B2B Lead Nurturing: Automate Direct Mail to Boost Results

Every business wants to generate leads. But the real challenge lies in converting these leads. 

That’s where lead nurturing comes into the picture. Companies that implement successful lead nurturing strategies generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. 

When it comes to B2B businesses that have a long sales cycle, effective B2B lead nurturing strategies become even more crucial. One method is to have direct mail automation in place for the lead nurturing process. 

Let’s understand more about this.  

Who to Call Next: Scoring Your Leads 

Not all generated leads hold the same importance. For example, a lead that clicked on your “Watch demo” CTA is far more conversion-ready than one who recently subscribed to your newsletter.
The way your marketing and sales teams approach these leads will differ. It will also take different resources and time to nurture these leads.

That’s why lead scoring is so important. It involves assigning a value to each lead based on categories, including

• lead source,
• engagement level, 
• company size, 
• sales funnel stage, 
• resemblance to existing customers,
• and requests for product demos or free trials.

An ideal way is to assign this score based on demographic and behavioral data. 

When you adopt a lead scoring system, it becomes easy for your team to prioritize the leads they should go after today versus those they should keep nurturing. 

Insights on Utilizing Dynamic Lead Scoring Models 

The lead scoring model changes from company to company. Here are three models you can consider for your lead nurturing efforts.

• Explicit scoring: In this model, you assign scores based on explicit characteristics like job title, company size, years of running, geographic location, company revenue, etc. For example, if you cater to enterprise-level companies, companies with 200 or more people would get a better score than one with 30 people.
• Implicit scoring: This model assigns scores based on implicit behavioral characteristics like website visits, pricing page visits, content downloads, contact form submissions, free trial opt-ins, etc. This contributes to your explicit scoring as a prospect can only be scored once for the company size but will be scored every time they visit the product page.
• Negative scoring: While certain prospect behaviors are positive, some show a decreasing interest in your product. You subtract these points from a lead score based on their actions, like unsubscribing from your email list or showing more interest in your “careers” page than the “pricing” page.

Ensure you refine these scores often, as a lead that shows a lesser score today might show a higher one tomorrow.

Enhancing Email Performance with Direct Mail 

Once you’ve scored your leads, it’s time to reach out to them. Here’s where a combination of email and direct mail can help you out. 

To nurture these leads, you can create different lead-nurturing campaigns based on demographic and behavioral characteristics. For example, while you might want to send additional content to those leads that interact with your content emails, you might share a discount code self-mailer to someone who abandoned their purchase on your site. 

Instead of resorting to just email campaigns, mix it up by adding direct mail marketing. Studies show that the conversion rate of direct mail can reach up to 28% when combined with digital ads.

For example, many customers won’t be that active on email. Whenever you see a lead not opening or responding to your emails, you can send a direct mail campaign to them. 

Reduce Direct Mail Fixed Costs Through Automation 

While many businesses consider direct mail marketing an expensive avenue, that’s no longer true with direct mail automation platforms like Postalytics.

For example, Zogics, an ecommerce company, saw a 500% increase in ROI, a 140% increase in order volume, and a significant reduction in costs and time conducting direct mail campaigns with Postalytics.

Some other benefits that automation provides are:

• You can reduce manual errors. For example, our platform provides easy import of contact lists, address verification tools, design testing functionality, and easy collaboration among team members, thus ensuring that costly errors do not take place.
• A lot of manual or low-value activities get automated. For example, instead of spending weeks designing your postcards, you can save time and money with readymade templates on Postalytics.
• As there are no fixed minimum mail requirements and everything works on credits, you can easily scale your campaigns as the business grows.
• Make lead nurturing easy with triggered mails. You can trigger direct mails without any human intervention based on certain criteria.

Event-Triggered Mailings for Timely Communications 

Gone are the days when prospects converted after reading your email or talking with your team member on a call. These days, multi-touch campaigns are all the hype because prospects are taking longer to convert. The reasons could be many, like various options or no urgency. 

In such a scenario, using event-triggered mailings could be a great lead-nurturing strategy. These direct mails are sent based on an action your prospect takes. For example, sending a discount code via postcard when 10 days have passed after your prospect signed up for your free trial or subscribed to your email list. 

You can even integrate your Postalytics account with HubSpot or the CRM tool of your choice to trigger events based on the changing data in these tools. For example, sending direct mail when the prospect data in your CRM changes from “sent email” to “opened email.”  

