Marketing Software to Nurture Leads

Marketing CRM Software

Did you know that 76% of marketers think that marketing has altered more in the past 2 years than the previous 50!  Less than 50% of marketers admit to being unprepared for this dramatic shift.  As a marketing manager you will be challenged with attracting high quality leads for your organisations sales teams, managing varied campaigns simultaneously, engaging with social media and making smart decisions about where to invest your marketing spend.

In today’s marketing role it’s all about proving value. Which of your marketing efforts are making an impact?  Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps you to deliver, using Microsoft technologies to generate leads and manage effective campaigns.  Modern marketing means keeping pace with fast moving markets.  So how can marketing software help to nurture leads?

We created this short guide so you can stay ahead.

Simplifying Lead Capture

New leads are the lifeblood of any business.  It is vital to generate leads in the most cost effective way and to follow them up as efficiently as possible.  With Microsoft CRM you can capture leads automatically from your internet’s web forms and route them to the correct sales representative to follow them up.

A marketers mission is to help sellers get engaged early with prospects by providing impactful communications that find out a prospects reason to buy.  Using both inbound and outbound marketing methods.

Lead nurturing fact

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help unite your marketing and sales efforts.

Inbound leads from your website can be sent to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, scored and passed to the right sales person in the right vertical or territory.  Or if your process states that all new inbound leads should route to the marketing team initially, then Microsoft CRM can do that!  It’s all about simplifying your leads process and getting the right information to the right person in the most efficient way possible.

leads that don't convert to sales

If you attend events you will know that you can hire a data scanner to capture the prospects contact details when they visit your stand.  Using a free app, you could use an iPad or Android handset to scan business cards to push directly into Microsoft CRM as leads.  This means that whilst your representatives are at the show, you can have your data feeding directly to the marketing or sales teams, ready to follow up or send compelling marketing material. Indeed you may have workflows set to send out automatic messages to follow up with the lead directly.

Your leads may come directly with calls into the office.  If that’s the case ensure that those people taking the sales calls are aware of where the prospect found you, what made them call, what are they interested in?  This can be done in Microsoft Dynamics CRM by structuring a simple lead form that has key questions.  This will help to capture critical marketing information about where the prospect found you, and what they are interested in.

Fact about leads readiness to purchase

Evaluating the lead sources will help marketers see which marketing campaigns are working the best.  With Microsoft CRM it’s easy to track how lead sources are performing.  Which campaigns are working the best for your business?

 

Make the most of your leads

Leads are often the lifeblood of your business, to grow and prosper.  Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads (DemandGenReport).

The simple truth is that many organisations generate leads that simply fall through the cracks.  So how many leads have you got in your data pile just waiting to buy something from you?  Maybe when the lead was initially captured they were not ready to buy, or perhaps they were discounted because it was bad timing… Either way a lot of time and money is spent generating leads so it is important they are nurtured properly.

Many businesses have a 3 pronged approach to lead management:

The marketing team nurtures the lead

  • There is a conversion to opportunity
  • Sales work the opportunity

Other businesses may use lead scoring to help the sales team focus on the “right” leads and opportunities; perhaps structures such as “Selling to Zebras” or a Sandler sales method approach.  These processes may look more like:

  • Marketing and / or Sales hold the lead until a scored criteria is met
  • Sales will then work that opportunity

Lead scoring methods by Marketers

So how can you effectively lead nurture to reduce that risk of missed opportunities?

Review what data you are capturing.  Find out how many employees work there, what is the turnover?  What is their pain – their reason for buying?  What do they need your product or service to do?  What is making them want to use your service?

Are they in a particular industry?  Or perhaps they are interested in a certain service that you offer.

You could score your leads.  Once they have a score high enough to qualify them you can pass to sales.  Scoring leads also shows you the hottest leads and gives clues into how you can engage with them to push them through the funnel.

Sales people often want prospects that are ready to buy; so it is important to work closely with sales to ensure that leads can be passed to and from marketing and the crucial lead nurture.

It is important to measure your success and ROI, so think about how you can quantify your lead nurture success.  This could be by looking at the best lead sources, which email campaigns had the most click throughs and conversions to sales.  Perhaps see how long a lead takes to be qualified and if your marketing campaigns are affecting that time period positively?

 

How to manage effective marketing campaigns

Marketing campaigns can be a broad range of activities from events, advertising, seminars, emails, inbound campaigns and so on!  They all have one thing in common.  They need to be managed.  They all have activities that need to take place to make them happen.  They will all have communication plans and budgetary spend.

CRM brings all campaigns together in one place and can help quantify those conversions and lead numbers generated from each campaign.

Managing campaigns in CRM ensures that no activities are missed.  Your database is at your fingertips so you can email and engage with the right individuals – all in the same place.

Using campaign responses ties actions back so you can quantify how successful that campaign was.

Using campaigns in CRM means that you know exactly how each campaign performed and what the ROI was.  Can you do that?

Fact leads nurtured more value

Top tips for creating engaging email campaigns

  1. Use your data to segment and tailor each message using industry, desires, interests…
  2. Use a great topic / subject line
  3. An email newsletter should be 90% educational and 10% promotional
  4. Work with sales so they know what is going out and when
  5. Get click throughs to your website and create an activity to call each click through
  6. Drive traffic and encourage social media engagement
  7. Track results
  8. Do A and B testing
  9. Analyse the campaign properly
  10. Ensure your CRM data is updated from your campaign so suppressions are captured.

 

Marketing Return on Investment

How do you unlock the value in data?

How can a marketer do this without using a data expert?

CRM can hold the answer… ask yourself…

What is the most important things you want to know? And

What are your marketing goals?

Microsoft functionality enables marketing data by visualising it in dashboards to bring that data to life. These marketing metrics will help you to find out which of your marketing campaigns are the most effective?

Where do you start?

Look at the touch points where you are engaging with your leads and prospects.  How are they interacting with you?

Which campaigns generated the most interest?

Data

Check the quality of your data. Are you capturing all the activities from sales?  Is everything captured correctly?

Are all CRM or data inputting people entering data in a uniformed way?

 

Want to find out more about how CRM can make your marketing life easier?  Read our other resources:

Marketing with CRM

Marketing in Microsoft software

 

 

or call us for a demonstration or free trial:

T. 01924 507 280

e. George@caltech.co.uk

 

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