Lead Nurturing - Act-On

Lead nurturing programs are automated dialogs with qualified prospects till they exhibit enough interest to be handed off to Sales.

Automating Dialogs

It can take many months for a new lead to agree to a meeting with a salesperson. Therefore, automation is essential in order to maintain prospect mindshare in the interim.

Act-On lets you set up multi-step automated programs, that deliver a sequence of relevant and personalized communications (newsletters, case studies, white papers or invitations to events) at appropriate intervals.

It is possible to keep the messaging relevant at each step by basing the message content on a recipient's reactions to prior messages.

The Act-On platform automatically tracks all responses as prospects respond to your "drip" campaigns by clicking through, downloading white papers, submitting forms or forwarding your campaign messages. Prospects who are deemed ready for sales (because they now fall into specific behavioral segments or have passed score thresholds) can be pushed back to Salesforce.com automatically.

Programs Without Programming

With Act-On, building an automated program is very straightforward, and requires no coding skills.

Use a simple drag-and-drop metaphor to stack the steps that make up your program. Drill into each step to define the specifics.

You can start off with a "drip" program consisting of a simple sequence of messages. As you get comfortable with the technology, you can layer in more complex logic, for example to select different messages to send based on past behavior. Finally, you can get more fancy with multiple programs and being able to move prospects between them based on reactions to past messages.

Triggering

Programs are associated with specific lists or segments.

Once a program is activated, prospects enter it automatically when they are added to that list (or fall into that segment). This can happen in many ways and for many reasons. Some examples:

• When a prospect fills out a form, the data could get added to a list with an associated program.
• Updating a prospect's profile could move it into a segment with an associated program.
• Sales can disqualify a prospect and move it into a segment with a nurturing program.
• A program step can move a prospect from one list to another one with a different program.