A few more words about accelerator campaigns…

You can decide to pursue multiple accelerator paths once you’ve nailed down the basics (as described in the previous post). Multiple paths can rest on different buying stages and interest levels of prospects. The one thing to keep in mind is that you want to reward prospects who show an increased interest level. Say you’ve worked out three nurturing paths:

1. Early-stage
2. Mid-stage
3. Late-stage

Each stage has a predefined set of sequential activities, and prospects who show a reasonably interested response graduate to the next stage as their engagement builds. Now, if leads in Stage 1 show enhanced responsiveness to your communications, you should short-circuit their current sequence and graduate them immediately to Stage 2, then Stage 3. On the other hand, if leads in an advanced stage seem to lose interest, you can drop them back to Stage 1 or just recycle them for later campaigns.

I don’t want to overstate the programmatic aspects of your lead campaigns, however. These are conversations – you need flexibility to respond to the specific circumstances surrounding each lead. If one of your campaigns seems to fizzle, don’t pull out your hair. Instead, learn from the experience and create another way to correlate buying behavior with online engagement. New opportunities and challenges constantly arise, so remain nimble in your thinking and revise your activity accordingly.

Always use you campaigns as a test bed for different nurturing components, such as:

• landing pages
• emails
• impact of different marketing assets
• communication frequency
• activity triggers
• lead scoring

By testing, I mean varying campaigns to isolate one critical factor, gauging how it affects your overall results. For instance, you can introduce earlier phone contact from Sales into an accelerated campaign to see if it is productive. Another tactic is to “goose” stalled prospects by offering them a stream of offers with escalating value. Test to see whether this triggers re-engagement, and if so, incorporate it into your normal accelerated campaign methodology. Also, pay attention to behaviors that trigger graduation from one nurturing stage to another – do the triggers make sense? If not, adjust and test. Only through constant re-evaluation will you be able to mold your marketing campaigns towards maximum effectiveness.

In our next post, we’ll look at lead lifecycle campaigns and its components: handoffs, recycling and new customers.

Eric Bank