Lead Nurturing

Marketing Profs is a great online resource site. For those of you who are selling more than printing, here's some information from one of their email newsletters related to lead nurturing.

In a post at Marketing Interactions, Ardath Albee recalls a B2B client who thought her proposed lead-nurturing messages might be too brief. Albee begged to differ.

"[I]nundating prospects with more links and choices rather than improving the personalization, value and contagiousness of your email message is not the right answer," she explained. "The purpose of a lead nurturing email is NOT to: Be everything to everyone; get any old click; ask for a lot of time; [or] make a sale."

According to Albee, your email has about 10 seconds to answer these questions:

Do I need to know this right now?

Is this subject matter relevant to my priorities?

Will it be easy to get the information?

What is my opinion of the sender?

What do I think they want from me?

In other words, your B2B customer won't waste his time digging through your paragraphs in search of your buried hook. "The only job of your lead nurturing email is to get the prospect to take an action that shows you their interest in the subject matter of your content offer," she notes. "There's just simply not time for much else."

Albee recommends limiting such messages to 150 or—even better—100 words. And there's no need for graphics since many prospects will read your email on a mobile device. "[I]f all I see is the emptiness of graphic boxes waiting to be downloaded in a preview, I just delete," she says. "Who has the time?"

The Po!nt: Brief works. When nurturing leads, keep your message short, sweet and relevant.

Source: Marketing Interactions.