Objectives of the Nurture Stage

The main objectives of the Nurture stage are:

• Evolve from multichannel to cross-channel dialogues where focus is customer-centric, digitally listening to behavior and responding in individual customers' preferred channels using, for example, behavioral targeting.
• Make extensive use of automated, personalized email marketing where triggers can be from any online channel and automated email flows include email welcome series, abandoned shopping carts, as well as special purpose automated email flows.
• Incorporate any social channel preferences and capture important behaviors that may take place in preferred social channels so that these behaviors can be leveraged in cross-channel nurturing.
• Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) in association with stages in the buyer's decision journey.
• Build on your ability to optimize (using personalization and testing as previously covered in the Optimize stage) while fully identifying and leveraging Nurture stage pathways that are made up of the touch points in the channels for which your customers demonstrate a preference.

Benefits to Your Customers

You may think of your customers as multi-channel, but do they see themselves this way? All too often, marketers tend to organize the world around themselves. This marketing-centric viewpoint makes it easier to execute marketing activities, but doesn't match the customer's view of the world. However, effective nurturing requires a customer-centric approach and results in customer-centric benefits.

Customers ultimately want relevant, quality experiences with brands to which they are attracted. If you focus on effectively listening digitally and engaging accordingly in the pathways customers prefer, you stand to generate increased relevancy and engagement. In fact, 82 percent of consumers like reading content from brands when it's relevant.² This is an important dynamic you want to leverage when nurturing.

Research shows that consumers have a favorable view about the use of email marketing and website personalization when these capabilities are used in ways that serve their needs.³ If you can tap into preference, you will be providing better experiences for your customers.

Your ability to listen digitally and engage effectively can serve to build brand recognition and support effects to win brand loyalty. An added positive effect is reducing visitor frustration. Research also shows that 74 percent get frustrated with websites when content, offers, ads, promotions, and the like appear that have nothing to do with their interests.⁴ And studies show that about half of the loyalty equation derives from the customer experience during the sales process.⁵ A “listening digitally” approach to sales nurturing will pay off in customer loyalty. By keeping the focus on cross-channel communication, your messaging will be unified and more effective.

Benefits to Your Organization

Just as a unified approach to nurturing provides benefits to customers, it also provides important benefits to organizations. By taking steps to engage one-to-one with customers where and how they prefer (while establishing your ability to leverage data), connected nurturing can empower your organization with new capabilities.

One result is better business outcomes. Companies that take a structured approach to marketing activities like nurturing are more likely to improve sales.⁶ Other data points support that systematic, relevant communication can reap higher response rates. One such finding shows that new email subscribers are twice as likely to click a link in an email compared to existing subscribers.⁷ Nurturing new subscribers is an example presented later in this chapter.

Greater cross-organizational efficiencies are another benefit. Studies show that marketing organizations that collaborate are more efficient and effective.⁸ By establishing measurable, reusable nurturing processes that are designed and implemented across channels, marketing organizations should be able to improve collaboration and break down silos.

Organizations that strategically focus on cross-channel nurturing tend to develop more productive sales and marketing processes. This sharper focus can lead to higher productivity and improved business results. For example, a B2B software company that established new processes (in an effort to more tightly interlock sales and marketing) implemented marketing automation processes to almost double its opportunities and increase revenue from new sales agreements by 178 percent.⁹

And then there are competitive advantages. Companies that use three or more of the types of nurturing methods described in this book—for example, personalization, testing, and marketing automation—saw a large increase in sales conversion rates.¹⁰ A by-product of this agility is higher-quality marketing initiatives—unified marketing initiatives. Such initiatives improve synergies across different parts of the organization to achieve more of a combined effect.

How to Approach Nurturing

Step 1 is to develop an approach that works. Like the other levels in the Customer Experience Maturity Model, you need to step back and identify the people, processes, and technology that are needed in light of your strategic business objectives and strategic marketing objectives. An important question to ask when developing an approach to nurturing is: How fast do you want to run? It is essential that you also consider how fast you are able to run given the types of constraints your organization, like many, may face. These constraints are likely to include budget limitations, connected technology, lack of process, competencies gaps, and so on.

