Is there a good email frequency benchmark for lead nurturing?

Nuturing cadence entirely depends on your buyer and where they are in their buying process.

When a buyer is closer to a purchase decision, you should have a more active cadence. When you're just 'a twinkle in your buyer's eyes' you should be hitting that buyer only every so often.

2/3 of B2B buyers at any given point in time are considering a purchase but are not going to purchase in the next 30-90 days. (The other 1/3 ARE going to buy int he next 30-90 days, according to MarketingSherpa.) So accelerating your nurture cadence will not help if a buyer is in that 2/3 category.

So you should leverage the online content consumption behaviors of B2B buyers (what are they reading, are they visiting your site more frequently) -- using scoring and buyer triggers -- to determine where they are in their buying cycles ... and consequently what the cadence of nurturing should be.

Think about nurturing cadence as being similar to the waves as you approach a beach. When you're offshore waves are just gentle ups and downs, but when you get closr to the beach, the surf picks up until you're eventually on land. Similarly, your nurturing of buyers should pick up as they get closer to purchase -- land -- and should be entirely variable to that specific buyer's relative position.

I'll note that you can't do this without automation. Traditional batch and blast email does not have the tools to trigger or respond in this way, so you need something more sophisticated.

Let me tell you a story. A week ago, my wife's mobile provider let her down (she's on Pay as you go). On the net I ordered a SIM from a different provider. Had a SIM in an envelope arrived next day this company would have had a new customer. But it didn't. So over the weekend, she went out and bought a new phone. Today a fancy Welcome package turned up. But too late - and a total waste of their money as a result.

The greatest but least used feature of Marketing Automation is the ability to learn more about your customer at every touch. You should already know which search term they used or which Social Media Group they came in from. You know from their web browsing which products interest them and often much more. You can quickly segment them using surveys, multi-story emails and social media. Once you know what makes them click, you can choose the right nurturing program for them and tweak it to improve it at every contact.

Which leads me onto the second least used, and also vital feature. Do AB testing. Try sending more often or less often. Use different wording, offers etc. From that you will build up your own answer to your question. You'll know that for one group once a week is too often, while for another group it is not enough.

Last, but not least, there is no right answer for everyone. Some people have already done all their research and are just on your site to buy. Others are at the start of their decision making process and it will involve persuading others, finding a budget etc. Part of your job is to work out which is which - and all the levels in between.

I think all the comments made above are interesting. I'm really interested in the "human look" that appears to be required with every bit of this nurturing idea. If you are capturing leads at a pretty good clip, and they are actively opening emails, clicking through, and downloading white papers or eBooks, etc., I hope you've got a marketing automation system that allows you to actively segment based upon expressed interest without having to manually assign folks to a nurturing sequence. To Lou's point, it's about what your leads are interested in, not what you're interested in.

I've been the recipient of a lot of nurturing programs by all types of companies, and I can tell you unequivocally, when I receive emails that are along an interest that I have, and continue that thread, I'm engaged. Too many "nurturing emails" are a group of disconnected one-off emails that don't continue a thread. They look like general marketing emails that go out on a 'timed' basis. I will postulate that is one type of lead nurturing, and possibly the most prevalent - but not the most effective.

I did an experiment, where I asked my list (approx. 6000) if they wanted to receive an email every day for 30 days. I told them what the subject was going to be on, and provided an opt-in link for them to sign up for it. I had 218 people opt-in! And I sent an email, as promised, every day for 30 days. I asked people for feedback all along the way, about what they liked and what they didn't, etc., and had a lot of replies. At the end, I asked people to take a brief survey. About frequency, ALL of the respondents said they would sign up for a similar offer again, if it was on a subject in which they were interested.

Wow. suprised me for sure. But points to TESTING -- which I've not heard anyone except Lou point to.

Another test we've run is using the Fibonacci sequence. It follows the principle that when people are interested in a subject, they are really interested initially, and then that interest wains. So if you have a nurturing sequence that follows the idea of the Fibonacci sequence, that can have terrific results -- and that has been the case with our nurturing.

Hope this helps the thinking!
Kim
www.genoo.com
www.internetmarketingcompete.com

I'd like to shift the conversation a bit. I'm assuming your ultimate goal would be to sell your solution.

Too often, we send 'content' when WE think it should be sent, and it doesn't hit the point when one (or more) of the members of the Buying Decision Team need the data.

How about if we use this sort of connection to actually help the Buying Decision Team navigate through the decision issues they must address together - help them recognize all of the decision team members that must be included in a purchase, help them figure out what to do with the old vendor who shows up, etc. , the stuff that sales isn't privvy to.

By developing an approach that truly serves the buyer, with links to your content, and enhances the digital experience from the very beginning of the human side of the buying decision and leads folks to your solution, puts the seller onto the Buying Decision Team from the first moment.

I make no secret of the fact that I would like to sell iDM for lead nurturing (among other applications). We identify innovative solutions which we believe can make an impact in their chosen markets, and then invest our time and expertise, rather like VCs invest cash, to take those solutions to market.

So, if we didn't believe iDM can make a difference, we would not be investing in it.

What iDM does is automate the process that Kim found so effective, integrated with your chosen CRM system.

I'd agree with Adam...it depends on a number of factors that will vary depending on the product/service, typical buying cycles for the product, and the prospect's situation. A couple of suggestions on how to figure this out.

First, I'd map out your best guess on what the lead nurturing process should look like...Adam's response is a good starting framework. Use your knowledge of your customers and markets to design this, and apply a few sanity checks, like when you feel that nurturing had turned into spam. You know more about the "benchmarks" for your sector that you think you do.

