Best Practices Guide: Integrating Email With Lead Gen Increases Sales Insights

However, the majority of marketers are still not integrating their broader lead generation campaigns with their email efforts. Considering the increasing demand to sync the buyer lifecycle with the customer engagement lifecycle, experts say it’s time for those silos to come down.

Email marketing and lead generation programs can and should co-exist in a common strategy to find, track, score and close business. But too often companies treat them as completely separate efforts with separate results and inconsistent performance indicators. “The intersection of email with demand gen and lead gen campaigns is certainly the right area for companies to aim right now,” says Will Schnabel, Vice President and General Manager International Markets for Silverpop’s Vtrenz solution. “But I think too many companies think of email as a separate solution even though it is absolutely essential to any lead generation campaign.”

Most lead gen programs incorporate email. The platform enables some level of customer segmentation, campaign automation and analytics. But lead gen vendors and consultants see the integrated whole of lead gen and email as underutilized. Companies that effectively integrate email within their lead gen campaigns can generate more relevant metrics, increase deliverability, gain more knowledge about prospects, and manage the conversation with them.

The most dramatic change integrated lead generation can bring about is in metrics. Viewed on its own terms, email metrics will show deliverability rates, open rates, response rates, and conversions. All are relevant. But when integrated with lead gen programs the metrics can be translated into potential revenue. A lead that consistently responds to email with relevant information and interest in products or services can be tied into the lead scoring system. A lead that forwards an email throughout the company or to other colleagues can be accelerated into an advanced nurturing program.

“When an email system is embedded into a lead gen campaign you can ask different questions and get more relevant answers,” says Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez. “If a campaign is transactional. you can tie it to sales. It can be tied to the CRM system. It can move to the pipeline report. It can cause a re-evaluation of that customer’s lifetime value. You can move from simple metrics like open rate to potential dollars.”

MOVING BEYOND OPEN RATES
In order to truly understand where a prospect is in the buying cycle, insiders say integration with lead management is necessary to move from open rate to more sophisticated lead scoring. Instead of tracking “explicit” metrics such as response rates, companies can track “implicit” behaviors. For example, a potential account that consistently opens offer emails is explicitly a solid lead. However, a potential account that rarely opens emails, and suddenly opens one and follows it with a request for more information on a particular product is showing more valuable behavior. Eloqua calls this “digital body language.” It tracks behaviors that go beyond the email such as website visits, whitepaper downloads, information requests, and newsletter subscriptions.

“Companies that integrate email effectively will track these behaviors,” says Dennis Dayman, Eloqua’s Chief Privacy and Deliverability Officer. “They don’t worry as much about content filters, they worry about reading that body language and targeting that behavior.”

Behavior provides a new level of customer and prospect knowledge. That knowledge should lead to better lead nurturing, but the knowledge and nurturing campaign can only work together if email is integrated. Marketbright’s Prospect Portal application, for example, allows companies to track customers from email interactions, to website interactions, and even through their activity on social networks. By having all that behavioral information in the same demand generation database, all stakeholders get the same visibility to lead metrics and behaviors. That communication, according to Marketbright co-founder Erik Bower, is essential.

“In the BtoC space we market to one person who’s pushing the shopping cart,” he says. “Not so in the BtoB space. We have a team of people pushing the shopping cart, but they all can’t have the same email messaging. This is a collaborative effort. Email is an essential part of the collaborative customer experience.”

Email integration also needs to sync the buyer lifecycle with the customer engagement lifecycle. Boston-based marketing services firm Customer Portfolios is one of the leaders in doing this. CEO Nick Godfrey says the BtoB buyer lifecycle focuses almost exclusively on increasing revenue and customer value. Customer engagement and its accompanying lifecycle address the attention and information gap between a company and its customers and prospects. It goes beyond simple revenue transactions to define and measure the more subtle ways in which customers share information and how often they touch a brand across channels. For example, a prospect may be far along in the buyer lifecycle, and because of that progress, the emails should reflect different content and offers

“Those offers need to be triggered automatically,” says Godfrey. “In some cases they are being executed through multi-channels, and require detailed coordination within the company, the brand, the business rules and overall marketing goals. The customer experience then extends from direct interaction to that of a customer engagement strategy.”

Finally, integrated email allows BtoB marketers to engage a dialog. Depending on where a lead is in the buying cycle, welcome emails, onboarding, thank yous, and even more aggressive product-based messaging can be automated and personalized at the same time. But it depends on the email analytics feeding the lead gen machine. “Companies that don’t integrate email tend to trip over themselves,” says Chip House, VP industry and relationship marketing for ExactTarget. “Companies that do it well control the frequency and content of their message.”