Interactive Marketing Trends

Interactive Marketing Trends

We’re seeing shift from simple lead generation to lead scoring and nurturing through automated touch points and analytics.

Basic lead generation has been around for years where websites ask visitors to complete a form to get something – whether it be an estimate or a white paper or free widget. As marketing teams have become more effective at these techniques and have generated, in some cases, floods of leads for their sales forces, a need for better qualification has been identified. Enter Lead Scoring and Nurturing.

With a planned strategy of multiple touch points and scoring based on user response, leading marketing teams are now providing automated nurturing through “drip campaigns.” These types of campaigns offer periodic follow-ups such as email offers to keep the prospect engaged and to further them along on the sales cycle, all the while tracking their every email open and website click. All of these actions are scored until a threshold is reached where a lead assignment rule kicks-in and sends that prospect’s relevant information to the appropriate sales team member. This reduces the number of tire kickers who make it to a busy sales team member.

For example, if Mary is in the market for a home theater system she may Google [home theater system] and click on one of the search results taking her to a home entertainment franchise website. On that site is a white paper comparing that year’s brands and models and to get it, Mary supplies her email address to have it mailed to her. She’s officially a prospect at that point with a score of -- let’s say 10. Mary gets the PDF and reads through most of it, only to be interrupted by her dog who wants to play in the park.

One week later an automated email is sent to Mary offering an online review of a new great system. She opens the email (Add 10 points: Total 20), she visits the site (Add 15 points: Total 35) and reads the review. After reading that review, she decides she wants to hear some of these systems in person, so Mary does a Store Finder search for her area (add 25 points for store finder: 60 points total now) and gets the addresses of the stores closest to her. She also received an online offer for a 10% of coupon that she could download, which she took advantage of by providing her name and address (add 50 points for coupon download: 110 points total now + more complete prospect information).

That last action, where she downloaded the ecoupon, updated her prospect information to include her address and also triggered a lead assignment rule by surpassing a 100 point threshold that assigned her as a lead to the individual franchise location’s sales manager. That manager can then follow-up with more personalized messaging, such as store-specific offers, that are warranted due to Mary’s online interactions.

This type of lead scoring and nurturing is an automated way to help identify the best prospects based on their online activities while keeping people that are not far enough along in sales process from taking valuable sales team member time.

There is an unlimited number of options for programs like that, but more and more smart marketers are taking advantage of these techniques in both B2B and B2C environments.