For most organizations the best approach is often a phased approach. Although it is easy to get excited about the sheer capabilities of various nurture marketing tool sets, several customer cases show that companies that have taken a phased approach can achieve successful business outcomes while building the experience that has helped them to continuously improve.¹¹

When mapping out a phased approach, be sure that each phase contains nurturing experiments—especially early phases. Experimenting and understanding what fails and what succeeds makes up a proven approach to learning faster. Nissan Australia experimented with cross-channel nurturing that used website personalization. The experiments involved different placements of personalized content. Nissan found that placing a personalized offer on the home page in place of the hero carousel was more effective than using personalization in a deep link to a product page.¹²

Timeliness is essential for nurturing. Therefore, a key mechanism for nurturing is automation. Deciding what to automate is consequently one of the most important decisions when defining your approach to nurturing. A number of specific recommendations are provided later in this chapter, but in general consider combining capabilities and thinking in terms of visitor journeys. For example, consider combining capabilities like personalization, behavior-based profiling, and email automation while segmenting for device.

This may sound complex, but in a phased approach you can start simply and work toward leveraging the capabilities that make the best sense given your specific objectives and target segments. You want to lay the right foundation when defining your approach so that you have the most powerful capabilities—for use in combination—when needed.

In effect, when establishing your approach, you want to be agile and accurate. Just as a military commander strives to “shoot, move, and communicate” at the same time, the approach you define to nurturing should put your organization in a position to execute—at a high pace—nurturing programs that create quality customer experiences.

Identify Processes to Nurture Customers

In a nutshell, nurturing is listening and subsequently communicating relevantly in order to build trust and ultimately gain commitment. You listen digitally at scale using technology and detect preferences (for example, does a given customer prefer to communicate in a social channel?); meaningful interactions (for example, micro goal conversions); and meaningful signals (for example, is a given prospect asking for purchasing advice?).

Based on what you (or your nurturing tool) hear, the relevancy in your communication is ideally achieved using targeted messaging (perhaps based on collected data and personalization) and timeliness that takes place in the channel that a given customer prefers. Think of this capability as progressive targeting.

Starting with the first digital “touch” when a potential customer first visits your website, you want to be able to use data to increase relevancy. As the touches (visits) from this individual customer occur and progress, you want to progressively leverage profile data that is collected as well as in-the-moment actions and behavior. The result should hopefully be a connected conversation composed of multiple touch points. Consider progressive targeting when designing nurture processes (see Figure 9.2).

When determining what to nurture, you may find there are two types of candidates: the obvious and the not so obvious. Let's start with the obvious candidates. What are some of the touch points that you have in place today, and how could they be used for nurturing? Here are some suggestions:

• Email welcome series. Research shows that new email subscribers are twice as likely to click a link in a received email compared to existing subscribers.¹³ Consider establishing a series of emails that are automatically triggered, over time, to new email subscribers. Consider ways to humanize the sender, subject line, and body of these emails. A key objective of the welcome emails is to build trust. Avoid strong calls to action until recipients demonstrate (via interactions with micro goals) that you have earned trust.
• Email countdown series. An event such as a subscription renewal or life cycle milestone could warrant a series of emails that leverage the relevancy of the event or milestone. For example, include a series of emails prior to the renewal date for an insurance policy, club membership, or software subscription.
• Win-back email series. Triggered emails that contain relevant content have been shown to generate substantial conversion rates. Recognizable, meaningful content is a key ingredient, as is timeliness. For example, one e-commerce study showed that while 72 percent of site visitors who place items into an online shopping cart do not complete the purchase, a sequence of triggered emails containing relevant content will recover between 10 percent and 30 percent of the buyers.¹⁴

With email nurturing, keep in mind that supporting the customers' preferred device or devices is a key aspect of being relevant. Emails that do not render fast enough on a smartphone, for example, lead to fewer opens and clicks compared to emails that are optimized. A study among smartphone and tablet users found that 59 percent of participants said download speed was the leading factor for determining whether a mobile website was “good.”¹⁵

What about the less obvious candidates for nurturing? What are some of the scenarios you could consider that you may not have in place today?

• Dynamic email welcome series. Research shows that a basic email welcome series can generate above-average open and click-through rates.¹⁶ Taking the concept a step further, the website visits produced by these emails are excellent candidates for nurturing. For example, an email welcome nurturing sequence could be extended to detect important micro goal conversions during website visits. The nurturing process could, for example, spawn more relevant and timely emails based on behavior and interactions during the email series process (as illustrated in Figure 9.3).

