea that if other people are doing something, and I trust those other people, then I should be doing it to.

Show leads that there are plenty of people just like them that trust your company by inviting them to become a part of the conversation. Invite them to social media chats (like tweetups), webinars, or other interactive community-based offers. Here’s an invitation we sent to leads in the ecommerce space for an upcoming webinar:

To further emphasize your company’s role in the ecosystem, feature co-marketing offers you create with other companies in the space. For example, this webinar was paired with BigCommerce.

4. Product Introduction: Features and Benefits

In addition to providing your leads with quality information and content, make sure to introduce them to your product or service. Since you now have more information about their background and content interests, introduce them to your product features and benefits in a way that will resonate with them.

For example, leads who downloaded our “101 Companies Rocking Social Media” ebook received the email below with a demo that specifically emphasizes our social media tools.

The most successful product-centric lead nurturing emails make it about the recipient, not the sender. Position your product messaging in a way that emphasizes the lead’s stated priorities and encourages them to a sales-specific call to action.

Support The Decision-Making Process To Convert MQLs to Sales

Marketing Qualified Leads, or MQLs, are people who have identified themselves as deeply-engaged, sales-ready leads. Leads usually become MQLs by following product-centric calls to action, such as requesting a trial, product demo or request to contact sales.

The goal for marketers here is to assist the sales team and make the MQL’s decision-making process as easy as possible. Here are the emails marketers should send at this stage of the game.

1. Proof of Product

Help an MQL see that your product or service gets results by sending proof of product. This type of email can be anything from results-oriented data, case studies, or testimonials. Give the MQL results he could use to make the case to his boss or teammates about your product or service.

This case study email includes both a quote from a satisfied customer and numbers to support exactly how he found success with our product.

Take this step the extra mile by giving the MQL the option to talk to a current customer who loves the results they’re getting from your service.

Other ways to assist sales in this stage of the lead nurturing process are to write updates on product features, create customer-facing content that analyzes your offerings vs. competitors, and continue to send targeted, educational content.

What are some of your go-to emails to send to subscribers and leads? Let us know in the comments!

1. Thinking Greater Time On Page Equates To A More Engaged Customer

Average time on a page is a core metric to assess your page performance in many analytics platforms.

However, marketers often incorrectly assume that it’s a good measure for customer engagement because more is always better, right? However, what if the average time on a page is high because the customer can’t find what he or she is looking for?

Marketers need to understand the goal of each individual page. For example, the goal of a sign-up form should be to quickly convert the customer, meaning a lower average time on page is potentially better.

Therefore, a better metric to optimize your page around is bounce rate, which measures the percentage of customers who leave a page if it’s the only page they visit. This metric properly accounts for both intent to view a page and if the page satisfies the viewer’s needs.

2. Thinking Return On Investment (ROI) Is Always The Best Measure Of Marketing Effectiveness

Return on Investment (ROI — calculated as the profitability of a marketing activity divided by its cost) is a popular metric among marketers to calculate marketing performance. However, ROI often does not account for the time it takes to recoup your marketing spend. When time is not accounted for in comparing two projects, it can be misleading.

For example, which is the better investment?

• Choice A: Spending $50 now to create additional blog content that will generate $100 in profitability in one year — 100% ROI
• Choice B: Spending $50 now to secure product placement in a movie that will generate $110 in profitability in three years — 120% ROI

In some situations, Choice A is the prudent choice because profits generated could be further reinvested in other projects, potentially generating more profits than Choice B.

To account for time, pair ROI with Payback Period, defined as the time required to recoup your marketing spend. Using our above example:

• Choice A’s Payback Period is 1 year
• Choice B’s Payback Period is 3 years

Another suggestion is to use Net Present Value (NPV), which calculates marketing performance similar to ROI, but also accounts for the time value of money. That is, the value of $1 today is more than the value of $1 a year from now. NPV accounts for this by discounting future cash flows by an appropriate rate. The discount rate is typically the percentage return you could receive on other marketing investments, also known as the opportunity cost of capital. NPV is calculated as:

• (Initial Investment + (Year 1 Profitability) / (1 + Discount Rate)^1) + (Year 2 Profitability) / (1 + Discount Rate)^2) + (Year 3 Profitability) / (1 + Discount Rate)^3) + …)

Applying a 10% discount rate to our previous example nets:

• Choice A: NPV of $41
• Choice B: NPV of $40

Be careful with your discount rate assumption as it can drastically change the outcome. As a simple rule of thumb, if you’re measuring short-term marketing performance, ROI is better given its simplicity. However, if your marketing activities stretch out over a few years, payback period and NPV are better.

