You’ve done all the work to create a campaign, educate your sales team and tweak your messaging to perfection. You’ve noticed that the message has resonated and piqued the interest of your audience. You may start to feel like you’re running a relay – eagerly awaiting the moment when you can get the next campaign in front of your audience – but not so fast.
Before you move forward with the next phase of your outreach, take a moment to pause. Now that leads have been contacted by sales or placed in the appropriate nurture stream, it’s time to take a critical eye to what worked well – and what didn’t – to optimize future campaigns.
Read on to learn more about evaluating and refining your lead follow-up strategies.
- Listen to Sales Representatives on the Front Line
You may have a great instinct for how follow-up strategies will resonate with your audience, but your sales teams will be the first to hear unfiltered feedback from prospects. If there’s a disconnect with your best-laid marketing plans or product feedback, your sales teams will likely know about it – and now is your chance to listen. Before you begin the next phase of your campaign, take 20 minutes (or less!) to host a quick roundtable with your sales leaders. You may discover that even your most well-intentioned outreach plans can feel pushy in tone or frequency. Candid discussions like these will help the entire team identify areas for improvement, which can be used to fine-tune your follow-up strategies.
- Take A Second Look at Your Content
What’s your unsubscribe rate right now? This is one of the key metrics you can track to determine how well your content is performing. If you’ve noticed a significant dropoff after recent sends, it may be time to review a few components of your campaign. First off, is your content compelling? Are you serving tailored content to your leads, or does every lead receive the same email? If you’ve crunched the numbers on your recent campaigns and feel your content is valuable (e.g. providing a solution to a pain point), take a moment to look over your email cadence. If your email sends are too frequent, you may need to reevaluate, ensuring that your messaging stands out amongst the noise that may be crowding prospects’ inboxes. Last but not least, a quick check-in with your lead generation provider could shed light on the effectiveness of your current content strategy and help determine if it’s time to modify your approach.
- Redefine Your Target Audience and/or Positioning
You already know the importance of defining your Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP), but just as your products are ever-evolving, so are your clients’ needs. If you notice a decrease in the performance or efficiency of your follow-ups, reevaluate your ICPs or the positioning of key messages to potentially uncover new approaches to target them. In doing this, you can also sync with your team about their prospects’ behavior. If your sales teams notice that they just can’t get those highly targeted leads on a call, they could try to cast a wider net. Or, if they report that their calls are constantly redirected, honing in on your targeting efforts may be just the ticket.
Taking the time to evaluate your outreach efforts is key in setting your current campaign up for success – and perhaps more importantly, using this information to refine and perfect your future follow-up strategies. Before you begin to ramp up for the next phase, check out our Lead Follow-Up Guide for more information on optimizing your approach to lead follow-up and how Spiceworks Ziff Davis’ unparalleled intelligence can help you drive revenue.