Strategic Nurture Programs Lead to 601% Increase in Inbound-Generated ROI
3PL Central has been a HubSpot power user for years, using the platform’s tools to create a strong and reliable lead generation engine fueled by creative content and clear conversion points. Everything was working, but as most B2B marketers know, as you continue to hit your goals, your goals start to get bigger.
After years of performing well, the small marketing team at 3PL Central was challenged to level up and reach a new, heftier marketing-sourced revenue goal. This posed a challenge not just for marketing, but required 3PL Central to align teams, put strong processes in place, and expand upon the touchpoints and engagement opportunities they were providing to prospects throughout their journey to purchase a Warehouse Management Software.
The Challenge
Improving the entire customer lifecycle
To boil down the challenge at hand, the 3PL Central marketing team needed to:
- Drive an increased number of leads without an increase to their small team’s limited bandwidth
- Improve conversion rates across the funnel
- Accelerate the pace in which leads convert to MQLs
- Stay in close alignment with the sales team to make sure that the quality of the leads they were delivering remained up to par as they increased the quantity
- Provide a great experience from the first moment a prospect interacts with 3PL Central to set the stage for delighting them throughout the entire customer lifecycle
Solution
Improve the process, then align technology
The first thing the marketing team did was look at internal processes to remove friction and identify gaps. Through meetings with the sales team, we broke down lead to sales handoffs and looked at metrics to identify the biggest gaps.
Key marketing to sales questions asked to identify necessary process improvements:
- Do we all agree on the current lead stages and what experience is provided at each stage?
- Why are leads disqualified and how can we improve that (for example, disqualification reasons, lead scoring, missing data)?
- Where are prospects getting stuck in the buyer’s journey?
- What are the most meaningful interactions and how can we improve them?
Having this alignment with the sales team was crucial to the next steps. To best harness the power of HubSpot, we outlined a nurture strategy designed to increase conversion rates from lead to MQL and accelerate the progression from one stage to another.
This lead to the creation of a few key nurture programs:
Awareness nurture
The goal of this is to welcome and immediately engage any net-new leads by providing helpful content and familiarize them with 3PL Central. The goal of this is to share the information they were looking for in a way that allowed them to digest it at their own pace. If their score increases quickly, they are moved to either the sales team as an MQL, or to a consideration nurture with mid-funnel content. If their score doesn’t increase, they stay on this awareness path until they are ready for more.
This was designed to share mid-funnel content, like case studies, in order to encourage leads to progress to the MQL stage through the action of requesting a demo or by interacting with content in ways that incrementally increased their lead score to reach the designated MQL scoring threshold. Once leads reach that goal and become “marketing qualified,” they are unenrolled from the nurture and passed to sales.
Post-sales nurture
This nurture encourages previously qualified leads that requested (but did not successfully complete) a demo with a member of the sales team or did not convert to become a customer to re-qualify themselves as an MQL through direct demo request or content downloads. Content is aligned to the specific Return to Nurture reason the sales team was unable to convert them (like missing features) to improve their understanding of the benefits of working with 3PL Central.
Outbound workflow
This automatically assigns leads who completed the Post-Sales Nurture to an outbound campaign in Salesforce, signifying that they are ready for 1:1 outreach after 70 days. This provides another touchpoint for BDRs, aligning how marketing and sales can best support each other.
Results
Remove friction, improve conversion rates
From 2018 to 2019, 3PL Central increased leads by 57%, while maintaining strong conversion rates. In 2018, 3PL Central had a 37% conversion rate from MQL to Opportunity Stage. In 2019, this increased drastically compared to previous year-over-year comparisons, for a 45% conversion rate. Even more exciting, when comparing the figures for 2018 revenue generated through inbound marketing vs 2019, the 3PL Central marketing team achieved a 601% increase year-over-year.
Since launch, the awareness nurture converted 50 leads to MQLs, and the consideration nurture converted 280 leads to MQLs, impacting the rate of acceleration to get these leads to the sales team.
Impact
On 3PL Central
Chelsea Mori, Director of Marketing at 3PL Central shares the direct impact of implementing a lead to sales nurture process on overall closed-won opportunity results.