Everyone has them – someone that requested info, spoke with you initially then went silent. Maybe there weren’t quite ready or just getting some additional research done. Perhaps they went with a competitor or found out the budget wasn’t approved or pushed to a future quarter. Whatever the reason the lead stopped communicating directly with you, there is no reason for you to stop your attempts to work with them.
One easy way to this is through the use of your business blog (you have one, right?!). If you are producing helpful, evergreen content on your blog that answers your audience’s problems, I recommend extending your use of that content by continually sending it via email to leads that have gone cold.
If you want to know how to warm up cold leads with marketing automation, this is a process I recommend. The first stage is to create an ongoing automated nurturing campaign that sends monthly content to your cold leads. You could easily program a year’s worth of emails with just 12 blog posts. Make the emails short – no more than 2 short paragraphs. Give the recipient the perception that it’s a personalized touch – not a formal email campaign.
If you want to make this long term nurturing even more powerful, consider creating landing pages instead of just blog posts that provide a collection of resources around a topic. Keep these landing pages updated quarterly with some fresh insights/content (links to blog posts, industry news, etc.). As people get through the first wave of the campaign, you can simply duplicate the campaign and run them through it again. The landing page content on the other end will have the fresh information you’ve added which your cold lead likely has yet to see.
The second part entails manual, ad hoc nurturing. As your marketing team publishes new valuable content, have your cold lead list included in the email broadcasts that promote the new content. If you come across some interesting industry news that helps support educating or moving your cold lead forward in the buying process, share those ad hoc as well. I like to do 2-part advanced campaigns where I do an introductory email for the new content and then a follow-up, ICYMI (in case you missed it) email to people who didn’t open the first time.
If you want to be even more intentional/relevant, another practice here is to track the reason(s) why a lead went cold or dead. Then, create a collection of nurturing campaigns that are segmented by the reason(s) so you can be even more relevant with the educational content you are providing.
In reality, you can and should do all of the above. Just make sure that you critically examine the overlapping campaigns so that a prospect doesn’t get bombarded by too many messages in the same day or a short time span.
