Evaluating Your Lead Nurturing Efforts

Lead nurturing is an essential element of any successful lead generation program. However, no matter how successful your lead nurturing efforts, they could always be better.

In order to make sure that your lead nurturing efforts are the best they can be, it is important that you evaluate these efforts on a regular basis. In some cases it may make sense to bring in an outside firm to evaluate your lead nurturing program so that you are able to get a truly accurate and objective assessment.

Here are just a few of the items you can expect such a firm to assess during your lead nurturing evaluation:

Unsubscribe Rates: In the simplest terms, unsubscribe rates measure the ability of your business to keep leads interested over a period of time. If your unsubscribe rates are exceptionally high, it is usually because of poor content, inaccurate targeting or both.

Response Rates: A good measure of your content, response rates allow you to understand how many leads responded in a way that you had hoped.

Engagement: It is the job of lead nurturing to turn cold leads hot. To assess success in this area, the engagement of nurtured leads needs to be compared to leads that have not been nurtured.

Activity: Engagement can be further assessed by looking at things like meeting requests or purchase page visits.

Duration of Sales Cycle: How long does it take for a lead to become a customer? Effective lead nurturing typically results in a shorter sales cycle.

Cost/Revenue per Customer: The amount it costs to acquire a customer will decrease if your lead nurturing efforts are working correctly. Further, exceptional lead nurturing also results in more upselling. In other words, successful lead nurturing doesn’t always result in more customers but ideally it results in customers who spend more.

If you are having issues with any of the elements of these lead nurturing tactics, a quality assessment can help you fix any problems. And if you are experiencing significant challenges in the area of lead nurturing, don’t despair. Research shows that the ability to segment prospects, target content by buyer stage, and maintain interest on the part of leads are key challenges for a large number of businesses. This is especially true in the B2B industry where marketers report quality content to be a top factor in lead flow and lead nurturing efforts.