Marketers know the importance of sending relevant, tailored communications. But how well are we doing? Not so well according to a  poll by Chief Marketing Officer Council. This poll reveals that of 91 percent of consumers who opt out or unsubscribe to emails, 46 percent are driven to brand defection because the messages are simply not relevant. Ouch.

How connected are marketers to their customers? Not doing well here either, with nearly three quarters of consumers reporting they have received promotions for products they have previously purchased from the company.

If marketers know how important it is to be timely, relevant and personal, why is this such a challenge? One might argue marketers have a wider array of tools and technologies at their disposal, so shouldn’t they be doing a better job? While its certainly true there are more technologies to choose from, the reality is having a tool in your tool belt and knowing how to put it to best use are two entirely different things.

So, how then to achieve the holy grail of personalized and relevant email marketing? By adopting precision marketing approaches that utilize more tailored and targeted messaging throughout the customer life cycle. Continuous data collection, as well as integration and on-going analysis are needed to produce customer insights. These insights enable marketers to achieve mass-customization of messaging to customers and generate improved response, engagement and retention.

I  get asked, “How do I get my prospects to respond to my campaigns?”

This best way is to look at your best customers, and then target direct marketing efforts at companies with similar profiles.

At True Influence we rank current customers by three criteria:

1. How much revenue do they represent over time?
2. How profitable might each customer be?
3. How well do their needs “fit” what True Influence has to offer?

Then look for similarities among the unique attributes of these top customers. What industries are they in? What is similar about how they use your products? Are they large, medium or small? Where are they located? Who are the key decision-makers and what are their titles?

Targeting is everything. There are few things worse than marketing to uninterested prospects.  It’s really important to find fresh, filtered data from a reputable data provider to add to the direct campaign mix.   There are a few really good data providers depending on your needs but for most cases Jigsaw is very good. They have a great model to keep B2B data fresh and relevant and our customers have very good results using their data especially for email campaigns.

Focus your marketing with these basic direct marketing strategies and you’ll improve the overall quality of your campaigns. And remember, test everything.

As an accomplished eMarketer, you may already have sophisticated Marketing and SalesForce.com Automation systems in place. You may also be using an analytics module to provide  in-depth stats by the minute, as well as a set of Automated Marketing Programs  to qualify, score and funnel Leads to your Sales system. With all of this in place, you will have a steady volume of prospects flowing through your system and a lead conversion rate on par with industry average.

However,  to add the ‘Customer Driven’ dimension to your automated marketing programs, one must design programs that elicit targeted actionable feedback from your prospects, leads, customers and marketing programs that are ‘Agile’ enough to adapt themselves based on customer feedback.

The key here is to ask the right questions to the right person. If you already have a lead/prospect/customer scoring mechanism built into your marketing programs, you could use the score to determine whom to ask what.

For Example:  When you lose a lead after he was assigned to a sales executive, you could send a satisfaction survey email asking to rate the salesperson. This feedback could be used by your agile marketing program to route your hottest (highest scoring) leads to one of your top salespeople in the future.

If one of your existing key customers gives you a very high overall rating, your agile marketing program would take note of this and send out an email asking for references or perhaps send another email to try and crosssell/upsell more products.

When reviewing automated marketing programs make sure you’re also evaluating just how agile and customer driven they truly are.

Products like Alexa (owned by Amazon.com) Google Analytics or Compete are interesting tools for high-level marketing metrics. They measure basics like web visits, page views etc. and do a fairly good “arial” view of what’s happening on a web site. But are these tools relevant to sales?

We’ve found a deeper view is needed to make this information relevant to sales. The web pages your prospects visit, how they got there, and how often they come back tell you a great deal about their interests and when they may be ready to make a purchase. By augmenting your web analytics with lead tracking capabilities, you can identify individual prospects by name, (even before they fill out a form) and see what pages they visit. You can track their relevant behavior, assign a score to it and pass the information to sales real-time.

Sales insights such as these allow you to build much richer, deeper prospect profiles. Now your sales team has a reason to call their prospects and they are able to more minutely tailor their pitch to meet each prospect’s individual needs based on what pages they visited.

Lead nurturing is a really misunderstood topic in marketing today. In fact, most marketers don’t understand what it IS and what it IS NOT at all.  So, here we go. Some thoughts on what it IS and what is IS NOT for you.

It IS NOT Lead Nurturing When:

• You  send the same old stuff (white papers, case studies etc.) over and over again to the same old prospect list and expect a different result.  Sound like the definition of insanity?
• Your sales team calls prospects that are in the early stages of the buying process every month just to “stay in touch” with them.
• You offer brochures or data sheets to early in the sales process about your product or service and expect a prospect to read them.

It IS Lead Nurturing When:

• You send an automated series of targeted emails that include content based on the prospects’ interest, role or location.  The purpose is to answer a question or offer more information – automatically.  Lead nurturing is sending information that is relevant to their problem or tries to help them do their job better without asking for anything in return.
• Your sales team makes calls based on marketing “touches” that adds value to the interaction. This gives them a valid business reason for each call.
• You focus on sharing content that’s relevant to them even if they never buy from you.  Getting them to remember you by not “selling” them through external offers but by creating internal pressure for them to buy from you.

Just like you,  your audience is well educated and does not want to be sold. But they do want to buy and are hungry to be educated so you can take advantage of that. And,  in the end, real Lead Nurturing will create a sales pipeline that is very predictable and more reliable for your marketing and sales management efforts.