I’ve been spending a lot of time supporting demand generation efforts for several large B2B and B2C businesses – with lead nurturing center stage. When organizations hear the value proposition behind nurturing, they can’t hold back their excitement and jump blindly into the initiative.

Unfortunately, marketing teams don’t enjoy unfettered access to subject matter experts, nor do they control critical IT elements, the main difference between a true nurturing program and e-mail marketing. I’m writing this post to help businesses understand the differences between the two, and the benefits you can expect from each.

E-mail Marketing

Companies deploy e-mail marketing with the intention of nurturing prospects in order to close new business. It is a good leap beyond sporadic, random communications, but is only the start of marketing uplift.

Using e-mail marketing gives you the ability to queue a series of communications, automating prospect touch by delivering timely information and offers. The immediate benefits of e-mail marketing include:

• Regular prospect and customer touch
• Communication effectiveness via e-mail click-through rates
• Increased marketing productivity and efficiency
• Segmented one-to-many communications
• Develop, deploy, test and refine platform
• Improved (not clearly measured) lead conversion

Nurturing

Implementing a true lead nurturing system can take your business light years ahead of e-mail marketing. Rather than staging a series of communications, nurturing enables marketers to target communications with laser-like precision, delivering the right message to the right decision-maker at the right time.

Doing this in B2B lead nurturing is critical given the complex nature of the sale, where influence occurs across multiple functional roles. Advanced analytics with lead tracking and scoring creates transparency into the level of interest and the intent to purchase for any given prospect. This elevates value to your business in the following ways:

• All the benefits of e-mail marketing plus …
• Content targeted to buying audiences
• Thought leadership and credibility uplift
• Increase in the number of sales-ready conversations
• Improved sales efficiency and productivity
• Consistent top-of-mind awareness
• Higher marketing ROI
• Shortened sales cycle
• Larger average deal size

If you want to uplift your marketing practice, the rewards for nurturing are exponentially more valuable than those achieved through e-mail marketing; the heavy lifting required for nurturing, however, requires special consideration and investment.

E-mail marketing can be executed by the marketing department, but nurturing relies on valuable supporting content from subject matter experts and technology support from your IT department. Don’t jump in too fast or you’ll find that you’ve invested in a sophisticated e-mail marketing engine.

In my next post, I’ll give you a prioritized list of steps you must execute to achieve a bona fide lead nurturing system.