Besides email, what other channels should I use for lead nurturing?

That's a great question. Most marketers rely too much on email.

You should try to interact as many ways as possible. Put links to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin in your email. Have a phone call or two in the process too. I'd even suggest you add a direct mail piece - a personal letter or dimensional mail.

By combining techniques, you'll keep the conversation fresh and effective.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers
www.findnewcustomers.com

In the B2B arena- Make it personal. Email is okay, but targeted mail/collateral and phone calls are best. Use email for expediting electronic collateral or quick touch-base communications or to schedule calls.

Vary it and don't wear them out with purposeless contacts. Every point of contact should have a purpose that is beneficial to both you and the prospect. Educate, inform, build the relationship and move the prospect through the sales funnel. Conversations, even brief ones, are much more effective than email.

Pat Beaird
Tight Five Marketing Solutions

You should use a mix of social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), live and online events, email, direct mail, phone calls, and your website. Many companies are also successfully using video and YouTube.

The point is not the media but the message and the conversation. The media is the delivery mechanism, and a mix works better than just one option.

For example, you might plan a thought leadership program around a particular theme that is important in your industry (for example, right now, we're building programs around the "Flash Crash" and impending regulatory changes in the financial markets). Build a story and program around the theme. Include clients, partners, industry pundits, and thought leaders in the program and create a series of content offers - blog posts, a white paper or article, a webinar, a podcast, and perhaps a live event. Then you can promote these offers through multiple media - example: email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, direct mail, even Google Adwords and banner ads in a trade publication.

As people respond and register for the various offers, you have opportunity to reach out and interact in a more personalized approach, whether with an email or a phone call. We find that by inviting people to programs like this, we get a lot of personal responses to our emails, which then prompt a personal conversation.

Most important is to make sure you're targeting the right prospects... that you understand their business problem, and you know specifically what it is about your product or service that solves that problem. Once you have that, the best channels (online, offline, email, direct mail, social media, carrier pigeon... whatever) can be selected to deliver that message to that prospect. More is better. The more channels you use, the more effective your campaign will be. Of course, there's a cost to each channel, so you need to weigh cost vs. return. I typically limit to the three most likely channels to reach my target. Know your target and the other stuff falls into place.

Eccolo Media recently published a report where they surveyed B2B technology buyers. They found that the most common channels buyers used to find content were (in order of popularity):

* browsing corporate website
* forwarded by a friend
* downloaded by a direct response campaign (email)
* forwarded by a sales rep

The least used but still important were
* linked or discussed in social media
* linked in RSS feed
* mentioned in a webinar

http://www.eccolomedia.com/publications.htm

Note: I'm not affiliated wit Eccolo at all and don't know much about them, but this research report looked to be well done.

Hi Jenny,

Email obviously plays an important role in lead nurturing but it is a channel. More importantly than the channel is the relevance of the information and how and when you provide it.

This decision is based upon interaction data of the lead. And so should the choice of channels be. In daily practice email is still the main channel for lead nurturing but it's really about being cross-channel so virtually every channel can play a role. It really depends of the interaction preferences of your lead: social media can be involved, mobile channels, specific RSS feeds, it really can go far but my advice unfortunately is simply: offer choice of channels when generating the lead. He calls the shots.

It will probably not help you very much but if you narrow your question down a bit and maybe define what you mean with a "channel" (purely the 'communication vehicle'?) I could answer more in detail.

Good luck.

Other channels to consider are:
social media, outbound calling, blogs/RSS, hand written notes, and unique direct mail pieces.

There is some good input here.

I've always thought of email as the channel which directs prospects to the nurturing activity.

Depending on the complexity of the sale, you may incorporate white papers, webinars, links to relevant content, product demonstrations, etc.

If my email is the connecting piece between the prospect and the nurturing activity, by default, the email is short and direct to the point.

Jenny

I agree with Jeff Ogden - with the plethora of options for touching contacts today, you should use as many methods as you can to get the best results. Then measure your results and opt out of the ones that don't turn things around fast enough.

For starters I recommend you check out: http://www.xeesm.com (no affiliation to me)

Axel has developed a powerful tool for "checking in" on clients via social media aggregation and conversation management. Using tools like this, you can get a great picture of what clients are talking about online and where they are most active without spending all day hunting and pecking for key data.

Don F Perkins

Good questions...and great answers.

You have already received an answer re: other channels to consider, but that doesn't mean those are the ones you should use for your lead nurturing project. It is impossible to answer your question without knowing who you are targeting. i.e. trying to reach small businesses is not the same as trying to reach Fortune 500 companies. So, I agree with Bob that generally speaking multi-channel is best, and that knowing your audience is key. You may find the following process useful:

1. Set your lead nurturing objective

2. Prioritize the use of different channels, based on who you really want to nurture.
i.e. It may be worth using email + direct mail + phone follow-up for segment A, but only email for segment B.

3. Consider what your audience is ready for
i.e Are they already on Facebook? Don't make the mistake of picking "popular" tools if your audience is not using them. Joining a community is easier than creating one.

4. Identify the pros & cons of each medium based on what you want them to do
Just listen? Participate?

4. Test & adapt.
As pointed out by Seamus, content plays a key part in lead nurturing, so make sure you only test one thing at a time, otherwise you may conclude that the medium is at fault, when your problem is actually your content, or vice versa. Not to make things more complicated, but the problem could also be your periodicity (contacting them too often or not often enough).

Good luck!

Géraldine