I’ve been building and scaling lead nurture programs for a number of years now, and during my time, I’ve developed many nurture programs that have later been sunset due to low performance.
Trial and error, right?
In this blog post, I’d like to talk about some lead nurture programs that just didn’t work, either because there were too many assumptions made about our leads, because we didn’t provide enough value, or we simply didn’t help my prospects answer their questions and tackle their challenges. Then I’m going to share the lessons learned from these campaigns.
Re-engagement campaign
Re-engagement campaigns are awesome for a couple of different reasons: they can be used as a way to reactivate “dead” leads, and they can also be used to tell (or retell) your story.
This particular re-engagement campaign was based on our leads’ current situation at the time. They were either in contract, closed too early, or were with another vendor, etc. There were a lot of different reasons, so I built out a drip campaign around all of these reasons, and the results were a bit lower than expected with a 20% open rate and a 6% click-through rate. Also booked a total of 10 demos and generated a total of two opportunities from a large list.
Lesson learned – If you start an email out with asking your leads and prospects to book a call, they probably won’t. They have chosen not to engage with you, and have probably forgotten all about you and your brand. Mind you, people’s inboxes get flooded with these types of emails daily, so if you’re being too pushy and sales focused – and not providing enough value, chances are slim that your leads will want to re-engage with you.
Winback campaign
Winback campaigns are a little bit different from re-engagement campaigns, since this campaign usually uses an automation sequence beginning with a gentle “nudge,” with incentives and beyond. Whereas we wanted to reactivate dead leads before, we ultimately wanted to bring back lapsed customers in the winback sequence.
This particular winback campaign was based on the goals of our leads. This was based on what the leads had filled out on our website. They had either filled out a demo form, a contact us form, requested a trial, requested pricing, etc., but never really moved past that stage. We even tried to incentivize booked meetings, and while this campaign performed a little bit better than the previous one, we still only saw a 30% open rate and a 14% click-through rate.
Lesson learned – Don’t make any assumptions about your lost leads. It’s easy to generalize and put your audience into buckets based on what you think their reasoning for not closing is, but what if you could nurture based on asking?
In my next blog post, I’m going to share a lead nurture program that skyrocketed our engagement rates – and all we did was asking our contacts what their biggest challenge was, and then contextually nurturing them to tackle that challenge.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the 45% open rate and 25% click-through rates…
Stay tuned!
Christian Baun
Christian Baun is an email marketing specialist with a background in demand generation, content marketing and marketing automation.