B2B Lead Nurturing Best Practices: Automated Direct Mail 

Instead of creating your campaigns haphazardly or imitating email strategies for direct mail campaigns, here are five steps to help you get the most out of your direct mail lead nurturing.

Step #1 Designing Buyer Persona-Centric Postcards for Direct Mail 

Before you start designing your campaign, you need to have a good idea of your target audience. One way is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona denotes your ideal customer based on past customer data or market research. It includes demographics, pain points, customer motivations, challenges, goals, spending capability, etc. 

Here’s an example for you to get started. 

Once you have the necessary details, you can start using readymade templates in Postalytics to design your postcard. 

You can even personalize these postcards using the data you gathered about your buyer personas. You can fetch this data from your CRM tools like HubSpot. 

You can create variants for A/B testing and get your designs proofed by our in-built online proofing tool. This removes many unnecessary tasks like exporting data, sending files to a printer, and waiting for a print technician to send the proof. 

Step #2 Utilizing Enhanced Personalization to Generate Leads 

Personalization is a crucial part of any lead nurturing campaign. The more targeted your message is, the higher the chances of conversions.  

Instead of just inserting the recipient names, Postalytics helps you personalize every aspect of your direct mail campaign with advanced tools like variable data and variable logic. If you opt for variable logic, you can use simple IF/THEN statements to showcase different images and texts to different segments.  

For example, if the company size exceeds 300, showcase ‘X’ image. If it is less than 300, showcase ‘Y’ image. 

You can create variations like this for different customer segments or buyer personas. Many businesses even create CTA variations depending on the behavioral traits of the recipients. For example, if someone purchased a product earlier because of a discount deal, you can offer those recipients discount codes to encourage purchase.  

Step #3 Building an On-Demand, Behavior-Based Drip Campaign 

Behavior-based triggered campaigns are the best option if you want to create campaigns that scale efficiently.  

Once you have designed and finalized the copy for your postcard, click “New campaign” under the Campaign menu and select “Triggered Drip Campaign.” 

You’ll automatically navigate to the wizard that will guide you through the process step by step. 

The next step is to choose the integration to identify the source of the trigger. You can choose from HubSpot, Salesforce, Klaviyo, Zapier, etc. 

Then enter basic details like campaign name and return address, and select your desired template.  

You can set up pURLs for audience tracking and bringing your recipients online to fulfill a desired action, like making a purchase or signing up for a free trial. 

Your triggered drip campaign is now ready, and you can integrate it into your CRM workflows for lead nurturing. 

Step #4 Setting up HubSpot Workflow for Automated, Timely Mailings 

Now that your triggered drip campaign is finalized and set up, you can build a HubSpot workflow to automate your direct mail campaigns. 

Let’s set up a workflow for leads who have unsubscribed from your email list but are still active. 

You need to identify the events or conditions that will trigger an automated mailing. We can define a lead meeting all or one of these conditions as a trigger: 

• Opted out of our marketing information or sales emails
• Fulfills our criteria for a marketing-qualified lead
• Has completed our form to download the “Early results are in” report
• Has viewed our pricing page at least five times

Next, “Add an action,” within your workflow by clicking the “Send direct mail with Postalytics” button in HubSpot. 

You’ll be prompted to choose the campaign we have set up and map HubSpot contact fields to the corresponding Postalytics contact fields. 

After verifying everything, you can move your campaign to live mode.  

Step #5 Ensuring Consistency to Stay Top of Mind 

Not every prospect will convert on the first direct mail or the second email. With so many options on the market, your business needs to stay on the prospect’s top of mind. 

To do that, you need to create workflows with multi-touch campaigns. For example, after a prospect signs up for your newsletter, you can send them an email with your top-performing content that is relevant to them. After a few days, you can trigger a direct mail with marketing content on what they will gain from subscribing to your tool. 

This can be followed by a discount code or a limited-time deal to encourage the subscription. 

You can even keep sending them informational content that would be helpful to your recipients. 

Accelerating Growth with Automated B2B Lead Nurturing 

An effective B2B lead nurturing strategy can increase conversions and revenue. While these strategies have many long-term benefits, you need to focus on creating buyer-centric campaigns, setting behavior-based drip campaigns, and automating manual tasks to reduce errors. 

Adopting direct mail marketing for your lead nurturing can help you cut through the email noise and reach your audience in a more personalized way.  

With Postalytics, you can get various automation tools to help you design an effective lead-nurturing campaign that hits the mark. 

Try it out for free today.