Looking at a sale as a long term investment is essential to having a high closing rate, hence the importance of lead nurturing in merchant acquiring.
Successful companies use lead nurturing in order to communicate, educate and eventually push their prospects through the sales funnel. The process is automated and once it is in place and you determine the true cost of acquisition per merchant in a predictable manner, and as long as it makes sense for your organization, it can be scaled by increasing your PPC budget.
Building the Model
Below are the steps to create a lead generation and lead nurturing model:
I. Start by defining the goals of the campaign.
II. Create one or two pieces of information (in a PDF format) that merchants will find valuable.
III. Create a sequence of 10 emails that is sent to merchants on a pre-determined schedule after we get them to enter their information on your website.
IV. Create an event triggered workflow. In its simplest form, it is a workflow that deals with two types of behaviors: merchants that read and respond to the first e-mail and merchants that don’t open their e-mails.
V. Establish a PPC campaign that would capture merchants that are looking to learn anything related to merchant acquiring. Decide on the keywords and key phrases to bid on.
VI. Create ad headers and copy that trigger curiosity in merchants and get them to click on the ad.
VII. Create multiple landing pages that are aligned with the keywords that were bid on and the ad headers that were created.
VIII. Launch PPC campaign. Capture prospect names and e-mails.
IX. Start the mailing process of the educational pieces. Each piece builds on the previous one and helps create trust through constant education.
X. Follow up with merchants that display buying signs and close them.
XI. Keep educating the merchants that have not made up their mind to buy yet.
XII. Follow up with merchants that haven’t opened the original mail with different mail subject lines to get them to open e-mail and move along the sales funnel.
XIII. When prospects open the original e-mail, start them through the funnel along with any new leads captured.
XIV. Restart at VII with new adjustments and corrections.
How Many e-Mails
8 to 10 e-mails in total spread out over a period of 5 to 6 weeks is an adequate number. There is a formula to optimize the frequency, delivery days, time and work out rest periods to avoid creating fatigue.
Some merchants will be interested in learning about customer acquisition, others about SEO/SEM, others about fostering loyalty, some about how to deal with employees, others about time management. The worst ones are those that are completely disengaged from their business or job. Nothing you can say will interest them because their interest lay outside of the job/business.
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So, each email is designed to capture the interest of a segment of the prospects.
The Challenge
The most challeging part in these campaigns is CONTENT and SALES COPY. Without good content, merchants will be unsubscribing from your list as fast as they get in. Without persuasive sales copy that triggers the emotions of the merchants, nobody will buy.
The Results
I’m going to let you peek behind my own marketing campaign and share with you the up-to-date results to show you how this worked for me. My goals were:
1) Sell copies of the report
2) Generate leads for consulting opportunities to help acquirers with PPC and lead nurturing.
I started by sending a press release to a list of 1820 people. Since the goal was to generate leads for consulting opportunities and I knew that only a segment of this list will be interested in this topic, I only sent the 4 supporting blogs to the people that opened the press release.
Those that didn’t open the press release received another e-mail with a different subject line. Each new person that opened the new press release was started on the blogs.
Eventhough it might seem contradictory to my goal of selling reports, I didn’t focus on driving people to the website. The Click-Through-Rates validate that.
In lead nurturing, the focus is to change customer behavior the least. It doesn’t serve any purpose to bounce prospects back and forth between e-mails and website. You only do that when you want to make an offer or close a sale. The prospect should be able to get all of the information on the screen in front of them without interrupting their flow or disrupting them.
If they are a motivated prospect and if the copy is persuasive, they will reach out. If they are not motivated or interested, at least they are being nurtured through educational data without being bounced back and forth.
In an offer, the important metric is the click-through-rate, but in lead nurturing, the important metric is the open rate. It shows how your prospects are interacting with your content. Below is the screen shot taken on 6/9/2014 showing the open rate of the blog post sent on 6/4. The average open rate of all of my campaigns this year stands at 49% which beats the consulting industry average of 14.9%
This one-week long campaign resulted in the sale of several reports, 7 inquiries from executives about help with PPC, 1 proposal sent and 2 still in progress.
The Opportunity
I hope this series of blogs showed you that it is rather easy to set up a solid lead generation and lead nurturing system using the Internet and PPC to get a share of the US$30 billion/year market opportunity that is represented by the 215,000 merchants that are using the Internet exclusively to look for a merchant processor.
For any questions on PPC or new merchant acquisition, please don’t hesitate to contact me. I’ll be glad to answer all of your questions.