Ideally, you would be able to test out some scenarios. For example, does a single touch in the first week generate fewer sales than two or three touches? Of course, testing requires you to have sufficient prospects to permit testing and you need to have the luxury of time to see what alternatives and messages generate the most sales. On the other hand, it's easy to get so into testing that nothing ever gets done. I think a sensible approach is one that gives you a directional read, rather than micro-detail is best.

Direct research is always a great tool, and seems to be neglected in a lot of interactive programs. There ought to be regular follow-up research to people who were in your nurturing program to ask them about their impressions, what frequency would be important, and when they made their purchasing decision. It's strange how so many programs that are intended to "engage" customers avoid ever getting customer opinions that would help make marketing better.

Jon Miller of Marketo once said "I don't know, but generally every two weeks is too much and once a month is too infrequent." In my mind, it is what the customer wants.

They can tell you what they want with their behavior, such as which pages they visit, how frequently they visit, etc. They can also tell you what they want with a Preference Center.

Hope that helps.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.com

Throttle frequency based on the depth of relationship and permission you have. If someone downloaded a white paper, once a week is way too much. But if someone has attended your last five webinars and is actively interested in the solutions, market or outcomes you're selling, once a week might not only be appropriate but welcome.

I'd recommend segmenting your prospects along a few different engagement bands in your lead & sales pipeline, then consider different levels of frequency for each.

The rule of thumb we go by is that you want to communicate as frequently as you can deliver relevant and engaging content. Obviously the volume of activity is largely determined by the context of the engagement. For example, someone asking to be kept abreast of new developments has a different expectation than someone who simply downloads a specific piece of collateral. Similarly, a marketing communication stream might have a different frequency than one coming from a salesperson (or sent by marketer on a salesperson's behalf).

Unfortunatley, there's no simple answer. My recommendation is to focus on adding value to the recipient (e.g. educaiton) while giving them the opportunity to move the engagement to another level (e.g. offering to get specific answers to their questions via a sales call).

Good luck.

If we are relying on working out how often we communicate with a prospect, and what we communicate about, we have probably already lost any potential deal we may have thought we could get.

We should be asking "When would YOU, Mr Prospect, next like us to contact YOU, how would YOU like us to contact you, and what would YOU like to see and hear from us?"

Typical lead management or nurturing methodologies imply that all the steps in the process happen in a serial fashion, and assumes that all leads will follow the same pathway and timing. It's often why companies believe their salesforce.com or siebel system is all they need.

The reality is that there are numerous sub-processes, and
there is the potential for great complexity in the interaction between those processes.

'interactive Lead Nurturing'(iLN)on the other hand, manages the complexity of the many potential paths through the lead management process, enabling each individual prospect to select their own path and indicate their own preferences for interacting with you.

iLN is not intended to replace existing operating metrics, marketing research and CRM/ERM programs. Rather, it should serve to augment your total relationship care efforts. Your internal operating measures are usually the fastest and best way to know whether things are being done right. However, to know whether you are doing the right things right, you must let the voice of your key relationships and prospects be your judge.

Please contact me if you would like me to expand on this approach.

A second generation Marketing Automation package can tell you in real time who is on your website, even if they haven't registered with you. It will tell you whether they came in from search, link from another site or social media - even drilling down to which search term was used or which thread in LinkedIn. It can show you exactly what they are interested in, with pages visited links used (or even hovered over) and how long they spent. It can even amalgamate this over time so you know that 5 people from one company visited your website over the past week, they spent 1 hour in total, they downloaded two white papers and they showed interest in Products A and C but not B.

That gives you a head start in nurturing. You can then see in real time just how that nurturing process is going and set expected next step timings with alternative strategies for slower or faster buyers. You can offer alternatives - seminar v white paper, and ensure that whichever is chosen, the other stage is not forgotten. You can segment closely according to company behaviour, individual behaviour - even look up their interests on LinkedIn and send them stuff relevant to that. You can widen the net, by automatically contacting other people you expect to be involved in the decision when it reaches a certain stage. You can monitor it and choose exactly the right moment to engage directly.

If your Marketing Automation package covers ALL of your interest generation methods then you can identify where all of your interest comes from - which campaigns did the work. You can thus compare email against social media and against SEO in generating traffic. It gets even more powerful if there is a link with CRM and your accounting package. You can then track all interest right through to sale and see what proportion of the interest generated by each campaign turned into sales at the end - even how long they took. That means you can evaluate your nurturing programme - is this piece of collateral converting more than that one or is this multi-stage email more effective than that one?

Warning - not all Marketing Automation Solutions can do this.

I agree with everything Peter says, but the point I was making is that lead nurturing is not about how YOU want to develop a lead, which is what typical methodologies do, even 2nd generation marketing automation solutions.

I have tried lead nurturing from various 'leaders', and to be honest, it's all about sending white papers, inviting me to seminars and webinars, and offering special deals. Even if I have been asked where my interest lies, and when do I anticipate buying, those questions seem to go straight out of the window once the leadnurturing process starts.

The moment I start receiving emails when I'm not in buying mode, I switch off that supplier.

First, you need to find out the expected days between two purchases or newsletter sign-up to final sale or first call to sale. Based on that only, you should create your lead nurturing campaigns. If there is a 8 days of gap between sign up and sale, you should send emails alternate days at least. So it all depends on customers' buying behavior. You need to use customer intelligence here to get the better conversion after your nurturing campaigns. Octopus3G, a desktop based affordable customer intelligence tool can help you to find out such customer behavior and customer segments to send the lead nurturing marketing campaigns.