Lead Nurturing best practices: How often should you email a nurturing prospect?

I have a little bit of a different take. Typically when an organization implements lead nurturing they are replacing regular blast emails they were doing. I recommend keeping the timing the same as these to start. (So, if you always emailed your list with something every other week then start your nurturing with the same regularity so you do not confuse readers) Then start testing for optimizations in timing.

At Marketo, we vary timing based on two things: either the request of the person being nurtured or on web and email activity. I suggest creating similiar nurturing programs, allowing your readers to decide on frequency instead of deciding for them. I also suggest using segmentation and triggers to help decide nurture timing.

It depends on your buy cycle. But as a general rule of thumb you can say that once a week is too much and once a month is not enough.

Alex

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Alexandre Pelletier
http://www.apelletier.com
http://twitter.com/apelletier

This is a very important topic. Too often alienates prospects. To infrequent let's them forget you. How do we find a balance?

Timing is not the first thing to do. I recommend marketers take their content and craft a story. Each email, direct mail, webinar, etc. should weave that story and build upon it. The story should have an introduction, a plot, a hook and a conclusion.

Once the story is fully mapped, space it out and mix the media. 100% emails -- no. Mix the media, such as email, eBook link viai email, webinar invitation, podcast, email.

Vary the timing too. For instance, once they download a white paper, you can follow up quickly, but then wait 10 days to 2 weeks for the next one.

At Find New Customers, we have found that this process works very well. But the quality of the content is critical. In fact, we even ran into a software glitch that caused too many emails to go out. People contacted me to say they love our content and don't wish to opt out, but there are too many emails. That is music to my ears.

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

How about respecting your prospects' preferences? Some want to be emailed once a week, and some want to receive emails monthly or even quarterly. Respecting their communication preferences is not that difficult. All you need is ask in the first place.

It's a great question, and not an easy challenge to solve. The challenge is two-fold:

a) there is not 1 frequency that is right for everyone

b) generally audiences will not take the time to accurately describe their own frequency preferences

A highly engaged, enthusiastic person may want information from you (including tactical items like event registration confirmations, and download responses) very frequently; a non-engaged, early stage prospect may only want to hear from you once a month or less, in order to stay on top of the industry.

Audiences, excluding specific situations, generally do not set their own preferences. Creating the preference management page is certainly a good idea, but having more than a few percent of your database use it is not common (tactical "updates" like LinkedIn group updates can be an exception to this rule, and true "publishers" that have multiple lines of research can find a willing audience, but general B2B sees low adoption rates of preference pages).

To get this right, you need to understand each person's interest level, and communicate according to that. That is understood through seeing their activity. I wrote a piece on this a while back that has a picture that shows it well:

http://digitalbodylanguage.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-much-is-too-much-frequenc...

Essentially, divide your audience into "buckets" based on how interested they are; highly, moderately, and non-interested. Then divide your communications into three categories; required, moderate, or nice-to-have. From there, only send the "required" (ie, things like though leadership, major announcements, etc) to all groups. The moderately interested group gets the top two categories, and the highly interested group gets all three.

As people increase or decrease their engagement, their communication frequency naturally adjusts. Monitoring for decreases in engagement will give you a sense of when a communication frequency for that group is too high.

Ardath Albee makes a great point about "asking them for their preferences." Steve Woods raises a good point about using Digital Body Language to adapt to needs however, I question how we implement this.

I'd love it if the email or personalized landing page had a slider bar for frequency, so the prospective client could simply and quick slide it to weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc. Or my software had the smarts to adapt automatically to digital body language.

However, I've never seen software that adapts automatically to digital body language or offers this level of interactivity when creating emails and personalized landing pages. I cannot capture feedback as I would like to adapt my marketing activities.

Are you listening marketing automation vendors? If I'm wrong about this, please let me know.

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

When it comes to email frequency for B2B campaigns, like many respondents, Neolane is in the “it depends” camp. This is for many reasons, one of the most important of which is relevancy. Any marketing automation system worth its salt will help marketers build highly relevant, personalized email campaigns by ensuring the system is capturing responses and preferences in order to shape timing for highly-targeted future communications. Another component of the timing decision has to be to consider what other channels are being utilized to nurture leads, as this will have a strong impact on frequency. Have you initiated a direct mail campaign recently? Are you embarking on a series of in-person events and have initiated a regional telecommunications campaign? Has the prospect recently downloaded a significant amount of content from your website including white papers and case studies? We are strong proponents of synchronized cross-channel campaigns where marketers are communicating with customers and prospects across a number of channels in addition to email. So while timing of emails should be based on customer preferences and relevancy based on current campaign goals, marketers also have to take in to consideration how timing factors in with other prospect touch points – both inbound and outbound - so you don’t overwhelm, but work in concert with other channels to engage, inform and move through the pipeline.

