Part One: The Problem with Nurture Campaigns

At Relationship One, we love marketing geeks and we love hearing about people who are pushing the envelope with Oracle Eloqua. As such, we’re excited to have guest blogger, Mike McKinnon, Director of Marketing Operations for ReadyTalk, present a four-part series on their persona-based nurturing tracks. 

At ReadyTalk, we had gone through several iterations of lead nurturing programs – none of which were successful. From looking at lead nurturing programs, I felt that there were several shortcomings, both in the scoring mechanism and the content delivery.

Shortcomings of Lead Scoring
Most of the ineffective lead scoring programs I see simply count “things” and then add up the “things” to measure engagement. The things I am referring to are opens, clicks and page visits. Counting these things without any context and relevance often leads to the dreaded sales questions of, “Why is this lead marked as an A1?” Weighing the action rather than the content results in poor performance; how many times have you received a phone call from a representative after downloading a top-of-funnel best practices whitepaper?

Shortcomings of Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing that sends eight emails over a two month period without regard to the prospect’s actions are what I like to call “unintelligent nurture tracks.” At ReadyTalk, we had several of those! They have no ability to respond to the prospect’s actions or stated business problem. A nurture track should be able to properly identify a prospect’s business problem and then educate the prospect on possible solutions to their problem. Put simply, a good lead nurturing program should lead the prospect down the funnel from awareness to evaluation. It should also understand what the prospect needs at each of these stages and deliver it.

Further, many lead nurturing programs we looked at were not linked to the lead scoring program. Each nurture program should be linked to its own scoring algorithm. There is no one-size-fits-all scoring that will be as effective as target persona scoring.

Finally, we felt that nurture programs should be based upon personas. The persona will dictate which content is delivered, how it is delivered and when it is delivered. At ReadyTalk, we have three main personas: sales, marketing and IT. Each one of those personas looks to ReadyTalk to solve different problems and are interested in different features.

In my next post, I will lay out our solution to these shortcomings.