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You already collect leads from your website, tradeshows, personal contact and other channels and are storing them in a database or CRM system such as www.salesforce.com. However, many of these leads have an interest level that while immediate is not at a point where you want to pass them on to your dealer or sales team.

Implementing a lead nurture campaign might be the answer to fulfill their immediate need. One way is to send them a product information request and then stay engaged over a defined period of time until they are ready to buy.

Below are four steps to implement a lead nurture campaign of your own.

Segmentation:
The first step in your new lead nurture campaign is to decide if you will be segmenting your messages to be unique to a particular audience. The more relevant your message is to your audience, the more effective your campaign is going to be. If a lead registers to receive a product brochure on one line of your products, do not send information on other product lines unless they are similar or at least complementary. 

Static Drip or Dynamic Flow:
The next step is to determine if your nurture campaign will be a drip series, or be a dynamic series that will respond to a prospect based on their response.

A drip campaign is essentially a series of emails spread out over a defined period of time. For example a lead could receive an email once per month for nine months. Since you have already defined how you will segment your leads, this drip campaign will be specific to the product or market interest that has been defined. After the nine-month series is complete, move the leads to a more general campaign such as a newsletter so they continue to receive relevant and frequent information from your company.

A dynamic campaign is one where you control the type of content they receive based on a response the lead reacts to a campaign. If a lead follows a link to read a white paper that was promoted in your campaign, you may add a rule to the white paper that provides additional relevant information to the prospect in real-time.

Content:
This step may be the easiest step in building your campaign, but it may take some time to complete a search of your existing content. Every campaign needs content, both for the body of the email and the offer you are providing. Conduct an inventory of whitepapers, case studies, product brochures, webinars, blog posts, analyst reports and any other resources your marketing team has already created.

The goal of a nurture campaign is to educate, so provide resources that move a prospect down the path of better understanding your product line and industry trends, and move them closer to the buying stage. Avoid offers of discounts in these nurture campaigns, save those for your dealer and sales team to close the deal.

Conversions:
Now that you have engaged with a lead in a nurture campaign, you will want to move them over or convert them to your sales team for follow up. This will be a more of a learning process and one that will require sales to work with marketing over a long period of time. As you receive leads, you should start to identify unique and interesting ones to move over to the sales team immediately. As you monitor these leads, you will start to notice trends of what defines a quality lead and begin to build out a lead scoring system you can use that will automatically move leads from your marketing campaigns to your sales teams.

Time to get started:
If you are already collecting leads in your CRM system, then it is time to start a lead nurture campaign. Employ these four steps to help you develop your nurture campaign, refine the campaign as you see trends unfold and what content works and what doesn’t. As you become comfortable with the program, you can begin to automate the processes and add in lead scoring and automatic lead assignments to provide better quality leads for your sales team.