3. Incorrectly Thinking That Word Of Mouth Traffic Or Other Traffic Equals Organic Traffic

Upon reviewing which keywords visitors used to find you organically on search engines, you’ll likely notice many of them are associated with your brand. For example, HubSpot’s detailed Organic Traffic analytics looks like this:

While visitors did find you via an organic search, that’s not necessarily how they first heard about you. These visitors could represent word of mouth traffic — individuals referred from a current customer or follower of your company.

The second potential issue is that your analytics platform displays last-touch attribution, the last medium the visitor used before he or she converted to a lead. Leads typically visit your site multiple times and through different sources before converting. This means that last-touch attribution masks the original and potentially most important source that generated the lead. Analytics platforms such as HubSpot and KissMetrics provide first-touch and last-touch attribution.

Finally, the keyword could represent a visitor who originally found you through social media or a paid advertisement campaign but that insight was lost because the tracking cookie expired or a different computer was used.

This nuance could mean that you’re overstating your return from SEO activities and correspondingly not understating your return from other online marketing activities.

As marketers, it can be easy to think that more analytics are always better. To draw valuable insights from your marketing analytics, pay close attention to what each metric is really telling you and dig deeper into why that metric is important and what might have caused it.

As you make your marketing decisions, think about what your goals are – whether it’s tied to how you want prospects to engage with you, your overall marketing ROI, or traffic to your site. Understanding which metrics can best help you appropriately identify issues and future strategies will prevent you from getting bogged down with marketing data.

But, with so many tools and micro-channels within LinkedIn, how do you make sure you’re getting the most out of your efforts? When optimizing your company’s LinkedIn presence, it helps to know how to choose the right tool for the right job.

Should You Spend Time On Company Pages Or Groups?

Of the many ways to communicate on LinkedIn, company pages and groups are among the most popular. The trick is knowing which channel to use for what. In the sections below, I’ll go over each in detail, but here’s a top-level assessment of each.

Company Pages:  Your company page is the headquarters for all your products, reviews and basic organizational information. Because it is focused on your specific offerings, company pages tend to be further down the funnel in terms of content and information.

Think for a moment about the mindset of someone viewing your company page. They’ve made the specific choice to search for your company name and get details on what you do and sell. For this reason, you have a bit more freedom to talk about yourself. However, company pages typically have fewer views than groups, and so your posts won’t have the same reach. 

Best content: Product releases, promotions, requests for feedback, new ebooks.

Groups:  When you’re just getting started, I’d suggest spending the bulk of your time sharing content to groups. While groups don’t specifically focus on your company, and don’t take well to promotional materials, they do tend to have a larger reach than company pages.

Added to the natural reach of groups is the fact that many groups automatically send an email digest to members with new posts. People join groups because they are interested in a topic, not a company. Make sure your posts are educational in nature or are discussion-prompts. Being too promotional in a group is not only ineffective; it can get you kicked-out. 

Best content:  Educational ebooks, targeted questions, new interesting data, infographics, etc.

How To Get The Most Out Of LinkedIn Pages

Set A Cover Photo:  With LinkedIn’s new updates, you have the ability to add a cover-style image that represents your company/brand at the top of your company overview page. Much like the image on your homepage, a cover photo is an opportunity to grab visitors’ attention. Don’t just use a logo – make your cover photo convey something about your company.

Search-Optimize Your Page:  Optimize your profile to get found by people searching LinkedIn. Use keywords that you think represent what your target audience would be searching for. Then add those keywords to various sections of your profile such as your headline or summary. You can include keywords in your company page’s summary section and in the “Company Specialties” section, seen below.

Post An Update To Your Followers (And Target Them!): As mentioned above, company status updates can range from new blog posts or downloadable content to promotions and company news. Experiment with different types of content to see which performs the best on your page. About 24 hours after you post an update you’ll be able to see each post’s impressions, clicks, and average engagement percentage.

