Lead Nurturing Tips to Drive More Sales Pipeline Opportunities

Kate Athmer writes in “Business 2 Community“, “Lead nurturing should be one of the most effective aspects of your demand generation strategies. In fact, 81% of B2B marketing executives ranked email as the most effective tactic for engagement with later-stage prospects, according to the 2018 Benchmark Survey Report.

This is likely because email heavily supports lead nurturing – a critical component of the demand generation engine. Without lead nurturing to convert more contacts into sales opportunities, your pipeline can’t scale.

Without an effective lead nurturing plan in place, you’re often wasting a lot of the time, resources and budget you’ve already invested in identifying audiences and generating net-new contacts….”

The State of Email Marketing in 2018

Nearly three-quarters of businesses spend time and money on email marketing, according to a survey of more than 500 digital marketers.
Businesses that regularly send a variety of emails to consumers retain customers and increase engagement.”

Findings

  • Most businesses (69%) spend time and money on email marketing.
  • Among businesses that participate in email marketing, most send marketing emails either daily (32%) or weekly (41%).
  • Businesses send a variety of emails, but product/company updates (69%), promotional emails (69%), newsletters, (68%), and event invitations (65%) are the most popular.
  • When asked about their main goal for email marketing, most businesses want to grow and retain their customer base (29%) or increase engagement (22%).

“Email marketing works,” said David Mihm, founder of newsletter generator Tidings. “You own your email list, you own your subscribers. You’re not renting them from Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other platform.”


 

Subscriber Self Registation

The person from whom the newsletters are sent, the sender, is also know in our system as the Subscriber Manager.

Multiple Subscriber Managers can be associated with a Team Edition. Each Team Edition will have a sign up form on its microsite. People who sign up at the microsite for a Team Edition will be associated with the default Subscriber Manager who, in turn, can reassign that subscriber to another Subscriber Manager in the same team.

In addition, each Subscriber Manager, whether they are in team or not, will be provided with a unique URL that will allow people to sign up as that Subscriber Manager’s subscriber. The Subscriber Manager could send an email to their prospects, customers, partners, colleagues and invite them to become a subscriber, compliments of that Subscriber Manager.

The Subscriber Manager’s form and the microsite are similar to this:

sign-up

Once the new subscriber completes the form and presses the “Sign me up for a subscription” button they will be added to the data bases in a “suspended” state and an email will be sent to them. They will remain inactive or suspended until they click on the link in the email that was sent to them. This “double opt-in” process guarantees that the email entered is valid and that a human took the action of completing the opt-in process.

 

Newsletter Layout – Simple

Another layout option that works really well with mobile devices is our “simple” format. It looks great in web mail clients, tablets and traditional mail clients:

newsletter-simple-layout

The links will go to the referenced articles and your e-marketing tool – such as MailChimp – will track which of your subscribers clicked on which links.

The simple layout looks great on a mobile device:

newsletter-simple-layout-mobile

MailChimp – Forever Free?

If you want to send newsletters and other marketing messages to your customers and prospects, then MailChimp is a very popular tool well worth considering.

MailChimp is even more appealing if you can leverage their Forever Free Plan.

That plan allows you to send 12,000 total emails per month and have up to 2,000 total subscribers across all lists in the account. That means you have a weekly newsletter.

In addition to producing turn-key newsletters with our own software, IT News and Events (ITNE) has a Content Service that works with MailChimp.

Included in that service:

  • Joint development of Newsletter Layout
  • Weekly setup, review and send

Joint development of Newsletter Layout

ITNE will work with you to select a template and customize it to make it your firm template. We can produce our content in several formats and you can choose the one that your like best.

Weekly setup, review and send

Each week, ITNE will copy last week’s newsletter and replace last week’s news with this week’s.

You will have 24 hours to make changes.

After 24 hours, on our agreed schedule, ITNE will “push the button” to send the newsletter to your contact from your address in your MailChimp account.

Tracking and Responses

Each send of a weekly newsletter is considered a “campaign”. At any time, you can login to your MailChimp account a review the performance of campaign. You can see who

  • opened the newsletter
  • what links they clicked on

Your standard newsletter template should include calls to action by phone and email.

Additional Campaigns

You can use the standard features of MailChimp to create additional campaigns which you can send to all or some of the same people who receive your IT newsletter.

 

Newsletter Content: links and logo – with or without intro paragraph

The newsletters that we produce for our customers have:

  • The title of the article with a hyperlink to the actual article
  • A subtitle with
    • The name of the publication
    • Date of publication
  • A logo for the publication

One form of newsletter has a paragraph or two describing the article.

Another form does not.

In both cases, the articles are grouped into named sections such as ‘IT News – Storage’.

Each subscriber can choose which sections are included in their copy of the newsletter.

Newsletter articles with paragraph of two of text
Newsletter articles in sections with a paragraph or two of text