Lead nurturing email campaigns enable you to stay foremost in the minds of prospects, while educating them on the benefits of your product or service and motivating them to progress further down the sales funnel.
Additionally, with today’s highly sophisticated web analytics and call tracking tools you can quickly establish a feedback loop to assess success in real-time.
To motivate recipients to take action, you need to clearly express what you want them to do and describe the value they’ll receive in return. An effective way to communicate this is through calls to action.
Following are some tips to incorporate calls to action into your lead nurturing campaign emails and track resulting activity:
Call to Action Options
• Link to online content – Links to eBooks, whitepapers, blogs, brochures, coupons and other online content are effective ways to drive recipients back to your website where they can engage with you further. For peak visibility, add links to banners, feature them within or below content, or incorporate graphic, eye-catching buttons. For example, include a text link below your main email message that says, “Download a 10% Off Coupon Here.”
• Phone number – For those leads who are motivated to contact you but prefer to speak to a person, you should consider including a phone number with a reason to call. For example, “Call today to speak with a sales representative.” These numbers can be featured in your email banner, directly within content, or called out in a right- or left-hand email column.
• Contact form – Web forms offer a convenient way for recipients to request to be contacted, download a valuable piece of content or register for a webinar. Integrate these forms into your email’s main content section or right- or left-hand column and include a compelling message. For example, “Register Today Only.”
Whichever calls to action you choose, make sure to include a compelling message that clearly details which action you want a recipient to take and what they will get for clicking or calling. This message should always answer the question, “What’s in it for me?”
Assessing Email Campaign Performance with Web Analytics and Call Tracking
As with any other marketing initiative, to yield the best return you’ll need to continuously test and evolve your lead nurturing calls to action.
For this reason, it’s important to integrate tracking tools that will enable you to capture and record any resulting web activity, as well as both online and offline conversions.
Web analytics
With most analytics programs, you can add tags to the end of a link so that as soon as someone arrives to your site via that link, your web analytics software automatically associates the visit with a specific lead-nurturing email. For example, Google Analytics offers this URL Builder that can add multiple tags to the end of a URL.
Depending on your phone call tracking needs, you may add the same tag to all your email links, or tag each link individually. Consider individual tags if you want to understand which link formats, locations or messages are most effective at generating clicks.
To record form completions, after someone submits their information via an email form, direct them to a unique thank-you web page. Within your analytics program, associate any visits to this web page as a conversion. Since only individuals who have completed the email form will land on this page, you can accurately track these as conversions.
Call tracking
Call tracking software enables you to associate any phone calls with a specific lead-nurturing campaign. This can be done in two ways:
• Assign and include a unique tracking phone number in your lead nurturing email. Any calls that result will be automatically be associated with the email and reported in your dashboard.
• Integrate the small Javascript snippet (provided by your call tracking vendor) throughout your website. This snippet will automatically show a unique phone number to each website visitor and associate the number with how the visitor arrived on the site, for example via your lead-nurturing email. Any calls that come into this number are then automatically associated with your email and reported in your dashboard.
Remember, it’s important to continuously experiment with the format, messaging and location of your lead nurturing calls to action. Only through this test-and-evolve process can you ensure the greatest results on your campaign.
How do you use lead nurturing calls to action to improve campaign performance?
Tags: Call Tracking, email campaign tracking, lead nurturing, phone call tracking, web analytics
