How To Plan A Simple Lead Nurturing Program

A common question for those who are out looking to set up their own for the first time is “how do I plan a campaign?”. Having a in place is just the first step. To get a nurturing program from planning stages to execution can be challenging the first time around and there are no fixed definte formulas which if followed will guarantee you a fixed response rate. Whats best for your business may not be as effective in someone elses and vice versa. Experimenting and making changes along the way will help tune your program and squeeze out better results and every scenario is different.

There are however, three factors to that simply have

to be looked into while planning your nurturing program: content, scheduling and a lead scoring system. First up is deciding on content.

Content

The saying ‘content is king’ holds true for nurturing programs too and it’s best never to underestimate the importance of high quality,  effective content that can impact the users decision making process and convince them to act on the information they consumed. There is a vaierty of options you can review to make your selection. Here are some of them:

• Articles
• Case Studies
• Press Releases
• Whitepapers
• E-Newsletters
• Research Findings
• Polls / Surveys
• Brochures & Collateral
• Emails
• Invites

Schedule

Scheduling or planning out the timelines between the content send-outs is another crucial step where you need to ask yourself a number of questions to find what works the best. How often to you want to reach out to your prospects with the content you’ve designed? How often is too often? How little is too little to the point they dont remember you till the next time they receive something? Again, there are no hard and fast rules but here is a great example of a nurturing campaign schedule from Brian Carrol of In Touch:

Sample of Nurturing Plan Schedule

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• Day 1 Introductory phone call and follow-up email
• Day 28 E-newsletter with voicemail alert that it’s there
• Day 42 Email recent customer success story, in related industry if possible
• Day 60 Personal invitation from sales person to forthcoming seminar
• Day 80 Mail case study and personalized letter of transmittal
• Day 100 Email recent article of interest on Internet
• Day 120 Email “touching base” note
• Day 140 Mail follow-up letter with free report
• Day 160 Prospect calls you: now a qualified

Lead Scoring

The last area to come to a consensus on is or deciding how much weightage in points would be assigned to a prospect based on the response to the content. For example a lead gets 20 points for clicking on a link in the introductory email but gets 60 points for accepting an webinar invite and signing up. A webinar registrant is almost definitely more qualified than a link click through. How much more qualified and how much more the weightage assigned to this response is a decision you will have to make . Here is a sample of the lead scoring rules page on Nurture :

Once the program gets rolling its possible to make tweaks and changes to improve on it but every program needs to start somewhere and decisions have to be made. Let us know about any sample nurturing plans you’ve developed and what went into planning it.