How-to and Best Practices for Lead Nurturing with Pardot

Lead nurturing with Pardot allows marketers to automatically distribute targeted marketing content to a specific group of people over time. Lead Nurturing has changed the marketing game significantly over the past few years. What was once a manual process, has now become an automated process based on the recipients’ actions, with programmable followups and notifications. It has changed the marketing game, and according to SilverPop/DemandGen Report with lead nurturing emails gaining as much as 10 times the response rate as compared to standalone emails. It’s no wonder that it’s still a top priority for marketers.

Lead nurturing can be a really effective tool when you have the right processes in place, marketing and sales alignment, and the right automation tools are some of the essentials to lead nurturing success. Lead nurturing with Pardot can build relationships with both prospects and customers. Once you’ve got your processes in place and begin lead nurturing, some of the benefits are:

• Increases your reach
  Nurturing programs, such as Engagement Studio in Pardot, are designed to create what seems like a one-to-one interaction but can be applied to many prospects.
  
• Increases your effectiveness
  Most buyers conduct more than half of their research online before reaching out to sales, which means a large portion of the buying processes is in the hands of the buyer. In fact, today’s buyer prefers not to engage with sales until the last third of the purchasing processes, which makes it really important for marketing and sales to collaborate through each stage of the buying cycle to provide prospects with the appropriate information. Nurturing provides you with an automated way to stay in touch with the buyer, provide relevant information, and immediately reach out when they show signs they’re ready to purchase.
  
• Gives you more bandwidth
  Doing more with less seems to be a common challenge for most marketers. Creating a nurture program allows you to simulate a salesperson and create what seems like personalized interactions without a person.

What is Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing leverages marketing automation to create and develop relationships with buyers at all stages of the sales funnel. Through the use of marketing automation, the marketer is able to listen to the needs of prospects and provide relevant content to help build a relationship and move them through the funnel.

What are Lead Nurturing Campaign Examples?

• Welcome Campaign
• Top-of-Mind Campaign
• Re-Engagement Campaign
• Product-Focused Campaign
• Thought Leadership Campaign
• Competitive Nurture
• Promotional Campaign
• Onboarding Campaign
• Upsell Nurture
• Renewal Campaign
• Leads Gone Dark Campaign

Campaigns That Are Not Considered Lead Nurturing

1. A newsletter sent out on a regular basis.
2. Reaching out to leads randomly to see if they are ready to buy.
3. Occasionally emailing your database with a new piece of content.
4. Randomly offering your prospects content that does not take into account their interests or needs during their particular stage of buying.
5. Emailing your subscription list when a blog has been posted.

Creating Your Nurture Campaigns
There is a lot to consider when you’re creating your campaigns, but there are a few core concepts to keep in mind when you’re creating your lead nurturing campaigns. Consider the 5 best practices below, when you start lead nurturing.

Lead Nurturing with Pardot –  Best Practices

1. Invest in a Marketing Automation Platform
According to the Epsilon Email Institute, automated email messages average 70.5% higher open rates and 152% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages. With a strong marketing automation platform you’ll have the ability to not only automate the nurturing process but leverage actionable insights, to understand your prospects and where they are in the buyer’s journey.

2. Personalization
If you haven’t already done so, be sure to map out your buyer’s journey and match up content that corresponds to each step. Leveraging a marketing automation platform like Pardot you can use features such as dynamic content to serve up content that corresponds with the stage the prospect is currently in. Additionally, you can personalize you content based on industry, location, and other demographic information as long as you have it in your database. The chart below outlines what type of content and platforms are best used for each stage in the buyers journey.

3. Leverage Multiple Channels
Historically, lead nurturing was a one-channel approach, it was through email marketing, today we can leverage marketing automation platforms to reach prospects on other channels such as text, social media, retargeting, dynamic website content, and ping a salesperson to reach out either through a personalized email or phone call. With sophisticated marketing automation platforms, we can now have an omni-channel approach to lead nurturing with Pardot.

4. Leverage Lead Scoring
Lead scoring applies a numeric score to actions that prospects take within your organization’s digital footprint. The higher the score the higher the perceived value of the action the user has taken. So if a user visits your home page you’d likely score that less than you would if a user visited a pricing page, or a contact us page, the perceived value of that action is lower. So it provides significant insight as to where the prospect is in the buyers’ journey. Additionally, with a marketing automation platform such as Pardot, you can leverage scoring categories, so not only will you be accumulating an overall score, but you can assign these values to particular categories such as products. So you can see just based on how a user engages with you digitally what they are most interested in without having them take an action.

Lead Scoring Categories in Pardot

5. Align your Marketing and Sales Teams
This one may seem obvious or even overlooked, but when you have a lead nurturing program that is triggering notifications to your sales team, make sure they are on the same page. Make sure they agree to the buyers’ journey you have laid out, make sure they understand what each notification means, and the notifications also indicate their place in the buyers’ journey so the sales team can understand the prospects’ propensity to buy. When you’re using a lead nurturing program such as Engagement Studio, part of Pardot, you can add tasks within the program, that will allow you to include a custom note to the sales team. It’s a great way to remind them of why you’re sending a particular lead to them. It’s also a great idea to conduct training with the team, walk through the lead nurture program, and allow them to ask questions, and fully understand what you’re trying to accomplish. It will likely earn the marketing team some partnership points with the sales team too, sometimes they don’t get to see the work marketing does behind the scenes, so its a great way to help build that partnership.

Lead Nurturing with Pardot – Of course not every lead nurturing campaign is a one size fits all approach. Each organization will have its own set of unique challenges, but hopefully, the core concepts above will help you get started. Start experimenting with your campaigns, watch the statistics, perform tests, and really see what’s working. You likely won’t create a lead nurturing campaign and set it and forget it, you’ll likely make tweaks based on the data, which is a great way to truly build a highly effective campaign. If you need assistance lead nurturing, with Pardot, feel free to reach out, we’d love to help

About Roycon
We’re an Austin-based Salesforce Consulting Partner, with a passion and belief that the Salesforce platform’s capabilities can help businesses run more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are just getting started with Salesforce or looking to realize its full potential, Roycon specializes in Salesforce Implementations, Salesforce Ongoing Support, and Salesforce Integrations, and Development. We’re the certified partner to guide the way to increase Salesforce Adoption, make strategic decisions, and build your Salesforce Roadmap for success.