An effective lead-nurturing campaign starts with bringing leads into the funnel, no matter what the source-webinars, search marketing, banner ads, offline or events. The key is to combine explicit data about a prospect with implicit behavior, such as e-mail opens rates, Web site visits and white pa- per downloads, said Steve Gershik, VP-marketing innovation at lead generation and management vendor Eloqua Corp. "You take all that data and it becomes the basis of a lead score," Gershik said. "If they're ready, hand them over to sales. All the rest are held out by marketing." Anticipating the economic downturn, Eloqua recently executed a "wake-up" campaign specifically targeted at leads that had gone dormant. "In a bad economy, we are turning more to our in-house database," Gershik said. So Eloqua ran its reawakened leads through a five-step nurturing program focused on education. (Given that it sells nurturing programs, it even revealed to each prospect their score in the Eloqua system.)
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