If you’re reading this blog post, you might be thinking of how to optimize (or start) your nurture strategy. You are certainly not alone! One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is the ability to deliver the right content to the right contacts, at the right time. Nurturing leads, contacts (and even customers!) is the automated, personalized, behavior-driven email campaign that gets your lead through the sales funnel faster, more engaged, and ready to buy. And, if there’s one project that we’ve taken on time and time again, it’s to build a comprehensive, robust, nurture strategy for marketing qualification success.

Of course, the task is not always that simple. Here, we’ve highlighted three big considerations when starting or optimizing your nurture strategy.

1. Consider the key players

Robust nurture strategies require multiple key players, including but not limited to:

• Executive team: understanding the goals of your business will provide you the foundation for your nurture strategy, and this comes from the top.
• Marketing automation team: your marketing operations team that manages your MAP understand the capabilities of the platform, as well as the availability of data needed for nurture strategy success.
• Content and Brand/Creative teams: well developed, branded, and engaging content for each targeted audience will allow for increased personalization and brand awareness.
• Sales: the sales management team can provide valuable insights into the lead lifecycle, allowing you to position how your nurture program tackles lead stall points and how/when to promote the most successful opportunities and offers for conversion.

2. Anticipate challenges… and plan how to overcome them

We don’t know what we don’t know, so identifying challenges before they exist may prove difficult. Here are a couple of the more common pitfalls we have seen (or encountered) with our clients:

“Wanting a mountain when they’ve got a mole hill”

Think realistically about the size and capabilities of your nurture. It may be that you’re lacking the data and engaging content needed for robust personalization, or maybe your sales-marketing MQL threshold isn’t optimized to know when your nurtured leads are sales-ready. But don’t despair! Make a plan to tackle each piece of the puzzle until you have what you need to launch your nurture with success. Jumping ahead to launch before your ducks are in a row can lead to lack-luster nurture success.

“Stakeholders lack an understanding of the importance of building a nurture journey and simply want all of the emails deployed to everyone”

Don’t get us wrong, there is a time and a place for drip nurture campaigns. However, your nurture success will come by building the nurture strategy and lead flow processes around the success route of your lead lifecycle, and delivering content in response to engagement, NOT simply sending a group of emails on an automated cadence. This challenge may require taking a step back to educate your key players to ensure alignment before finalizing your nurture strategy.

3. Flush out a robust plan for strategy success

Before diving into the creation of a nurture program in your MAP, make sure that you plan your strategy for success! Some layers of your plan to consider will include:

• Nurture Program Volume: each nurture should have defined goals, an identified target audience, and success metrics to report against. You may wish to introduce new leads in one nurture, re-engage inactive leads in another, and onboard new customers in a third.
• Content: as marketers, we know that ‘Content is King’; even with a robust nurture program in place, you won’t see the success of your strategy if your content is lacking in relevancy, fresh, educational, information, and content that is aligned with the stage of your target audience. Content that works to nurture new buyers will certainly not be relevant to new customers being on-boarded in another nurture program.

The path to nurture strategy success is within reach. With these three considerations in mind, you are on your way to engaging your leads in an automated, personalized, and engaging way. Of course if you have any questions, contact us here, or get started on your path to nurture strategy success with our Nurture Toolkit.