Is your unsubscribe rate less than 1%? Is your click-through rate high? If the answer to either of these questions is “no” or “I’m not sure”, you need to download and read chapter 6 of the new eBook, “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics” from Mark Parent today.
The effectiveness of your lead nurturing is dependent on how well you’ve segmented your leads. Dive into your analytics to identify any problems with your list segmentation.
“Start by looking at your unsubscribe rate, which should stay below 1% at all times,” advises inbound marketing expert and President of SugarBush Inc. Mark Parent on page 52. “If [your unsubscribe rate is] higher for any particular list segment, it’s an indication the content you are sending isn’t relevant to that list segment, and they are unsubscribing as a result.”
You can glean similar insights by examining the click-through rates of each list segment. Marketers who suffer a low click-through rate for a particular list segment haven’t aligned their offer well enough with the recipients on that list.
Faulty list segmentation can be fixed by revisiting how you’ve mapped content to your list segments based on their stage in the life cycle. According to Parent, you should deliver email content to leads based on the pages they’ve visited on your site, the content they’ve downloaded, the blog posts they’ve commented on, and how far down the sales funnel they are.
You can optimize the offers you deliver by reviewing your website analytics, and determining which calls to action have the highest click-through rate, and which landing pages have the highest visitor-to-customer conversion rate in your closed-loop analytics.
Next, it’s important to consider the time to customer conversion.
“You should always be looking for ways to make your lead nurturing more efficient. To improve your time to customer conversion, analyze how good you are at generating marketing qualified leads (MQLs) with your lead nurturing,” says Parent.
They’re the leads most likely to become a customer based on their pre-close activities. If you’ve implemented lead nurturing right, more leads should be moving into MQL territory in your sales funnel. If you analyze this bit of information for each lead nurturing campaign, “ you may find that some list segments move more slowly than others, indicating that you have a bottleneck in your lead nurturing somewhere,” Parent points out. And, if it turns out you’re sending less than compelling offers or pointing leads to under-optimized landing pages, you can fix it before you waste any more time, money and effort.
Another way to maximize your time to customer conversion is by looking at the number of sales-accepted leads in each lead nurturing campaign. Marketing automation should increase both your MQLs and sales accepted leads.
You’ll need to meet with your sales team to figure out the problem. Maybe the lead scoring criteria between sales and marketing is out of whack.
Another piece of information that marketing analytics can unlock for your is your cost per customer.
“Effective lead nurturing converts leads into MQLs and sales-accepted leads,
but it must follow through all the way to the customer.”
- Mark Parent, “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics”
Use closed-loop analytics to ensure the leads you’re nurturing actually turn into customers and over time, your cost per customer should decrease. Check this metric monthly to make sure your lead nurturing work is as cost-efficient as possible.
Download the informative eBook “Unlock The ROI of Your Marketing With Analytics” from Mark Parent now.