Bulk sending is out, collection and nurture are in!

Personalisation prevails!

In the past, if you wanted to run a campaign it was simple. You’d build a content piece, select some old CRM data, and send the piece to the entire data set. In other words, you’d batch and blast.

Unfortunately, for any old school marketers out there, this no longer works. While you may get some early returns, using this approach is not a long-term strategy and will usually trail off into oblivion.

Replace bulk sending with data collection and nurture…

In today’s world, it’s all about making it as easy as possible for mail servers to process your emails and place them into inboxes. This is achieved by rigorous segmentation! Failing to segment will result in high bounce rates, increased unsubscribes and overall poor engagement. Mail servers favour the marketers that make their job easy. But how do we do this?

Qualify data out quickly and aggressively…

If you’re aiming for open rates above 50%, click rates over 15% and a greater number of leads, there is one simply, savvy solution: qualify data out quickly and aggressively. Some people misinterpret this to mean they must delete people who aren’t opening their emails, but this is not the case. Instead, it’s all about sending less frequently to those guys, which is something that automation can do in a few buttons.

Understand the futility of a single email…

In an ideal world, every engaged contact would be ready to talk immediately. But in reality, most contacts need a little nurturing. Nurturing contacts effectively requires you to be intentional and strategic with what you send, when you send it and who you send it to. When deciding to hit ‘send’, how do you know that every contact will be at their desk, in the office, in a meeting or away on holiday? The answer is, you don’t!

To secure a return on investment from the high value collateral you’re producing, you need to be running a campaign over a period of time. Basing a series of emails over a single piece of high-value collateral should last between 4 to 8 weeks. This helps you to build brand awareness, while maintaining ample time to create your next campaign. It also gives your contacts a chance to engage with your content and digest any information.

Out with the old and in with the new…

Alongside your automated engagement strategies, it’s equally important to collect new data. This is achieved with top of the funnel methods such as paid search and display & social media, which help to drive traffic to specific content. This enables you to collect relevant data so you can subsequently re-engage contacts with automation.

As time goes by, this pool of engaged data will start to grow, as you compile more contacts who are interested in what you have to say. Not only will you now have a data set of potential buyers, but these buyers will also be ranked in order of engagement. Using lead scoring, we can understand which of these prospects need a little more nurturing and which we should start to proactively target.

“So long” bulk sending. “Hello” collection and nurture.