How to Give Your Prospects Content They Actually Want

[Rachel_Noble]

Are your engagement rates worth writing home about?

If you answered “no,” then maybe it’s time to take a deeper dive into why your prospects are overlooking the content you worked so hard to create. Personalized emails return 6x more revenue per email than non-personalized emails. Imagine what will happen to your marketing when you take that personalization to the next level!

Here at PFL, we like to use our nurture stream audience as guinea pigs for engagement rate testing. Our latest initiative revolves around harnessing behavioral data to deliver relevant content at just the right time. The strategy: Content Binge Tracks. When leads visit our website, watch webinars, and attend tradeshow sessions, they leave valuable behavioral data about their topical interests.

Consider John Doe. Last month, John attended our webinar that focused on Demand Generation. A few days later, he read two of our Demand Gen blog posts, and then downloaded the eBook referenced in the second post. Clearly, John is interested in Demand Gen. Why not let him binge on Demand Gen content?

Our game plan:

1. Determine the most common categories our leads are interested in
   1. Account-Based Marketing
   2. Demand Gen
   3. Lead Gen
   4. Social Media Marketing
   5. Etc

If you are in B2C, think along the lines of your product offerings. Are you a kitchen appliance distributor? Maybe your categories include Refrigerators, Ovens, Small Kitchen Appliances, etc. You get the idea.

2. Create a set of emails, direct mail pieces (and if we’re feeling extra ambitious, RTP) for each of those categories
3. Create new nurture streams for each of these categories in your Engagement Program
4. Put those emails and direct mail pieces in the corresponding nurture stream, and VOILA!

Here’s how to set it up:

1. To determine categories with the highest engagement, we started by talking to our SDR team to see which categories they thought would provide the most value

OPTIONAL: if you have more time, do a website audit (or at least a blog page audit) to see which categories have the highest engagement rates

2. Go into your Engagement Program you typically use to market new leads. Add a new stream for each category

3. In your Engagement Program, add your new content to each corresponding stream
4. Set up your nurture stream transition rules to capture leads who exhibit behavior indicating they are interested in the designated topic. For example, here’s how we do it for our Demand Gen binge track:

5. But you still want to deliver educational content when they exhaust the binge track, so set up smart campaigns that transition leads back to your generic stream once the binge track content is exhausted. This is our campaign, and it runs weekly (after each cast):

And that’s it! You’re officially a data-driven marketer.