You can even target your status updates to the activity feeds of specific users using LinkedIn’s targeting options. You can target your company updates by criteria like company size, industry, job function, seniority, geography, or by including/excluding company employees.

According to an internal LinkedIn study, some companies have seen a 66%+ increase in audience engagement as the result of targeted updates.

List Your Products Or Services (And Target Them!):  One of the main benefits of a company page over groups and answers is the ability to detail your products and garner reviews for each. The products section of your company page also provides an opportunity for lead generation with its call-to-action capabilities.

Each page has a giant, clickable cover image that can link to a product, service, or offer. Beneath this call-to-action are trusted recommendations from fans and recognizable connections. Use these recommendations within your own marketing and encourage happy customers to share their experiences there.

A Little Known Secret About Products:  LinkedIn also can target your products page to different segments based on characteristics in user profiles. For example, you can create a version targeted to the U.S. and a different version targeted to Europe. Start by creating a default version, then create different versions by clicking “New Audience.” Name your target, choose your targeting characteristics and click Save and Exit to edit your targeted page.

How To Get The Most Out Of LinkedIn Groups

Join Before Managing:  Groups are an oft-overlooked channel in LinkedIn. Leveraged correctly, however, they can give you a level of reach and engagement that you can’t find in other parts of LinkedIn. Before you manage a LinkedIn group, I’d suggest joining existing groups with already thriving memberships.

Managing successful groups takes a ton of work, both in growing membership and in keeping activity levels high. For most businesses it makes more sense to add value to an online community rather than reinvent the wheel.

There are two ways to find groups that matter to your business:

1. Use the main search box in the upper right corner of LinkedIn to search for keywords
2. Search for skills that are related to your work; the skills page can not only help you find new connections, it shows you a list of relevant groups to join

Join Complementary Groups:  It can be helpful to join groups within your industry, but also think about joining groups that your customers would join.  By stretching out a little bit, you can find the people who matter most to your business. So, for example, if you’re an accountant, you don’t want to just join accounting groups — you’ll want to join groups for entrepreneurs, small business owners and other groups outside of your immediate circle.

Use A Social Media Scheduler To Scale Your Efforts: Ask marketers about social media, and a common refrain is: where do people find the time?  As social media has evolved and become a mainstay in communications, a number of tools have also evolved to help streamline and scale social efforts.

When it comes to social media, think first and foremost about the audience you’re targeting. What content would interest them?  Where can they be found?  When you have a piece of content or a discussion point worth sharing with your larger audience, use a scheduler to help deliver that content to the groups and forums where your audience resides.

In the example below, I’ve decided to share a piece of content with some of our HubSpot User Groups. Below, you’ll see I’ve chosen a piece of content to share with multiple HubSpot User Groups on LinkedIn at once. Sharing it with the groups ensures that it will have more activity than a simple company page post. As people respond, I can consolidate and track that activity within my social media publishing tool and follow up as needed.

Where To Start

There are countless opportunities to leverage LinkedIn to expand your reach and develop your expertise. But, everyone needs a starting point. To begin, take an afternoon to perfect your company page. Think about the mentality of someone who has actively sought out your company and the information they need at hand.

Next, spend a week finding and engaging in good groups for your company. Start by commenting on other posts, then in the following week, experiment with some posts of your own. Use a social media tool to streamline this effort and help you track its results.

From there, see what works and scale it up. As with most marketing, you’ll pick up nuances and best practices along the way.

What Is An iOS?

Your first question might be, “What is an iOS?” iOS stands for iPhone Operating System and is the foundation for Apple’s mobile devices. Similar to Windows 7 for your PC or Mountain Lion for your Mac, your iOS is the operating system for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. It provides you with the interface for using your device’s apps and helps different systems work together in an integrated way to provide you with a consistent experience across devices.

What Is iOS 6?

iOS 6 is Apple’s latest mobile operating system. It’s no surprise that Apple released this to coincide with its iPhone 5 debut.

Apple is touting the new iOS as the world’s most advanced mobile operating system and is taking a clear jab at competitors, going as far to say that even as others try to catch up, the technologies and features built into iOS keep your Apple devices years ahead.

The update includes improved integration with Facebook and Twitter, shared photo streams, Smart Banner support, and the addition of Apple’s Maps app.

