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Industry : Marketing Agency
Location : New York, USA
Challenge : As a marketing agency, they were unable to fulfill the essential promise of launching successful email lead generation and driving higher engagement for their clients.
MEET THE CLIENT
The client is a marketing agency that specializes in brand consulting and content creation. They cater to clientsfrom the B2B segment including logistics, pharma and information technology among many others. A lot of these accounts rely on the agency to do their digital marketing collaterals and were particularly interested in pitches to expand their channel partner network.
While the agency was creating digital brand assets and videos that appealed to the end customers of their clients, they were also trying to win more lead generation opportunities. The client was eager to expand their portfolio of offerings with email campaigns but seemed to be failing at fulfilling campaign goals and meeting the ROI targets.
THE KEY CHALLENGE
DRIVING HIGHER ENGAGEMENT WITH EMAIL LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGNS
TO REACH CUSTOMERS IN THE B2B SEGMENT, THEEMAIL INBOX HOLDS A LOT OF VALUE. ON AN AVERAGE, A PROFESSIONAL THINK TANK AND DECISION MAKER WILL SPENDS MANY VALUABLE HOURS IN FRONT OF THEIR COMPUTERS OR LAPTOPS. THEY ALSO CONSTANTLY NAVIGATE THROUGH THEIR PROFESSIONAL EMAILS ON THE MOBILE. IT IS ESTIMATED THAT CLOSE TO 86 PERCENT OF BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS PREFER THE EMAIL AS THE FIRST MODE OF COMMUNICATION. THEY WOULD RATHER READ AN EMAIL THAN HAVING COMMUNICATION OVER THE PHONE OR DOING A FACE TO FACE MEETING.EMAIL LEAD GENERATION THEREFORE BECOMES AN ESSENTIAL CHANNEL FOR SALES AND MARKETING TEAMS.
BANKING ON THEIR PAST GOOD WORK AND REPUTATION, THE AGENCY WAS ACTIVELY ASKING THEIR CLIENTS FOR OUTSOURCING EMAIL CAMPAIGN REQUIREMENTS. CLIENTS WERE MORE THAN EAGER TO LAUNCH EMAIL LEAD GENERATION PILOTS WITH THEM. HOWEVER, THESE EMAIL CAMPAIGNS WERE NOT ATTRACTING SUFFICIENT RESPONSE FROM THEIR TARGET AUDIENCES. ALTHOUGH THE COMPANY HAD EXPERIENCE IN CREATING APPEALING VISUAL, MOTION GRAPHICS AND VIDEO CONTENT, THEY WERE NOW GETTING INTO OUTCOME BASED ENGAGEMENT MODELS. THIS MODEL MAKES IT ESSENTIAL TO DRIVE DESIRED RESULTS FROM EMAIL CAMPAIGNS. THE AGENCY’S VISION WAS HOWEVER NOT MATCHED BY THEIR EMAIL CAPABILITIES. BY MERELY LEARNING EMAIL SENDING TOOLS LIKE MAILCHIMP OR AUTORESPONSE, THE AGENCY WAS NOT ABLE TODRIVEUP ENGAGEMENT.
After Lake B2B experts stepped in, the agency leaders realized that every interaction requires sustained follow-up efforts to develop a relationship over time. While it is important to constantly remind the leads about your offerings, the methods adopted by email campaign managers are outdated and archaic.Lake B2B experts have helped the agency leaders realize the loopholes in their existing planning and that there is a lot to be done beyond emailing newsletters to customers.
INTRODUCTION TO DRIP
Of course, email newsletters are an ideal way to tell existingsubscribers about the company's newest developments. However, these leads need to be nurtured through multiple targeted emails that are well thought through and not randomly sent to the leads.
“Growth marketing experts from Lake B2B introduced the whole concept of drip marketing campaigns to us. They were able come on board and create an engagement journey by drawing up customer experience chart. This chart has helped us imagine how a lead can be tracked after the email is sent. What makes this whole exercise interesting is what we can do with the knowledge of who has opened the emails, there are those who have opened but did not take any action. Then, there are those who have taken an action and warrant a closure,” says in-house campaign manager Malcom.
He went on to add, “With the introduction of Drip into our system and Lake B2B’s data guidance, we are now able to see the big picture beforehand. Lake B2B has shown how to identify those who are downloading the ebooks and whitepapers. For those who are not taking action, the experts have a follow-up plan devised based on their knowledge of the how an engagement could be cultivated further - using another marketing asset or possibly a quick video asset to watch online.”
Get a better perspective of how a drip campaign journey is designed.
Take a look at this Drip journey:
The Solution
A drip campaign would be pointless if emails are directionless and crafted without a thought. There are times when the customer would like to gain further knowledge about possible use cases whereas the mail once again speaks about benefits which they are already aware of. Instead of helping targeted customers advance in their buying journey what if the mail makes them drop off. Lake B2B data experts therefore started mining insights on each and every lead who was to be targeted through email campaign.
Before any campaign begins, the experts would help the agency’s creative teams understand how the targets were researching online and was there any buying intent shown previously.
A data driven strategy was devised to identify and group customers based on how advanced they are in the buying journeys. Sometimes, the groups were made based on the type of title or professional designation that the target audience belongs to. We started targeting the C-Suite audiences with messages that address their strategic goals while making the communication very informative for subject matter expert audience segments. Insights aboutwhat sort of online content appeals to the lead was also being extracted to drive higher email open rates and click through rates.
Weeding Out Unresponsive Leads
The agency was also able to identify the leads who were most responsive and weed out the ones who showed all the signs of not being interested. By weeding out the unresponsive leads, the campaign focus vastly improved and the push towards taking conversations towards sales demos, webinars or a call back has yielded great results. The opt-in details of the responsive leads from the drip campaign journeys are now edging towards closures mush faster. It has started manifesting results through increased sales call conversions. It was all because of the contextually relevant messages and the timing of the messages that is driving up sales interest through the roof.
THE RESULT
After the Drip campaign was implemented, the agency’s teams are now much more organized and well prepared. They are able to visualize the entire customer journey beforehand - the actions that customers could take and the remedies in case there is no response. They are able to precision target the email targets based on their segmented grouping and drive greater results for the bottom of the funnel sales teams. The emails are now more than just a newsletter campaign or a randomly implemented bulk email to every lead in the CRM.
It begins with specific pre-planned journeys and email communication with assets that the audience would like consuming. This drip campaign planning ensures every email is trigged and timed for delivery for a specific set of recipients and based on their anticipated actions, a thank you mailer or further follow-up mails are made ready. This ensures,the next line of communication is activated immedeately.
“With the help of Lake B2B, we are now able to create automated drip messaging journeys for our subscribers based on the status of the actions taken and behavior. By segmenting our list into different customer groups and sending them the drip messages, we are driving 3X faster closures for our clients’ sales teams.”
“It has resulted in a significant appreciation in revenues quarter-on-quarter and this makes us an ideal partner for email lead generation campaigns. We are now driving trust among our customers in a manner that not only boosts up-sells and cross-sell opportunities, but also significantly cuts down their sales cycle.”
I am Trevor Norris, a Senior Account Director at my Agency.