As you learned in the previous blog, once you’ve worked with a personalized marketing company to provide enough personalized experiences for new visitors and created personalized enough conversion and re-conversion opportunities, it’s time to get to the business of nurturing!
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your business’s leads through sharing valuable resources and advice. The goal here is to move those leads further and further down your sales funnel until they’re ready to buy.
And, of course, personalization can help you do just that. It’s important to note that personalization isn’t merely a top-of-the-funnel activity. And if you’re looking to close deals, adding some personalization to your lead nurturing program can help.
To be clear, email is by no means the only marketing channel you can use for nurturing leads. That being said, it is definitely one of the most effective and one of the easiest to personalize. In fact, there’s a good chance you’ve received personalized emails before. Ever open an email that starts with “Hi [your name]”? That’s personalization in action.
Using your personalized marketing company’s email software, you can personalize any email you create in a few simple steps. For example, you could include the recipient’s first name, the name of the recipient’s company, and even the title of a piece of content that the recipient downloaded recently. You could also personalize who the email is coming from, so that a lead or customer always receives emails from the same person in your organization.
While the term “automation” may imply something cold, or robotic, the reality is that marketing automation software can actually make it easier for marketers to add that human touch. (Provided, of course, that you use marketing automation software correctly.)
The marketers who are most successful with marketing automation are those who understand their audience and who tailor content to meet the needs and expectations of specific audience segments.
If your personalized marketing company uses automation software to send out unsolicited, untargeted emails en masse, it’s called spamming. And, as you probably already know, that’s a practice that can get you into a lot of trouble.
If, on the other hand, your personalized marketing company uses automation software to send personalized emails to people who’ve opted in to receive those emails, and you provide different content in those emails based on what you know about each contact ... then you’re off to a good start.
List segmentation is the process of dividing the contacts in your database into different groups based on similar characteristics. Defining these different groups will allow you establish which email topics, tones (personal, buttoned up), and content types resonate best with each. You can then refine your future lead nurturing emails accordingly, and deliver an even higher degree of personalization.
But now we reach the big question: How should you segment your contacts? What
should those different groups be? The reality is that you can do list segmentation based on any piece of information you’ve happened to gather during the conversion stage: geography, age, gender, industry, organization type, purchase cycle ... the sky’s the limit.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet or one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to segmentation. The way you group your contacts will depend on the nature of your business and your business’s goals. With a personalized marketing company by your side, this work shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as going it alone.