If your company has had some success in B2B digital marketing, you likely know the importance of the sales funnel and the process of nurturing your leads. It’s rare that a lead is ready to buy your product or service from the moment they enter your system and the same holds true for B2B direct mail leads.
According to a recent study, less than 2% of B2B customers immediately. B2B buying can take months and require you to engage with more decision-makers than ever before. In fact, a recent survey showed that the average number of stakeholders involved in B2B purchasing decisions was 6.8, up from 5.4 in late 2014. More people have more input in more decisions. These numbers are even higher in enterprise sales where more departments have a stake in large-scale purchasing decisions.
For these reasons, the B2B lead nurturing process is even more critical than it ever has been before. It is important that you are able to identify what is important to your B2B Direct Mail Leads, speak to those topics, and subtly move them through the sales funnel over time to close the sale.
Pre-Qualify Your Prospects
Source: SalesScripter
Not all leads are created equal and treating them as such will lead to a lot of wasted time for your sales and marketing teams. Because B2B buying decisions require more touches than ever before, it is increasingly important that you are able to qualify your prospects early in the process so that you can avoid wasting valuable resources and time on continuing to engage with them.
A key challenge that B2B Marketers face is that most lead nurturing workflows are delivered only via email and digital channels, which are increasingly crowded. Many marketers are turning to automated direct mail like Postalytics to complement their email & digital nurturing.
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Direct mail is the perfect platform for collecting more information from your leads due to its high response rate — particularly when you use personalization to speak directly to your prospects. To increase the chances that your prospects respond to your mailers and answer questions that you have, provide some incentive for them to do so in the form of discounts, education, or other valuable offers.
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Pre-qualification relies on collecting more information, which also improves your ability to segment your lists as well. In learning about your prospects, you gain insight into how you can address their specific organizational needs. Different segments of your market will have unique pain points and speaking to those pain points will improve response rates in follow-up campaigns through direct mail and other channels.
Stay Top-of-Mind with Frequent Touches To B2B Direct Mail Leads
Visibility is king when it comes to branding, and you need to make sure that your company and products remain visible with your target audience. In B2B marketing, it takes an average of 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead.
New neuroscience proves that it is important to include direct mail in your top-of-mind nurturing streams. According to a recent Canada Post study, “When asked to cite the brand (company
name) of an advertisement they had just seen, participants’ recall was 70% higher if they were exposed to a direct mail piece (75%) rather than a digital ad (44%).”
Don’t be afraid to combine follow-up emails and direct mail pieces to your B2B direct mail leads, particularly when they have responded favorably to previous mailings. You can’t expect B2B consumers to take action after a single touch, and you’d be leaving money on the table by failing to follow up with them in the weeks and months following your first engagement with a prospect.
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Use Direct Mail Success to Drive a Multi-Channel Approach
Source: Smartcomm
Multi-channel marketing is the practice of using multiple marketing channels to touch leads in a coordinated way. Why deploy multi-channel campaigns? Because they work. It is estimated that multi-channel customers spend 3-4x what single channel customers spend.
Old school, traditional direct mail has always been very difficult to blend with other channels for multi-channel marketing campaigns. It has never been coordinated via Marketing Automation or CRM tools, and the teams and workflow have been separated from digital marketing channels.
Direct mail automation tools like Postalytics solve these problems by integrating with CRM and Marketing Automation platforms, as well as by offering free Personalized URLs (pURLs) that link mailers to landing pages. Once a direct mail lead engages with your campaign, you can use digital tools to touch them through other channels like email and social media.
Learn more about how to create powerful lead generation campaigns with these 4 Easy Steps.
Use Direct Mail Throughout The Sales Funnel
Because of the long production cycles and lack of CRM integration of traditional direct mail, in the past it was used primarily for top of the funnel lead generation or acquisition marketing. Email has been the primary channel for delivering middle and bottom of the funnel content in nurturing campaigns.
Now, with the rise of direct mail response rates, pURLs that link to landing pages and advent of automated direct mail tools, marketers are augmenting their email-centric middle and bottom of the funnel outreach with direct mail. Examples of middle and bottom of the funnel content that are now being deployed via direct mail combined with landing pages includes:
- Product comparisons
- Case Studies
- White Papers
- Buyer’s Guides
Using the data that you have on hand to personalize and identify content that will be relevant to specific prospects will not only increase your close rate, but will provide a better experience to your users as well.
B2B Direct Mail Leads Need Nurturing
Like leads from any channel, direct mail leads aren’t immune to the buyer’s journey. They need to be walked through the process of buying your solution and connecting it to the problems that they are currently facing. Using Postalytics, you can schedule multi-step campaigns and connect those campaigns to your CRM and other digital channels to learn more about your prospects and deliver a better, more fulfilling nurturing experience.