In this post, I will share how I started with an active recycle campaign. My campaign is awfully large and I won't share details of the emails, landing pages, forms, cloud connectors, blind form links etc. that I used to build it, but rather a high level overview of what I did to get started formulating my master plan. As you can see a number of different Eloqua University course have helped me with the knowledge required to build this campaign, however I can point out two that actually mention active recycled campaigns RPM: Effective Nurturing and RPM: Lead Quality.
First, let's clarify what an active recycled lead is. It is a lead that a sales person actively passes back to marketing vs. passive recycle when a lead becomes inactive or expires from lead stage. The challenge is to nurture these leads that "fall out of the funnel". As we know, not all leads follow the linear path to purchase, so what happens with the leads that get rejected by sales or leads that are not ready to buy? How do we effectively nurture leads so that they become marketing qualified again?
The modern marketer's answer would be to create a nurture campaign to address concerns and obstacles that are slowing down a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and ultimately, to re-engage these leads so that they are ready to purchase. To validate success of the campaign, the ultimate metric is the % converted back to MQL status and also the % of SAL and % of SQL thereafter. For me, I would break it down a bit further to determine what my goal was for these leads based on their reason for rejection.
For example, the reasons to turnback leads by sales could be:
- Bad Phone/Lead provided a valid email only: Get phone number and improve lead quality by using progressive profiling
- Unresponsive/Lead is not responding: The goal is to get any engagement from the lead (opens, clicks within the email), and then send them educational information after they've showed response.
- Still Researching/Needs more info: Lead is simply not ready to buy. Nurture with engaging educational while building urgency around the need for the product, measured by web activity, form conversions, high CTR and Open rate.
- Cleanup/Miscellaneous: Re-engage with the customer. Goal is determine whether they are still interested in the product/service and nurture them down the right path or remove them from the campaign
Benchmarking was difficult because there were no prior or existing turnback campaigns to compare with. The benchmark was against industry standard CTR and Open rate. But moving forward, I will be comparing to my % converted to MQL for my first few campaigns.
Getting Started:
- Determine reasons for rejection. Before you start, you need sales to give you a reason for rejecting a lead. I would recommend storing this information to a custom data object. This will help with segmentation and determining how to communicate with the lead and marcom assets to use in our emails. Set this part up long before you start these campaigns so you have data to work with!
- Target Audience. Define who you are targeting - which product interests or personas are you trying to target.
- Relevant Message/content mapping: This includes providing content at the right stage of the buying cycle. It would be smart to use the reason for rejection to direct the messaging. Work with stakeholders to determine messaging and how many assets you have to work with.
- Treatment. Include and determine behavioral based decision rules that will route your leads according to their actions. Creating a visio diagram really helps visually show stakeholders your plan so that everyone is on the same page.
- Caveat. Keep in mind any sales SLAs that determine how many days the sales person has to mark someone as a turned back after they've become marketing qualified. You may want to keep them in the nurture campaign until that time expires. I have included a decision rule to remove the lead from the campaign only when their status date has expired the SLA period.
Results:
My active recycle campaigns are relatively new, so I've only launched them about a month ago. I have preliminary metrics that show signs of success, with a 32% lift in open rates compared to industry benchmark (17%), 14% lift in clickthrough rates compared to industry benchmark (3%), and the percentage of leads converted to MQL from those that responded is between 30%-50%. I will update this post with more recent results as they come in!
I hope this post helped a little with planning for an active recycle (turnback) campaign, it can be a large undertaking but definitely should be on your campaign map!
Saving the rest of the details for my Markie submission