Believe it or not, there are still industries that haven't yet made a serious jump into digital marketing across the board—and one of those is manufacturing.
Although some companies are incredibly far along in their digital marketing efforts, others are lagging behind, and those who fall into that second category tend to fear the unknown and feel that it’s too long a road to travel down before they’d see any ROI.
One of my favorite discussions with prospects or clients in the manufacturing industry is about quick wins. After all, who doesn’t want to make an investment in marketing and see initial returns rather quickly?
But what I’m about to dive into in this post isn’t magic—it’s a series of evergreen lead nurturing strategies (automated email campaigns triggered by the activities of a contact in your CRM) that your organization can implement in a fairly short period of time. It’s important to note that these strategies assume several key pieces are in place: a marketing automation tool (Marketo or HubSpot, for example), an integration with an ERP or CRM tool, and a functional website that has up-to-date content.
Let’s dive in and explore three evergreen lead nurturing strategies for manufacturing professionals.
Getting a prospect to take a chance on your organization can seem challenging.
In the last five years, the cost of acquiring new customers has increased by over 50 percent, which shows the challenge that companies (and marketers) face in trying to convert prospects into paying customers.
A proven strategy that we’ve used with manufacturing clients (and others) are open quote reminders. Here’s the flow of this lead nurturing strategy:
Adding breakup-style emails to the tail end of the lead nurturing campaign can be beneficial. Using subject lines with personalization tokens can grab a contact’s attention. For example, an email that says “[First Name], was there something I missed?” can encourage the user to open. Once they do, the email can answer some frequently asked questions about the ordering process, remind them of their open quote, and provide contact info for the sales team.
Acquiring new customers is difficult, and using data and automation to your advantage can give you a leg up on the competitive landscape. Communicating as efficiently as possible with warm leads that request quotes is beneficial to both parties. With an open quote reminder style of lead nurturing campaign, your most sales-ready leads are helped across the finish line.
More often than not, companies in the manufacturing industry are selling high volumes of product.
Because of this, being able to use previous order history/data to anticipate customer needs can provide a massive boost to the bottom line. How? Let’s use an example customer named John Smith. Here’s the flow:
If your integration can sync order quantity, you can use personalization tokens to craft messaging like:
“Hi John,
You recently ordered [insert product quantity here] of [insert product here]. As a courtesy, we wanted to let you know that it’s been X days since your last order.
Also, I wanted to let you know that [insert featured product name / link] is currently on sale for 20% off with a purchase of X units or more.”
Takeaway
As you can see, this tactic utilizes fairly basic data that is passed by an integration (from ordering system to marketing automation tool). This type of hyper-personalized messaging can be a true game changer for busy manufacturing professionals needing to make quick decisions regarding which vendor to choose.
As an inbound marketing agency, we live and breathe high-quality content, and iIn this lead nurturing strategy, we leverage your organization’s content. This could be in the form of blog posts, infographics, white papers, fact sheets, brochures, e-books, and more.
(Note: If you’re concerned because you don’t have these assets, don’t worry—we work with clients to create content. Let’s chat.)
If you have a few assets, that’s all we need to get started with this proven lead nurturing winner. Here’s the flow:
Bonus Tactic
As a bonus, if your organization determines “unengaged contacts” are those who do not make a purchase within 120 days, you can trigger a final breakup email in the series that offers a steep discount for first-time customers. If they still do not buy, you can have an internal notification be sent to your marketing manager to opt them out of future emails (database cleanliness is key!).
Takeaway
Leveraging your content is a foundational inbound tactic, and combining that with the power of lead nurturing is a recipe for success. Your business is full of experts in your field, and utilizing various content formats to bring that expertise to life can result in a surge of leads and new customers. Educating your customers where they are in their specific, unique buying journey is going to be much more beneficial than cold emailing or cold calling prospects.