How Much Is Too Much With Multi-touch Attribute Of Lead Nurturing?
A recent article I read published on DemandGenReport made me question "how much is too much when it comes to the multi-touch approach of ?" The study conducted and published some interesting findings which were brought out well in the write up. In a nutshell, these findings included:
- Is useful and effective.
- Two nurturing touches to a prospect or lead are optimum producing better conversions.
- Four touches or more can be potentially damaging to the conversion prospects.
Now the findings are subjective to the type of companies and products surveyed in the study but lets look into this a little further. The ability to touch leads regularly with communication is a huge part of what makes useful or the process of lead nurturing so effective. The software simply helps automate improve a process that would be carried out even by a single sales person and is based on what works in the marketing and sales process.
For example, the other day, I sent an introductory email to a prospect I thought fits our bill as a good lead. He showed some level of interest and said he will take a look at it although there was no immediate requirement. I followed up with some work samples of how we have helped previous customers tackle certain issues with links to more case studies on our website. Since the I was able to view clicks to our website and views for certain case studies. Since there was no response about 2 weeks later, I sent an invite to an online demo we were doing followed by another email a few weeks later. About a month and a half from the first email, he finally replied saying he would be interested in exploring what we had to offer a bit more.
This is the same approach takes by constantly keeping a channel of communication open and touching leads regularly with useful information until they are ready to be contacted directly and ready to be engaged. As a customer, I know I must have received at least something from Dell once every two weeks for the last one year before I decided to buy one of their laptops. I wasn't annoyed by the regular communication because I did have the option to opt out of receiving them. Their nurturing program worked on me. I can't say it would have worked if they had given up after two trys though I could understand how several people would find too many touches from them annoying. The point is, I'm not sure if its possible to universally define how many touches are optimum and every company would have a very different threshold for this at all? Wouldn't just two bulk email send outs do the job? So how much is really ideal and how much is too many when it comes to nurturing messages?