Andrew Sheridan
B2B marketers are responsible for pushing as many qualified leads to sales as possible. Marketing that focuses on demand generation may create a high number of new leads, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will convert into customers. The B2B buying process has evolved into the “customer journey,” and your marketing needs to reflect that. Most of the time, one phone call or email won’t drive an immediate conversion. Prospects now need to have numerous interactions with your brand, and should be contacted multiple times before they will even consider purchasing. Continuously connecting with prospective customers has become easier with the popularization of email nurturing.
Nurturing campaigns are a great, low-cost way for marketers to interact with leads who are simply not ready to buy at the moment but might be in the future. These campaigns are great for demonstrating the value that your product can provide as well as reminding prospects about your brand. In fact, a DemandGen report found that nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities. Imagine what a 20% boost in opportunities could do for your business. Implementing email nurture campaigns can do amazing things for the amount of opportunities your marketing creates and the revenue they generate. But in order to measure the impact your nurture campaigns have, you need to analyze them in a few different ways. Here are a few methods and metrics we use to measure the effect of our email nurture campaigns.
Email Performance Metrics
These metrics are provided by most standard email automation platforms. Knowing which emails are getting the most opens and clicks can help improve your other emails or campaigns. These metrics can help determine what subject lines are getting the most people to open your emails and what type of content or language is driving clicks within the email. By looking at these metrics at the level of each individual email, you can analyze which ones need to be removed, rewritten, or updated.
By tracking the email metrics of your nurturing campaigns, you can also measure the engagement of the leads you are nurturing. A lead may not have been interested in your product at first, but if they are engaging with your emails, this could mean they are ready to be contacted again, and even ready to buy.
Analyze Conversions By Integrating With Your CRM Platform
Your campaigns may have excellent engagement levels, but are they really driving conversions? Knowing what converts leads into contacts and opportunities into sales can have a huge impact on your pipeline. Advancing prospects from one stage to the next at an increased rate can drive higher amounts of sales, and email nurturing campaigns are here to help. By integrating your email automation platform with a CRM platform, such as Salesforce, you can create a direct link between email nurturing and conversion metrics. Knowing which nurture campaigns are driving the highest conversion rates, you can decipher what specific aspects of that campaign are working well and mimic that for your other campaigns.
Connecting with your CRM can also allow you to analyze the campaigns that have influenced opportunities. Your nurturing campaigns will rarely be the primary source of a conversion or sale, but they are likely present in the history of many opportunities. Knowing that a contact associated with an opportunity was exposed to your nurturing campaign can prove the true impact they are having.
Call Analytics
Adding phone numbers to your nurture campaigns provides prospects with an easy way to get in touch with you. Now that 65 percent of all emails get opened first on a mobile device (Movable Ink), more people are opting to call into your business instead of staying online and filling out a web form. Without adding the call analytics piece, you can’t truly measure the impact of your email nurturing campaigns. With a call tracking solution, you can include phone numbers in your email and then link the calls that are generated by those emails. Even if your email drives a lead to visit your website first before calling, call tracking can still tie that call back to the email that generated it, so you know what’s really working.
Only by combining call analytics with your other analytics can you get the complete representation of the effectiveness of your nurture campaigns. To learn more about integrating call analytics with the rest of your email metrics, check out our Definitive Guide to Call Tracking for Email Marketing.
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