It's always smart to pay attention to the leads you already have
Look at any Blog or site in the B2B marketing space and you’ll find a lot of discussion and buzz about lead nurturing and the marketing automation packages that facilitate it.
When I first heard the term lead nurturing it got me thinking back to my days at Avaya in the direct response team. We were using a really great tool called Annuncio to send email campaigns, create custom landing pages and generate auto-responder emails. We not only used this tool to create campaign landing pages for third party emails and direct mail pieces, but also for creating follow-up campaigns to what we called our “recent responders” (people that had come into our prospect database, but had not yet converted to a customer). Tom Reid, then at Avaya, was the genius behind devising a strategy to nurture the company’s prospects. He also worked with Annuncio to integrate the tool with our existing databases. He created the “e-demand” initiative and the team to support it. It struck me a few years back that we were doing lead nurturing and aspects of marketing automation before it had those name tags.
Our results were amazing—both in terms of the conversion rates of our prospects and the results we saw in cross-selling or up-selling our customer base. The Annuncio tool had some really cool features, and was very easy to use. The company was acquired by PeopleSoft (now Oracle) in 2002, so I’m not sure where the technology ended up. It was great to be a part of something in its early stages of development, and to see firsthand how it makes sense to spend effort marketing to those leads you’ve already spent time and money to acquire.
There are a lot of great resources out there to learn more about lead nurturing, like Marketo’s “Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.”
We’d like to hear about your experiences with marketing automation or lead nurturing!