Site Visitor Drip Campaigns: A Growth Strategy I Learned Too Late
People visiting your website are likely to be the ones most interested in what you’re offering, make sure to nurture them with this approach
Intro
As someone who has focused most of their career on the tech side of business, marketing and sales strategies were something I focused on primarily when I founded my startup.
That was a big mistake.
Founders need to be keenly aware of how they’re going to get customers or users.
Figuring this out is one of the most important things for new founders.
Depending on your product and your market, you’ll likely gravitate to one of several different growth strategies. If you’re an enterprise company, you’ll likely have a ton of direct sales strategies. If you’re product-led, you’ll probably be focused on marketing or community building.
No matter what your primary approach, though, you’ll likely need to nurture prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy from you yet, even if they’re interested in the solution you’re offering.
One of the best ways to do this is with drip campaigns, and specifically, drip campaigns to your site visitors.
Drip campaigns for visitors
Drip campaigns are multi-email (or SMS, or mailer, or whatever) campaigns that are sent slowly over time to your prospects. They’re designed to educate your customers and build demand for your product. Good drip campaigns can also build relationships with your prospects before you even talk to them.
Drip campaigns are typically sent out to customers that provide you with their contact information. Perhaps you’ve offered an ebook and gated it with a form that they need to fill out. Or maybe you’ve done a webinar about a key topic in your industry and you’ve got a list of attendees and their contact information. In these cases, you have a good sense for who your targets are and you can choose to create highly personalized, outbound campaigns (or, if you’re like most folks, just send out a generic email campaign to them and play the numbers game).
But chances are, you’re likely not capturing some of your most interested and highest-probability prospects — your website visitors.
Identifying your visitors
Now, I don’t have numbers on this (ooh man, not great for a data scientist), but I’d bet that most site visitors are left anonymous. Most folks aren’t giving away their contact information on your site, scheduling demos, or signing up for your product right away.
They’re browsing. And they want to remain anonymous so they don’t get a bunch of spam. But they’re still interested in what you have to offer.
From a founder’s perspective, these folks are like an untouched vein of gold. If you could get access to them, your sales team would have an easier time closing deals, or your marketing team would be able to target them with more relevant content.
Fortunately today, there are tools that help you identify the companies that are visiting your website (I’ve personally used LeadFeeder and Clearbit). While these tools don’t give you information about the individual people who are visiting your site, if you’re a B2B company, they do the next best thing. They help you identify accounts that might be primed for a conversation.
For startups that have figured out who their ideal customer profile is (personally, as a founder, I have come to hate this term 😊 — but it is important), this is money.
Since you already know who your ideal customer is, and you know which companies are visiting your website, you can easily find the relevant people at that company and start targeting them with marketing campaigns.
An example
At Apteo, we targeted D2C ecommerce marketers selling consumable, repeat-purchase products in a few key industries. We usually sold into the marketing management team — sometimes the CEO or COO at smaller companies, other times the director of marketing, or even marketing agencies that were already working with brands.
Once we identified a relevant company that fit our target customer, we would go onto LinkedIn and see who they were, and then use a tool like Apollo or Hunter to get their email address, and then add them in to a pre-existing, 3–4 month drip campaign that we had already set up on Apollo.
The first few emails in the campaign, which were spread out over a couple of weeks, would ask if the potential customer was interested in setting up a call or interested in any of the promotional offers we had.
But after a few weeks, if the prospect hadn’t responded to any of our emails, we’d shift into more of an educational strategy. In some emails, we’d discuss our own offering and product, highlighting case studies of previous successes, or ways that they could use our product to drive sales. But in other emails, we’d offer tips, resources, and general strategies for these customers to grow sales through better marketing and by using data.
And at the end of the campaign, unlike with what some other companies do, we wouldn’t send a “breakup” email. They’d simply be at the end of the campaign and would receive our bi-weekly newsletter, which contained industry news, tips, strategies, product updates, and other resources.
What to expect
The example I mentioned above shows how you can nurture a potential customer early and often, ideally adding value to their day without being overly-salesy. These sorts of campaigns are a good way to keep your solution top of mind and to build goodwill with potential future customers.
But keep in mind that they are still outbound email campaigns, and their performance will reflect that. You probably won’t get a ton of customers converting with this campaign (though you will get some).
Instead, what you might notice is that, after a few months, customers might mention that they wanted to take a call after they saw something interesting in one of your emails and their company was now considering a tool like yours. Or that they remembered seeing something from you and they were considering implementing a solution to one of their problems, and you were top of mind.
Fortunately, the majority of the work needed to run these campaigns is automated and just requires some time up front to get things set up. While you will need to periodically review your website visitor reports and potentially look up individual team members from prospective companies, you can likely automate this or do this in a few minutes a week.
Because of the low effort and potential for high lift, this strategy is almost a no-brainer, and most B2B SaaS founders would be leaving money on the table if they ignored it. That being said, when I was first starting out, I had no idea that this was something that could or should be done. But now you know, and if you’re looking to grow your inbound pipeline, you should jump on this right away.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash