Generating a lead is an important step, but it is rarely the end of the marketing journey.

B2B buyers may encounter a company through an email, an article, an advertisement, a webinar, or another piece of content before they are ready to have a sales conversation. Each interaction can add context and help move that prospect closer to a decision. That’s why lead nurturing works best when marketers think beyond individual tactics and consider how those tactics work together over time.

Recent campaign performance data from IgniteDemand Accelerate provides an interesting look at what that can mean in practice.

Engagement Does Not Happen in One Place

One of the challenges with evaluating marketing performance is the tendency to look at each channel separately. An email campaign has its open and click-through rates. Digital content has another set of engagement metrics. Website activity may live somewhere else entirely.

Those numbers are useful, but individually they only tell part of the story.

Lead nurturing creates opportunities to continue the conversation with someone who has already demonstrated interest. An email can bring a prospect back to relevant content. A content recommendation can introduce another topic. A subsequent interaction can provide another signal about what that person or company may care about.

Over time, those signals begin to provide a clearer picture of engagement.

What We’re Seeing Across IgniteDemand Accelerate Campaigns

IgniteDemand Accelerate campaigns combine lead activity with ongoing nurture and content engagement. Looking at aggregate campaign performance provides some useful benchmarks for how audiences are interacting across those touchpoints.

Across Accelerate email campaigns, the average open rate is 45% and the average click-through rate is 2.29%. Individual campaigns have reached open rates as high as 71% and click-through rates as high as 6.2%.

Content engagement tells another part of the story. Accelerate content pop-up ads have generated an average click-through rate of 6.95%, with the highest-performing campaign reaching 9.74%. Even the lowest rate within the performance snapshot was 5.13%.

IgniteDemand Accelerate campaign performance data reflects aggregate results across campaigns and is intended to illustrate overall engagement trends. Individual campaign results will vary.

These numbers are valuable because they show engagement occurring through more than one marketing interaction. A prospect who does not click an email today may interact with content later. Someone who engages with one topic may respond differently when presented with information that more closely matches their interests.

The objective is to create additional opportunities to understand what is capturing a prospect’s attention… not just generate another click.

Lead Nurturing Gives Marketing More Time to Work

It’s easy to judge a campaign based on its first response.

Did someone fill out the form? Did they click the email? Did they request information?

Those actions matter, but B2B purchasing decisions do not necessarily follow a straight line from first interaction to sales conversation. A prospect may be researching a problem, comparing approaches, gathering information for colleagues, or simply becoming familiar with companies that could help.

That’s where nurturing can play an important role. Instead of expecting every lead to be ready for sales immediately, marketers can continue providing relevant opportunities for engagement. The resulting activity can help identify which prospects remain interested and which topics appear to matter most to them.

Your Lead Nurturing Strategy Doesn’t Have to Work Alone

Many B2B marketers already have lead nurturing programs using email campaigns, marketing automation and their own content to stay connected with prospects. But there’s an opportunity to extend that engagement beyond owned marketing channels.

Through IgniteDemand Accelerate, BNP helps our customers continue engaging prospects within the industry publications and content their audiences already turn to. By combining ongoing email nurturing with relevant content, Accelerate creates additional opportunities for prospects to interact with a BNP customer’s message.

For marketers already running their own nurture journeys, this provides another layer of engagement that can work with their existing efforts. While their internal efforts keep the conversations going, Accelerate helps maintain visibility and encourage continued interaction within their industry’s community.

The result is a more connected approach to lead nurturing, with multiple opportunities to reach prospects, reinforce messaging, and keep the conversation moving forward. Interested in how it can work for you? Schedule a demo.

More Touchpoints Also Mean More Data

There is another benefit to a multi-channel nurturing strategy that can be easily overlooked: each interaction provides additional information.

A single form fill tells you that someone was interested enough in one asset to provide their information. Continued engagement can tell you considerably more.

Those behaviors can help marketing and sales distinguish between someone who downloaded one resource months ago and a prospect showing continued interest. This is also where platforms such as IgniteDemand can be useful. By bringing campaign and engagement activity together, marketers can look beyond isolated lead reports and develop a broader view of how prospects are interacting with their campaigns.

The technology itself, however, is only part of the equation. The value comes from using that information to make better marketing and follow-up decisions.

Think in Terms of the Journey, Not the Tactic

A successful lead-generation strategy should not end when the lead arrives. You must consider what happens next.

• Does the prospect receive additional information that relates to what originally interested them?
• Are there opportunities for them to engage with relevant content?
• Can marketing see those additional interactions?
• Can sales identify which prospects appear to be becoming more engaged?

When email, content, lead gen, and engagement data are viewed as parts of the same strategy, marketers have more opportunities to learn from prospect behavior and react.

The IgniteDemand Accelerate performance data offers one example of what that ongoing engagement can look like. Strong email engagement paired with continued content interaction suggests something marketers have long understood but cannot always see clearly in individual campaign reports: marketing has more than one opportunity to earn a prospect’s attention.