When generating leads and adding contacts to your database, you should always be thinking about how you are going to segment those contacts, and about how you’ll continuously engage with them to move them through your funnel.
It’s not enough to simply “get” a lead if you never forge a relationship and help them through their buyer’s journey. The following five email campaigns are essential ways to keep contacts engaged so you don’t miss out on opportunities.
1. Post-Download Nurture CampaignA post-download nurture campaign is an effort to follow up with contacts in an appropriate cadence after they’ve downloaded a specific piece of content. This follow-up should help guide them through their buyer’s journey.
After a prospect enters the top of your funnel, you want to build their trust by providing additional helpful content — content related to the same topic they’ve just been learning about. Keep adding value without overwhelming them, and they’ll eventually convert from a lead to an MQL.
What happens if you don’t make an effort to nurture leads after they download your content? You risk them becoming unengaged. And that’s not the best use of your content investment. If you have spent any effort to build out the attraction and conversion pieces that brought the prospect into the funnel, then letting the prospect disappear — all because of lack of follow-up — is a waste of your initial investment.
2. Re-engagement Campaign
Re-engagement campaigns aim to prompt interest from contacts who have been classified as “unengaged.”
Anyone who uses an email platform that collects engagement data can run a re-engagement campaign. Hubspot’s CRM will automatically track contacts who haven’t been interacting with your content or opening emails so you can target them with new content. But you can also apply this same concept to any marketing or email automation platform — you just might need to develop the criteria for “unengaged” manually.
To attempt to regain interest from those unengaged contacts, you should send out a targeted email campaign highlighting a popular blog or new e-book with the goal of getting them to open those emails and take an action. Once they’ve shown interest, you can then move them into an appropriate segmented nurture campaign — but not until then! If you put still unengaged contacts into nurture campaigns, it can drive down your email metrics and make it seem like you’re not performing as well as you actually are, due to graymail.
A re-engagement campaign is a great way to take a segment of your database that is “asleep” and wake them up. One campaign I ran with a client featured an unengaged list of thousands of contacts. We were able to re-engage at a six percent conversion rate, bringing 200 hundred contacts back into the fold.
If re-engagement campaigns aren’t one of your demand generation tactics, you may be missing out on potential deals with high-fit prospects. You were able to generate them as a lead at some point, and without them, your pool of opportunities grows smaller. You want to maximize your relationship with every contact who comes into your database. If they go quiet, and you let them stay quiet, you could potentially be missing out on a huge deal by not following up in an appropriate way.
3. Pre-Webinar & Event Promotional Campaign
Pre-webinar or pre-event promotional campaigns inform a targeted audience about an upcoming event with the goal of driving registrations or meeting bookings.
This campaign should take place in the weeks leading up to your event or webinar, and is an important part of ensuring the event or webinar brings ROI.
When you host a webinar or attend an event, you’re investing time, resources and money. If you’re not taking the time to adequately promote, you won’t get registrants and won’t have anyone to nurture afterward.
4. Post-Webinar & Event Follow-Up Campaign
After you’ve attended an event or held a webinar, you want to follow up with everyone you interacted with to keep in contact and generate demand down the funnel.
Post-webinar and event follow-up campaigns reach out to all the people you came into contact with when hosting a webinar or attending an event, whether they attended, just registered or were on an attendee list you were given by an event organizer. Like post-download nurture campaigns, post-webinar and event follow-ups capitalize on relationship with prospects who have shown interest or consumed content.
If you don’t follow up, you’re essentially wasting the resources you put into holding the webinar or attending the event. For example, if you spend a large amount of money to attend a conference and you have great conversations there, you shouldn’t just return home and do nothing. You need to follow up, create targeted content and make efforts to continue promoting yourself and all of the ways you can help your new contacts, or you won’t see ROI. You should be capitalizing on the connections you make at events.
5. Contact Enrichment Campaign
Contact enrichment campaigns help you fill in knowledge gaps about your contacts. This type of campaign will most commonly identify a contact’s buyer persona, but it can also be used to clarify job title, industry, location, etc.
The goal of this campaign is to get the contacts to fill out a form including a question about the missing piece of information. You should identify all contacts with missing profile information of a specific type, and then send them an email campaign promoting one of your top pieces of gated content.
Contact enrichment campaigns are important for proper segmentation. If you aren’t segmenting, you risk sending a generic message that doesn’t reach the heart of each individual’s challenge or goal. You should be talking to people differently depending on their industry, buyer persona, etc., and contact enrichment campaigns help you gain the context to do so.
Additionally, missing identifiers can interfere with your operational processes. For example, if you assign MQLs to sales reps by geography or industry, but you don’t have that information for some of your marketing qualified contacts, you won’t be able to hand off those leads.
The Takeaway
Your marketing efforts are an investment in technology, time and people to create content that attracts people to your website, and you want those efforts to pay off. These email campaigns can help you stay engaged with leads you worked hard to generate, so you don’t lose out on opportunities.
