MHS
lead nurture

Work > MHS lead nurture

Setting up sales for success

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, sales teams across the world had to redefine how to function with no in-person meetings and lots of budget hesitation. While MHS’s sales team adapted to this new normal, their marketing department wanted to put a greater emphasis on lead nurture initiatives to help ease the burden. MHS’s paid media placements generate about 1,500 leads annually. But rather than just tossing those contacts over the bow to the sales team, the plan was to nurture them into warmer, marketing qualified leads via targeted email campaigns – then, give them to sales.

Organizing the conversation

Koroberi reviewed all lead generating placements in MHS’s trade media plan and categorized them by audience and topics of interest based on the promoted assets. To match the audience segments with relevant solutions, we needed four lead nurture campaigns: robotics, software, distribution and fulfillment, and peak season preparation. Then, we mapped out each nurture campaign’s path to include three basic kinds of emails:

The last email looks like something sent out of Outlook – not a designed marketing send. We included the email signature of the sales contact and a link for recipients to review their calendar availability and schedule a meeting. This final touch served as a formal hand-off to sales to continue the conversation.

Designing user-friendly templates and workflows

With content needs established, we created a suite of email templates that share a cohesive brand look and feel while accommodating the unique content needs in a variety of formats.

Collateral template

Multi-topic template

Single topic email template

Plain-text template

We coded into HTML, uploaded to Mailchimp and configured for easy, drag-and-drop use, enabling MHS to create launch-ready emails in under 15 minutes. This kind of speed allows us to add new, relevant emails to their nurture campaigns whenever they’re needed.

Then, using these templates, we built out each email for each campaign and dropped into Mailchimp’s individual linear automation structure. This workflow type allows for maximum reporting depth and flexibility, enabling customization as needed.

Reporting automated

Since drip campaigns deploy emails on a continuous basis, a static reporting structure doesn’t work well. It’s not only time consuming and often limited in insights, but the metrics are effectively out of date the second you pull them. Instead, we recommended an automated dashboard through Google Data Studio to provide a real-time view into the performance of these campaigns. We first integrated the systems – Google Data Studio, Mailchimp and Google Analytics. This allowed us to see not only the email’s open and click performance reported in Mailchimp, but also the user activity after clicking through to the MHS Global website. The dashboard allows users to view data in aggregate or drill down to the individual topic, email or lead source, and includes:

The reporting dashboard allows for more data-driven insights than previously possible. We can not only see how these email campaigns are performing, but deduce things like which assets resonate best with our target audiences, which advertising placements provide the most engaged leads, and which individuals are ready for a sales follow up.

Warm leads with hot results

The MHS email nurture campaigns are ongoing and continue to perform well above material handling industry averages. We regularly roll in new email content and incorporate new audiences, but here’s a snapshot of the performance in year one.

lead-initiated meeting requests

average open rate

0 %

average click rate

0 %

white papers accessed

case studies accessed

videos accessed

MHS
lead nurture

Setting up sales for success

Organizing the conversation

Designing user-friendly templates and workflows

Reporting automated

Email click and open rates

Most accessed assets

Website engagement

Number of leads

Warm leads with hot results

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