One of the most critical steps to convincing a prospective customer to make the purchase – “lead nurturing”- is a strategy that’s been employed by marketers since forever. However, a recent joint report from Oracle Marketing Cloud and Bizo – “The State of B2B Lead Nurturing” – shows that, when it comes to nurturing leads, email marketing falls a bit short.
Their report states that, because of the way users are connected today, marketers should be developing multichannel lead nurturing strategies rather than relying on email marketing alone.
While the report does it show that significant investments are being made by B2B companies when it comes to lead nurturing, it also shows that nearly 80% of marketers have an email open rate of 20%, and that only a quarter of their qualified leads are being converted through email marketing. These are dismal numbers at best.
The authors of the report also said that a multichannel strategy only makes sense due to the development of new marketing automation technologies. The reason is that, although most of these technologies were initially focused on email marketing, they’ve opened the door to the possibility of reaching not only existing but new customers “across a variety of digital channels.”
Those new channels include paid search, display retargeting and social media, all three of which are believed to be highly effective lead nurturing tools and would be a valuable part of any lead nurturing strategy.