• Attribution nurturing. The “attractor factor” that generated a first website visit can be used for segmentation or personalization. For example, the attractor factor for a first visit may have been an online ad. Visitors who are attracted by an ad could be added to a nurture flow based on that ad's topic. The flow can update selected visitors into new segments as subsequent visits occur and visitors perform (or do not perform) certain interactions. A first-time visitor who was attracted by an online ad or a social post can be added to a segment as an anonymous prospect. If the visitor, on a subsequent visit, subscribes to email or signs up for a seminar, then additional personalized messages can leverage that email or seminar the visitor was interested in.
• Behavior-based nurturing across channels. Studies in the area of stated preferences versus revealed preferences show that people don't always actually do what they say they will do. When you want to tap into in-the-moment preferences for use in marketing, a connected customer experience platform gives you the best of both worlds: you can ask for and capture explicit preferences, and you can track and store behaviors that indicate revealed preferences. Consider using website visitor profiling for nurturing in social channels. For example, assume a logged-in visitor who previously submitted an

  explicit preference for the mid-priced product visits and demonstrates implicit interest in the high-priced product. Using in-the-moment behavior matching as a trigger, the visitor could be added to a high-priced segment. The segment could be used for personalizing website content or personalized social posts, email content, and sales follow-up.

• Nurture using triangulation. Websites have the ability to identify a variety of behaviors in real time. Consider capturing different types of distinct behaviors and using them to triangulate the visitor's behavior into a narrow segment. For example, assume you have three different content profiles you want to track: one for personas (identifying personal characteristics), one for product category preference, and one for buying phase. Consider what you can deduce if a visitor looking at new cars views inexpensive car models, then checks sporty cars, and finally uses an online calculator to calculate product financing. You could use those three content profiles to personalize the visitor's current visit and future visits as a qualified potential buyer of low-cost sporty models. If you also tracked that unique visitor's preferred channels, then you could send or display very relevant messages, perhaps telling of a dealer in the area with a forthcoming sale on a model fitting this visitor's interest.
• Nurturing using targeted app messages. In cases where email is less effective or not a preferred channel, nurture messaging to apps installed on smartphones is proving a viable alternative. In China, for example, where consumer email marketing has a limited effect due to the widespread practice of selling email lists, banks have begun to embrace apps, such as WeChat, to send consumer-oriented messages to banking customers. In Russia, Facebook messaging is used among businesses for similar reasons. Wireless beacon technologies—that have the potential to send coupons to apps on the smartphones of in-store shoppers—offer interesting nurturing possibilities.
• Nurturing for customer activation, retention, and reselling. With customers' increased use of digital channels throughout the entire Customer Life Cycle, companies are increasingly looking at ways to use digital channels to support key business objectives. Nurturing can play a key role here. For example, data from a customer relationship management (CRM) or customer transaction system can feed into a customer experience platform to add customers to a nurturing program.

When considering your nurturing processes, focus on how and where your customers prefer to communicate. Consider that your objective is to nurture micro goals and build trust to ultimately gain macro conversions. The journey is part of the reward.

Steps for Developing an Approach to Cross-Channel Nurturing

You should establish a foundation on which to grow your nurturing ability. Many of the following steps will have been partially or completely finished as you worked through the previous stages. Important steps for developing nurturing in your organization include:

• Starting with your strategic business objectives and high-priority marketing objectives, identify the micro and macro goals you will use to achieve these objectives.
• Identify the broad segments and subsegments of prospects and customers that you want to attract and who are attracted to your goals.
• Begin developing a single view of the customer by establishing a connected customer profile. The profile should be designed to scale as well as to contain a variety of data—contact information, channel preferences, device preferences, persona, profiles behavior, campaign history, responses, transactions, and so on.
• Be prepared to experiment. A key objective with the Nurture stage is to master the ability to engage across channels. It will invariably require research as well as trial and error to identify the combinations of segments, channels, goals, and persuasive content to develop winning formulas.
• In developing your approach to nurturing, identify the mistakes you want to avoid. This could be an important step toward actually avoiding mistakes and pitfalls.
• Ensure you have commitment from executives. Consider conducting the quick wins process (described and linked to in Chapter 13) to arm yourself with the ammunition to reinforce your business case.
• Create a strategy document. Take a quality-in, quality-out approach where you commit yourself to milestones and periodic reviews.

Identifying Nurture Processes

What should your nurture processes be? The answer is part art and part science. First off, identify the channels your customers prefer. You want to meet your customers where they prefer and not where it is primarily convenient for you to execute as a marketing organization.

If you do not have firsthand knowledge of your customers' preferred channels, conduct research to identify the channels that your type of customer prefers. Also, understand the channel preferences of your competitors. Research may help here as well.

Some of the nurture processes you identify may include traditional channels, but consider experimenting in nontraditional channels to understand preferred channels as mapped to different customer segments.

