How to build an after-sale nurture plan with Marketo

Lead nurturing strategy generally works on converting the prospect into a customer and bringing sales. It considers the conversion rate as the primary KPI. However, the problem with this approach is that it overlooks the post-sales lead nurturing process. Marketers tend to not focus on leads that have converted into customers and move on to nurture the fresh leads or prospects. By doing so, you are losing out on retaining existing customers and getting them to purchase again. 

Still doubtful about it? Here are some facts and figures that would convince you.

• While selling to a new customer comes with a success rate of merely 5-20%, selling to an existing customer has a 60-70% success rate. 
• If you increase customer retention by 5%, you can boost profits to 95%. 
• Acquiring a new customer is five times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. 
• U.S. companies lose $136.8 Bn annually because of avoidable customer switching. 

These numbers make it quite clear that post-sales nurturing is as important as nurturing the leads and prospective customers before conversions. Moreover, customers who have a pleasant experience with the brand immediately after making the purchase and are satisfied with the products are more likely to spread word-of-mouth and help you with referrals. Approximately 90% of B2B buyers reveal that positive reviews influence purchase decisions. Also, 88% of B2B customers use online recommendations to decide which product they should purchase. If you fail to keep in touch with such customers after the conversion, you might lose out on a potential brand ambassador and evangelist. 

So, how can you employ an after-sale lead nurture plan? Well, Marketo provides you a robust lead nurturing tool that helps run early and late stages of lead nurturing as well as customer campaigns. Let’s understand how you can use it and get the most bang for your marketing buck.

Segment the subscribers into leads and customers based on the basic segmentation criteria and their past interaction with your brand.

Your post-sales campaigns will fall under the late-stage lead nurture campaigns. In addition to the customer campaigns, this stage includes the lead hand-off and lead recycling categories too. While the former refers to the stage when a lead becomes sales-ready, the latter consists of leads that you count as sales-ready based on the lead scoring criteria. Still, the sales representative considers them to be not ready to engage. Use these details to segment your subscribers and personalize your email communications. 

Here is one of the segmentation criteria devised by Marketo, based on the role of a prospect:

Formulate different automation workflows so that you can send follow-up emails and pertinent post-sales communication, tailormade according to their preferences.

Customer campaigns must first onboard the customers and introduce them to your products and services. Gradually, you can cross-sell or up-sell other relevant products to encourage them to purchase from you again. 

Contact your customers regularly and let them know about your ongoing offers, product launches, and updates in the current services.

Customer campaigns are not limited to ‘introduction emails’ and ‘product recommendations’. Go a step further and let them know how you introduce new features in your services. You can even invite your customers to follow you on social media, which will eventually enhance your brand visibility. It will also allow them to interact with your brand on channels except for emails.  

Express gratitude and send out appreciation emails to the customers. You can even consider promoting a sale for your ‘VIP’ customers. 

Marketo sets a scaffold to send ‘Thank you’ emails to your customers. It will make them feel special and increase the likelihood of future purchases. 

Ask the customers for their feedback and give them a chance to let you know if there are any other services they expect of you. You can use Marketo email template to create impressive emails that would appeal to your target audience.   

Suppose you are a SaaS company offering multiple services and products. You can ask your existing customer for their feedback and ask them if they are looking for any other services from their company. It is a great way to drive business for your company while showing the customers that you care. 

Use Marketo’s analytics to keep a close eye on how you can track and monitor your customers’ post-sales behavior. 

Marketo gives you a clear picture of how your audience is responding to your nurturing emails. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Based on this information, you must keep optimizing your nurturing campaigns to yield tangible results. 

According to Marketo, the golden test to prove the ROI of your lead nurturing campaigns is to compare the nurtured buyers and non-nurtured buyers. You can set a benchmark and a control group that you can use to determine whether your lead nurturing program is effective or not. 

With all this said and done, the most important thing is to calculate the ROI of your lead nurturing campaigns. Apart from the open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribes, and delivery rate, you must measure advanced metrics as discussed below.

Advanced Metrics to Take Into Consideration

Engagement Metric

The Marketo Engage engagement score works to establish how engaging every message is. It considers several parameters like clicks, opens, conversions, unsubscribes, program successes, etc. Subsequently, it creates a single engagement metric by employing a statistical algorithm. 

This metric assigns a tangible number to your marketing metrics that enable you to make better decisions related to your multichannel strategy. 

Lead Acceleration

Lead acceleration gives you an insight into the time it takes to move your leads to sales or the time it takes to move them between nurturing stages and tracks. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, you must also compare the acceleration pattern between nurtured and non-nurtured leads. 

Revenue Impact

Measuring financial outcome is imperative if you want to understand whether your buyers are resonating with your campaigns. Here’s how you can determine the revenue you can drive. 

I. Count every successful touch

If you are considering a multichannel scenario, there can be successful touches across diverse channels. The email was likely the last touchpoint for your customer before making the purchase, but they interacted with your social media posts and browsed through your website, too, before making the action. Bear in mind that you must take into account the touches that led to the action. 

II. Allocate a value to the final action

Use marketing automation tools, transactional system, or CRM software to the revenue to which the action would translate.

III. Divide the value across the successful touchpoints

A simple way to understand this is that if a prospective client interacted with three marketing programs, you could assign each touchpoint one-third of the ultimate value. 

Wrapping Up

We’ve tried to cover all the golden nuggets that would help you create an effective after-sale nurture plan in Marketo. If you are a smart modern marketer, these tips would surely help you create scalable and impactful communications and help you move the prospects as well as customers closer to conversions. If you are still skeptical about how to do it, you can take help of an expert email developer who would make things a breeze for you.