Hi all,
I am a big fan of asking prospects their "preferred cadence". FYI Jeff, this is readily accomplished with the Adaptive Campaigns in Market2Lead. That said, there are far too few marketers thinking along these lines yet, which is a pity. I wrote a blog post on Pull Marketing recently that covers allowing the prospect setting their preferred cadence as well as other aspects of the nurturing campaigns. I guess the bottom line for me is we shouldn't be here debating how often we should send stuff to people, we should be discussing how fast we can move to a model that encourages each individual to tell us these things, because the marketing automation systems are here to implement it.
-Kevin

One factor I recommend to our customers is that they also consider where a prospect is in the buying cycle. If a prospect is in the general awareness phase, without a timeline for purchase, every three to four months will do. If a prospect is further down the marketing funnel, I would consider touching more often. At this point they probably won't mind valuable content as well.

Obviously, the content you deliver needs to be germane to stage of the marketing funnel as well.

Craig, although I agree with many of the comments above, and believe that one can make pretty good educated guesses at the right frequency when your prospects haven't been asked about their own preferences, I think the best answer is to test.

Here's how: Find a group of similar prospects, then randomly assign subsets of this group to different test groups. Then follow up with each test group at a different frequency. Then measure opt-outs, clickthroughs and responders. You'll soon learn what the best frequency is.

Unfortunately most B2B marketers fail to test, which is a shame considering that I've seen tests lead to increases in leads and sales of 30% to as high as 130%.

Simply put, yes it depends. And you should ask as well. It comess down to relevancy and frequency.

Relevant - The message/offer needs to resonate with the customer. Relevancy can be driven by events, prior purchases, and/or through segmentations.

•Events - A customer that downloads a whitepaper or article about a product or service could be ripe for a follow-up email or call. A dramatic increase in bank account balance could signal a call-to-action from a bank about investment options. A very personalized email could be triggered to drive customers to personalized microsites with a relevant message that speaks to the customer's need or interest. Lead nurturing applications can play a key role in supporting your marketing efforts related to customer events.

•Prior purchases - Simple cross/up-sell campaigns can be driven by product purchases. For instance, a customer that purchases a water filter could receive an email that drives them to a microsite that attempts to enroll them in scheduled deliveries (recurring sales!) of replacement filters. Data mining can also use information about prior purchases (RFM type data) to predict the likelihood of a customer's interest in other products or services. Then we simply communicate to customers about the products they are most likely to purchase (based on a statistical probability to respond). We won't always be right, but more times than not, this type of personalized communication will increase conversions and improve our campaign results.

•Segmentations - There are many ways to create segmentations. One is based on industry, product and customer knowledge that is accumulated over time. For instance, "I've worked in this industry for 10 years and know that females, aged 21-25 are the best targets for my product." Another interesting segmentation approach that improves campaign results is customer clustering. Clustering is a data mining technique that creates customer segments where everyone in one segment is similar to each other based on customer attributes (e.g., gender, age, prior purchases, geographic location, income class, etc.). While everyone in a given segment are similar to one another, each segment in general is quite different from any other. Once we profile each segment, it is easy to develop a personalized message that goes beyond first name. The actual copy/text of the email can be personalized to be perceived as even more relevant. If just using first name for personalization leads to a 2-3 X conversion improvement versus mass email, just imagine what affect personalized copy will have?

If interested, I touch on these topics in a little bit more detail at the links below. Happy marketing!

Jim
http://blogs.marketingstudio.aprimo.com/blog/marketing-automation-corner/0/0/...
http://blogs.marketingstudio.aprimo.com/blog/marketing-automation-corner/0/0/...

I like the idea about letting the user pick their own frequence, but I am not sure how practical that is. It depends on so many variables, so I as the reader don't want to have to make that decision. I rely on you as the marketer to only communicate with me when you have something interesting or important to tell me. You, the marketer must be informed enough to make the call. So best way to think about it is make sure you understand the interests of your prospects and what they really care about. Then email them as frequently as the value of the information calls for. If you are launching something I really want to know about I want to hear about it right away (not a month later, to meet some random email frequency requirements)

I agree with the other answers, but I also suggest you vary the frequency. Once a week at first, then once every two weeks, then once a month. Ask them what they prefer.

Alway ensure your content talks in their language about their problems. It's not about you.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
President, Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

late to reply, but my two cents:

Only ask frequency preferences when you can meet those preferences. I've worked with dozens of major organizations and they could not manage different frequency preferences with much success.

When you do ask for a frequency preference, it means you can't send more email just because something is important for you to communicate. If I said email me once a month, don't send me email once a week because you feel the information is too important to miss.

Ultimately, what can dictate frequency is how a user is engaging with your email. If you send weekly, and after three months the user still does not engage with the email, then you should quickly scale back the frequency to that user because non-engagement seriously impacts your IP reputation at the major ISPs.

I hope this helps, and is not too late to help folks out.