How to Eliminate the Sales/Marketing Disconnect With CRM-FM Read More >>
80% of Sales Lead Generation Costs Wasted Due to Lack of Lead Development Read More >>
Sales-Optimizing On-Demand CRM Marketing Campaigns, With CRM-FM Read More >>
Where On-Demand CRM Meets Marketing: What Marketers Need to Know Read More >>

MAKE SURE YOU CONTINUE TO RECEIVE EACH ISSUE OF TUESDAY MARKETING NOTES—CLICK HERE TO RENEW YOUR FREE SUBSCRIPTION

What To Do When
eMarketing Engagement Levels Drop

by Ardath Albee, Marketing Interactions

Marketers are increasingly challenged to optimize lead engagement to deliver more opportunity-prone prospects to their sales departments. With workloads increasing and marketing responsibilities expanding it’s easy to take a lead’s behavior at face value and let them slide. Instead of wasting the time, effort and dollars you’ve already spent to get their attention, it behooves marketers to ensure they keep leads engaged throughout the buying cycle.

Discovering who your hottest prospects are and getting them to sales at exactly the right moment is becoming easier, even while the complexity of doing so grows. This is due to marketing automation technology implemented by a growing number of B2B marketers to help them track, score and connect better than ever with their lead database.

Marketing automation is a great enabler for both quantifying marketing efforts and for generating higher alignment with sales. The system tracks an abundance of metrics, but most marketers are only interested in the leads who continue to express the highest levels of engagement. However, a lot can be learned by paying attention when the frequency and recency of a lead's engagement stalls.

Generally, stalled leads are rolled into a "general" touch campaign with the intent of keeping your company in the lead's mind so that when something changes, they can re-engage. Instead of trying to facilitate forward momentum, these leads are sent generic communications that take a wait-and-see attitude, putting all the responsibility for action onto the lead.

Taking a lead’s behavior at face value may not be the best first response.

Consider the profile of a lead who was hot and heavy with response to your content and communications who has either stopped completely interacting with you or has turned into a sporadic responder. Those are two totally different behaviors and can happen for a variety of reasons. Doing a bit of investigative work to learn why the lead’s behavior changed can pay off with huge dividends for future engagement initiatives.

In the case of a lead who’s stopped responding completely, it would be proactive to reach out and ask things like:

• Has your position in the company changed? To...?
• Was the project put on hold?
• Did you already solve this problem? How?
• Did our content cease being of value to you? Why?

Knowing the answers to these questions can present options for handling the lead that go beyond just dumping them back into the general nurturing pool or dropping them completely. The way you choose to handle how you act can actually add relevance for the lead, bringing them back—depending on their answers to the above, of course.

Learning more about that lead’s situation can help identify triggers that have shifted their attention, or point to new issues that need to be addressed. This information presents opportunities for highly relevant content development that can engage more leads like them. By feeding these insights into your emarketing strategies you can keep in step—instead of playing catch up after interest wavers. And, you’ll have more information to flesh out that segment’s profile.

If the lead is still responsive, but only sporadically, take a look at their activity profile and try to determine what changed. If your content shifted focus around that time period to a different problem/solution scenario, your information may have become less valuable to leads interested in previous topics. This gives you a valid reason to develop more content on the previous topic or to create bridge content that gives leads a reason to continue on with the new topic.

Alternatively, take a look at the content that continues to generate a response. What similarities exist between the lead's content choices? Are any other leads with similar attributes reacting the same way? Given the answers to those questions, can you create a 1-to-1 interaction that enables you to learn more and take action to re-engage them?

The point is that buyer behavior changes and evolves continuously. If you're seeing a growing percentage of people retreating from your communications, perhaps something has shifted in your marketplace that you've missed. Maybe some new problem scenario is now the urgent priority and you overlooked the triggering event. Perhaps a new industry development or regulatory requirement has taken precedence.

Doing some investigation into why these lead behaviors are occurring can help you ensure your emarketing strategy stays on track because your relevance never wavers, or at least not for long. Once you know, you’re armed with information to help you create content your leads will gladly pay with their attention to receive.

And finally, look and see what options your marketing automation technology offers to help you track frequency and recency and how you can start using those insights for more than a tool to reroute your leads into the general nurturing pool.

Ardath Albee (Ardath@marketinginteractions.com) is an expert at creating contagious content and e-marketing strategies that engage prospects-from initial attention until they're sales ready. She has a unique ability to develop content strategies that work hand-in-glove with overall corporate and product positioning to deliver hard hitting e-marketing programs and tools that compel customers to buy. Ardath helps her clients generate more opportunities by optimizing how they leverage marketing automation and CRM technology investments. Her clients include Covad Communications, LANDesk and Silicon Graphics. Visit her website and industry-leading blog to learn more: www.marketinginteractions.com.