Identify types of content that are persuasive for the different segments you are targeting in the different buyer journey phases. Don't think in terms of individual pieces of content. Think in terms of customer dialogues where you want content to support the process of driving attraction, trust, and commitment. Identify the key interactions and calls to action that are effective for different segments in their preferred channels.

Leverage proven processes. Examine existing interactions and current calls to action, and consider ways to create automated dialogues that start or lead up to these calls to action. Typical examples include sign-up forms, social shares, requests for contact, and transaction completions. If a process—for example, an online ad that drives conversions—is currently effective, you should be able to increase the effectiveness of the process using structured nurturing.

Identifying Technology Needs

Depending on your approach and processes, the technology you use can vary. Here are guidelines, based on capabilities that you can use to identify technology for cross-channel nurturing.

• Automation. The automation capability for the Nurture stage should give you the ability to reach across channels. The tool should let you listen in one channel and, based on interactions and signals in that channel, execute in a different channel. It is paramount that this cross-channel tracking capability be website-centric. Given that high business–value interactions and calls to action take place on your website, you must have the ability to use automation on the website to nurture the pathways leading to the conversion points.
• Multivariate testing. In the Optimize stage, you performed A/B split tests. In the Nurture stage, the technology you use must enable you to perform multivariate tests. When it comes to multivariate testing and nurturing, it is essential that you are able to conduct experiments to test hypotheses regarding nurture pathways, visitor segments, sources of attribution, and the like.
• Personalization. The personalization capability you established in the Optimize stage should be extended in the Nurture stage. To generate increasingly relevant one-to-one dialogues, you need technology that enables you to present personalized content (in the preferred channel and adapted for the preferred device) based on all forms of personalization. This includes algorithm-based personalization. And you need to be able to measure the effects. An important consideration here is the ability to centrally store visitor profiles and significant behavioral choices for use in further generating relevancy.
• Campaign attribution. Understanding the campaigns that attract visitors to nurture pathways as well as campaigns that feed conversions is essential. The technology should enable you to attribute campaigns and to use campaign attributions when generating relevancy along nurture pathways.
• Integrated e-commerce. In scenarios where e-commerce is used, the technology should enable you to employ nurturing capabilities in the shopping catalog as well as in the checkout processes.
• Customer tracking. The ability to track customers from anonymous to known to logged in is an important technological capability for nurturing. This tracking uses techniques like resolving IP numbers into business names. While this has been important in business-to-business (B2B) settings, the capability is also applicable in business-to-consumer (B2C) settings. Although customer tracking is used in a basic way in the Optimize stage, in the Nurture stage the technology should permit you to store customer tracking information centrally in preparation for the connected customer profile.
• Deeper social integration. The technology should enable you to evolve from simply listening to social channels to also engaging in social channels. The ability to post personalized content in social channels (as well as simultaneously in other channels) is essential. It should also be possible to collect data, such as profile data, and feed this to the connected customer profile.
• Content distribution. The technology should support cross-channel dialogues. Capabilities such as tag injection into foreign systems (for example, HTML pages) is one example of how content distribution can be accomplished. Content distribution should also be supported for retargeting, communities, devices, information kiosks, smartphone and tablet apps, print, and so on.

Email Marketing

The email technology used for cross-channel nurturing should ideally be coupled with the automation technology and website. If these capabilities coexist in the same system, the tracking, reporting, and analytics intelligence is greater. To truly measure and optimize nurture pathways, the email capability should track the journeys of email recipients who click through email links, visit channels (most importantly the website), and convert goals. The more closely coupled the email tracking is to website tracking, the easier it is to nurture email visits and measure the nurturing performance for email visitors. In addition, ease of execution is essential. But trading off cross-channel tracking capabilities for ease of execution will limit possibilities to nurture visitor pathways effectively. As the maturity stages increase, so does the need for specialized competencies. Cross-channel, data-driven nurturing is a step up in complexity—and business value—compared to traditional email marketing and silo-based email automation.

If the top priority is to make nurturing easy for marketers to execute, this may be a setup for failure. The payoff with the Nurture stage is developing a capability to listen in the channels where your customers are and use the signals to generate conversions on your website. Accomplishing this requires specialized competencies and skills. Find an effective balance between ease of execution and effort of execution. Some of the skills and roles needed include customer acquisition marketers, channel experts, content marketers, and expert tools users.

Effective cross-channel nurturing requires diligent project management. Not only can the project management role help to drive projects to completion, but this function can also help to manage project costs. Project management should be used on an ongoing basis to manage the continuous digital optimization activities that we recommend. Calculating return on investment for cross-channel nurture initiatives could be a responsibility of the project manager.