How You Can Take Advantage Of iOS 6 To Improve Your Marketing

Your next question is probably, “What does this mean for me as a marketer?” With over 2 million pre-orders on the first day, the iPhone 5 (which comes loaded with iOS 6) is sure to be in the hands of your customers. Here are a few ways to take advantage of the new features:

1. Set up loyalty programs easily with Passbook.

Apple’s new Passbook app on iOS 6 allows users to store boarding passes, movie tickets, retail coupons and loyalty cards all in one place, similar to a virtual wallet.

There are a slew of 3rd party apps such as PassRocket, Passdock and PassSource to help you take advantage of this for setting up your own loyalty program. These apps, and others like them, allow businesses to create their own loyalty cards or coupons for free, along with a link to share with customers.

When the customer opens the link with their iOS 6-enabled device, it’ll be placed in their Passbook application and also make them eligible to receive reminders about the offer when they’re in or near the store’s location.

Many of these apps come with pre-built templates to make it quick and easy to get started. With this feature, any small business can develop its own rewards program like CVS’s ExtraCare Rewards or Starbucks Rewards.

Sephora took advantage of this feature to promote its “Beauty Insider” card and generated 20,000 users in day.

Download one of these apps to get started on yours. Having a stellar loyalty program can be a great way to drive repeat business, track your highly-engaged customers and continue to market to them in targeted ways. This is definitely one of the hottest features for marketers. For additional ideas, take a look at our How to Give Your Audience the 5-Star Treatment With Exclusive Offers blog article.

2. Drive likes and shares through increased social media integration.

iOS 6 features native integration with Facebook and Twitter for users, which means no more waiting for the Facebook or Twitter app to load.

After a one-time setup, users can now post to Facebook and Twitter directly from their notification center and through Siri. To set this up, users go to Settings -> Facebook (or Twitter) and enter their account credentials. By doing this, users can now pull down their notification center to post even faster, making it easier for them to share and like your content.

To take advantage of this, make sure that you’re giving your network something to talk about. Some examples: If you’re hosting a webinar, make sure that you promote a hashtag for them to use on Twitter. If you’re doing a live event, create photo ops through giveaways, meet-and-greets with presenters or relevant quotes and tips on a slide to make snapshot-able moments for participants to share with their networks.

3. Increase Facebook likes of your apps and podcasts. 

Speaking of increasing likes and shares, podcasts and apps can now be liked on Facebook directly from the Podcasts and App Store iPhone interfaces.

When users do this, it’ll show up on their timeline and newsfeed. This, in addition to the star rating system in the Music and App store, is a great way to help your listeners and customers spread the word about your content. Users just search for your app in the App Store or podcast in the iTunes store and click Reviews to like it on Facebook, as well as through the App or iTunes store.

4. Make it easy for customers to find you on iOS 6 Maps.

One of the major changes released is that the Google’s Maps app has been replaced with Apple’s own Maps app on iOS 6. Because of this change, Google local listings are not going to be featured.

At this point, it looks like business listings for Maps are now sourced from Yelp. If you run a business with a physical location such as a restaurant, store or office where location-based discovery matters, be sure that your Yelp listings are up-to-date with your current information to make it easy for customers and prospects to find you.

To do this, simply go to Yelp.com and search for your place of business to confirm the information is correct. If it isn’t correct, or if your business doesn’t have a listing already, you can create a free Yelp Business Account to manage your information, create deals and message your customers.

5. Generate app downloads with Smart App Banners.

iOS 6 introduced a new feature called Smart App Banners to help app developers promote their iPhone apps in Safari.

By adding a simple line of code to their website, marketers can direct their website visitors to their app without having to use full-page popup messages or hire a developer.

These Smart App Banners are unobtrusive, provide a direct link to the app, and also display the app’s icon, title, company name, star rating, and price. Here is the Smart App Banner HubSpot is using for its iPhone app on our login page and on Marketing Grader.

Adding a Smart App Banner is incredibly easy. Simply add the following meta tag to the head area of your site HTML:

<meta name=”apple-itunes-app” content=”app-id=534167981″/>

Be sure to replace the value for app-id with your own iTunes identifier for your app. Additional information on implementing Smart App Banners can be found on this article by David Smith.

Let us know: How are you taking advantage of Apple’s iOS changes?