Nurturing path to purchase depends on packaging as much as it does content(s)

The concept of demand generation through marketing automation may sound complex, but in reality, the concept is simple: Don’t sell when you’re ready to sell. Sell when your prospect is ready to buy. 

On the heels of my last post about using surveys to ask email recipients why they are not opening your emails, I came across a blog post from Marketo that made me think about how to leverage interactive content to engage prospects.  According to blog’s author,  Seth Lieberman, he notes the interaction between users and interactive content—i.e. meaning content that leads to an exchange of information—results in impressive interaction rates:

We’ve all been there. We send an email blast and the very first question our clients or bosses ask us is, “Who all opened it?”  or if they’re savvy, “Who all clicked on it?”  It’s a question as old as marketing, and now, thanks to technology, we can answer that.  But let’s face it, it’s led to a new heartier (and harder) question “Why didn’t they click on it?”

We have stock pile of answers:  “The offer wasn’t strong enough.”  “They’re not at this stage in the buy cycle.”  “No one opens emails on a Friday at 4:30.” But the truth is, we don’t know.  We can test, we can try, but we don’t know.  I think that’s why “How a Simple Email Can Give You Critical Insight Into Your Recipients' Behavior” resonated with me.  

I am, admittedly, a survey taker. Send me one, and I'm in. I'll admit, the offer can be weak if the information being gathered is interesting to me. So what made this blog post interesting to me isn't that people took the survey, but that it means they are not ALWAYS ignoring your emails.

As someone who bridges the gap between strategy, analytics and implementation on a day-to-day basis, I love the idea of figuring out why.  The fact that the survey email asking why people don’t engage with the emails had a record breaking engagement is the kind of nugget I latch on to.  For me, it’s proof that people don’t MIND hearing from you, but they will ignore you when you are not interesting.

What I think this post is missing is more of the “what do you do with this knowledge.”  Sure, if the majority of people say, “Your emails are too long.” then maybe you shorten your next email; or if they say, “there are too many,” you stretch them out.  But I start to picture a world of nurturing paths customized to their answers. Talk about leveraging the power of marketing automation.