4 Ways to Create Your Own Multi-Step Campaigns

Unlike the one liners used to sell hamburgers, complex products require a richer story line with multiple steps to close the deal.  Indeed, the time and relationship building required to make a sale increases with the price and complexity of the purchase (figure 1).  Companies that can figure out how to build trust while educating the customer on their best options will win in this long play marketplace.    This article describes why product marketers deploy multi-step messages and 4 simple steps to create your own campaigns. 

 Figure 1: Product investment curve

Let’s agree that not all leads are ready to speak with a sales agent and sales agents don’t want to speak with all leads.  The vast majority of total leads are not ready to engage with a sales person, yet.  These potentials need to be nurtured in the most efficient way possible until they are ready for a limited amount of salespeople to help close the sale. 

Multi-step campaigns increase sales efficiency in two ways:

1. Accelerating customer readiness through automated channels
2. Identifying the qualified opportunities that deserve focused sales team attention

Automating the task of turning marketing ready leads into sales ready leads is scalable and cost effective. This increases the ability to focus sales agent on higher converting leads.  Let’s see this in action. 

For a one step process, imagine a car owner who needs an oil change.  They probably have a service station they frequent, so the full purchase decision is a phone call to schedule the service.  Even a new customer would be able to select a station and schedule the oil change in a few simple steps based on location and advertised price.

For a multi-step process, let’s consider a new car dealership.  Like the service center, the dealership wants to increases sales.  But on high ticket items like a new car,  it’s a long way from vaguely interested to car buyer.  So the dealership breaks the problem into pieces. 

They start by placing local media to generate interest. These ads point to the website and encourage research.  For those who show higher interest, for example by spending at least 5 minutes checking out the cars on offer, the dealer can provide a discount offer for scheduling a test drive.  Even if this prospect doesn’t purchase after the test drive, they may still purchase a car in the future. 

This long play relationship uses automated channels like email, digital retargeting, SMS, Dir Mail, and Phone for long term nurture and new releases and sales notifications.  More personal channels like an outbound sales call can then be saved for customers who show relevant interest in terms of digital and in person behavior. 

  

4 ways to create your own Multi-Step programs

1. Start with the end in mind: Define the success criteria in terms of actions the customer needs to accomplish.
2. Break the problem into natural stages: define the full customer journey by stage, including the required actions to progress (research, inquire, compare, buy, use, repurchase). 
3.  Motivation ≥  Perceived effort: At each stage the required customer effort to proceed must be less than the customer’s motivation.  If it doesn’t, consider smaller steps.  If a prospect isn’t willing to share all their personal info at an early stage, isn’t it better to simply capture their name and email to continue the dialogue?
4.  Personalize the message and channel mix:  Use message personalization to get noticed.  Also experiment with different channels frequency, and sequence to increase campaign effectiveness with “surround sound” messaging.

Sounds easy enough, but what about our car dealership friend?  Here’s an illustration of how this might this play out for her.

1. Start with the end in mind: The dealer’s end goal is sales.  She has identified test drives as a high opportunity flow of high converting leads as the behavior to encourage.    But she has a limited number of staff and test cars, so it’s important to encourage test drives for the most qualified prospects. 

2. Break the problem into stages: The dealer plots the desired journey.  Generate Interest, Customer Research, Select the dealerships, Schedule test drive.  

3. Step into the Customer’s Mind: For this dealership, most customers fall into two categories, anonymous shoppers and brand loyalists.  Brand loyalists are excellent customers but are a small population and only grow when the dealership acquires new customers.  So the dealer focuses on anonymous shoppers and how to encourage them to do research on their brand. 
Games and quizzes can work well here to encourage introductory research, as well as SEO marketing articles.  But to make the leap from anonymous web search to scheduling a test drive, the dealer realizes she needs to offer an incentive.  The trick is to only offer it to customers who have shown sufficient intent to increase the chance of conversion. 

4. Personalize the Message & Mix:   By placing cookies on their site, the dealer is able to recognize past visitors and serve up content relevant to past visits.  This browser history is important to log repeat visitors and see what brands and options interest them.  Once on their radar, the dealer can serve up pop ups and Facebook ads presenting test drive offers with the specific car the prospect has viewed to select visitors who fulfilled a minimum set of digital actions and browser behavior. 

In situations with longer sales cycles and larger investment products, it’s difficult to go from 0 to 60 in the first interaction with a prospect. Multi-touch marketing helps to nurture marketing ready leads into sales ready leads at a pace that fits the customer’s motivation.  As the old adage says, “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.”