Lead Nurturing Guide Part 7: Mastering Advanced Lead Nurture Segmentation

In the seventh and final installment of our lead nurturing guide, we’ll examine the different aspects of advanced lead nurture segmentation. Taken from the latest edition of Marketo’s The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing (@Marketo), previous installments in the series can be found here .

Bolster Lead Nurturing Campaigns by Adding Behavioral Segmentation and Targeting

Adding behavioral segmentation and targeting to your lead nurturing campaigns is vital to increasing relevance and cross-channel engagement. Relevance and personalization are the name of the game, and you can achieve these objectives by combining transactional data with online body language, like web traffic, email responses, and search behavior.

Behavioral segmentation and targeting pays attention to behavioral cues, which in turn leads to triggered reactions that feel more like a conversation than an impersonal sales pitch. Rather than anticipate every move a lead might make, marketers can design transition rules which inform their marketing automation systems what to “listen” for in order to deliver the most targeted content.

Depending on what the marketing automation system can hear, leads can be pulled backwards or propelled forward. Transition rules can be as sophisticated or as basic as marketers wish, with transitions based on lead score changes, lead status, and other behavioral triggers.

Increase Relevance by Creating a “Topic of Interest” Nurture Track

Your leads will have different interests and needs; hence, it is unadvisable to lump your topics together into one track. To prevent leads from becoming disengaged, you should create interest-based nurture tracks—also known as “Topic of Interest” tracks. These are based on a lead’s last activity and interests, and help marketers gauge if targeted content would work better on these leads or not.

Leads that have shown interest in a particular topic should be delivered focused nurture touches. For example, if a lead performs a crucial action (like attending a webinar event, downloading content, clicking on emails, or filling out forms about social marketing), he/she should be assigned to the social marketing nurture track. From thereon, he/she should receive a series of social marketing focused nurture touches.

Of course, Topics of Interest tracks need to be tested and optimized to ascertain their effectiveness.

Additional Behavioral Segmentation: Product Interest

Product interest segmentation works particularly well in multi-product and multi-service companies where upselling and cross selling are important.

Create product interest segmentation through lead scoring rules to track what products people are interested in. This works by adjusting product interest score as leads engage with information about particular products. By understanding what product a person engages with, you can create highly targeted lead nurture tracks.

Creative Lead Nurturing with Specialized Campaigns

Your lead nurturing efforts could yield more successful results if you create specialized campaigns that serve different purposes. In addition to your two dimensions, specialized tracks—such as event nurture tracks and seasonal tracks—can be created.

Specialized campaigns are particularly effective because they are highly relevant and in touch with current events. When executed correctly, specialized campaigns can move leads through your sales funnel at an accelerated pace.

Event nurture tracks can be created to stay relevant with leads obtained during an event. This track can consist of a few touches before the leads get moved into one of the larger tracks. [See Figure 1]

The event nurture track should contain information and content that was created at the event, such as recordings and slides from a speaking session.

Seasonal campaigns, on the other hand, can focus on particular holidays and celebrations, and is a great means of engaging audiences with content that is timely and relevant. Seasonal campaigns can include time-sensitive blog posts and other content created for seasonal topics. [See Figure 2]

Move Leads Further Along the Buying Cycle with Accelerator Campaigns

Accelerator campaigns give leads relevant nudges at the right time to move them more quickly along the buying cycle. These nudges are usually triggered by specific buyer behaviors or sales updates. “By observing the type of content prospects request, where they go and how often they visit your web site, marketers can adapt their nurturing approaches accordingly.”

Using this approach, prospects who display stronger interest can be placed on a more accelerated path toward sales conversion, whereas less interested prospects can be scaled back on communication. Trigger-based accelerator campaigns can help marketers effectively gauge what works and what doesn’t when it comes to building enduring and fruitful relationships with prospects.

Figure 3 is an example of an accelerator email that Marketo sends out to leads after they’d visited specific pages on the website.

This installment concludes our Lead Nurturing Guide series. Subscribe to the Marketing Digest Newsletter for more awesome informational content.

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