Testing Your Lead Nurturing Campaign To Attract The Ideal eLearning Audience

Benefits Of Testing In Lead Nurturing
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Summary: Because there is no exact science for running a lead nurturing campaign, you need testing to help you understand what works for your audience. Make sure, though, that you don't just test for the sake of running a test.

Why Testing Is A Necessary Step In Your Lead Nurturing Campaign

Your lead nurturing campaign needs optimization if you want to reach the ideal eLearning buyers. After all of the knowledge you've gained about lead nurturing and how to do it properly, there is one final step that cannot be overlooked: testing [1]. Just like anything in marketing, analyzing the results of your efforts to see whether what you're doing is working is the most important step.

Taking the time to test gives you insight into where your lead nurturing efforts have room to be optimized or adjusted. This might be something like changing the types of messages you're sending or the time of day you're sending them. Whatever you find, you'll have a much clearer picture of how to keep moving forward.

Be thoughtful and strategic. Set goals, know exactly what you want to measure, and focus on identifying what decisions you can make to improve the success of your efforts.

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eBook Release
How To Ace Your Lead Nurturing Campaign In The eLearning Niche
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Tips To Test How Leads React To Your Campaigns

When you decide to begin testing your lead nurturing campaigns, start simple. Consider choosing one or two subject lines to test first. Then, as you go, you can start to add more variables and get creative.

Make sure, too, that you make testing a part of your day-to-day operations. It shouldn't be something that you have to put off because you feel intimidated by it. Keeping it a part of your daily routine will help you stay comfortable with it. Consider it like a practice strategy that can lead to perfection. You are the coach of your own sports team. By keeping testing in your everyday tasks you can optimize any lead nurturing campaign without anxiety. The type of actions that your leads take will eventually drive you to the results you need to succeed.

To help it feel approachable, track what you're doing. Keep a log of all tests and results so you can go back to your recorded findings to see what you've learned and share those insights with others. Your eLearning brand’s sales team and marketing team will both get ideas from those findings. Having those two departments in alignment is crucial for the success of your content marketing implementation.

When it comes to conducting your actual tests, nail down a control group before you get started. Once you do, it's important to test small groups that are still big enough to ensure your results are statistically significant. You can then incorporate the successes into your nurture emails and drip campaigns.

Finally, listen to your test results! If you don't modify your lead nurturing messages and campaigns based on what you glean from all of the testing you do, you won't be taking advantage of the opportunity to grow based on what you learn.

How Optimization And Testing Help Your Campaigns

Knowing those testing tips, it's time to see exactly how testing can work for you. It will help you understand how the results can strengthen your lead nurturing efforts. The following are 3 of the most important areas:

1. Optimization

Testing lets you continually optimize your lead nurturing campaigns to ensure they stay relevant and successful in the long term. And there are a number of ways you can harness these optimization opportunities.

To start, you can optimize how often you're sending lead nurturing messages. Having a content strategy to create funnels is one thing, but having a path to your lead nurturing campaign’s success does not include spamming your prospects. The frequency at which you send nurturing messages to your leads matters more than you might realize. Different buyers have different needs, meaning you need to tailor what you're doing and when you're doing it. How often you push messages their way in hopes of engaging with them should depend on their behavior and journey. Testing can let you see whether you're on the right track in this way.

And speaking of their path, testing can help you optimize to ensure your eLearning buyers see your nurture messages; always depending on where they are in their buyer’s journey. Simple A/B testing can show you how to change the order of your campaign messages to better meet leads where they are. Adjust your messages on a regular basis until you find the best path for your buyers.

Finally, testing your lead nurturing campaigns helps you optimize your eLearning content and creative work. This can also include A/B testing to find out which emails, social messages, and website promotions are working best and which need to be looked at again. These tests might even include working to find which types of content you need or already have.

2. eLearning Content Mix

Speaking of content, testing enables you to measure the success of your content mix and refine it. Do you create and share audio or video content with your leads? Are you only writing blog posts? Testing lets you see how your eLearning content is performing with your leads. You also get results on what kinds of content you could start using to nurture leads even better.

Because lead nurturing campaigns should always be evolving and acting as a continuous conversation, make sure you don't rigidly map them out. Testing is inherently designed to ensure your nurturing efforts don't become stagnant. Such a practice keeps your campaigns dynamic and adaptable to the needs of your leads.

If your leads don't respond as you hoped or expected at first, don't get discouraged. This is the time to use your data to its fullest potential. Data insights will help find opportunities to engage them better. Testing lets you discover new ways to create content for leads based on their behavior. It assists in tracking their stage in the buyer's journey.

3. Returns

Lead nurturing, more than anything else, should be a consistent part of your content marketing efforts. Your messages should be regular, whether they go out each week or every day to a defined, consistent target audience. You might be just posting articles but to bring traction you need to spread the word. So, you have to promote them on social media and via email marketing.

Testing lets you learn lessons that have the potential to create long-term impacts on your eLearning business. For example, you might test and find that a certain style of email subject line resonates incredibly well with your leads. While it also increases the response rate by 10%. By following the same successful recipe, you have the ability to make that impact with all future emails too.

Ultimately, testing can be a catalyst for growth and success in your lead nurturing efforts. If you aren't already measuring and tracking how your nurturing work is performing, it's time to start. Don't miss out on the potential to see what's working well and what needs attention. It can—and should—change the way you do everything when it comes to nurturing leads.

Curious to learn more about lead nurturing? Download eLearning Industry's Complete Lead Nurturing Guide for eLearning Companies

References:

[1] The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing

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