Written by Dann Marty and Brian Teevan, ADP Inc.

With increased focus on marketing automation tools and the concepts of lead nurturing and lead scoring in the past few years, marketers have been migrating to platforms that help them easily build email programs to target interested prospects. Clearly, the tools have helped drive better efficiencies in not only developing and managing these programs but also in reducing the marketing and sales efforts required to keep early stage buyers engaged.

However, for some marketers, the shift to leveraging automation tools has been too heavily dependent on emails, where human interaction may seem completely eliminated in the early buying stages.  Marketers can become too reliant on email as the main conduit to engage these prospects and push any human interaction until much later in the funnel.  This can be too late if the prospect had already decided to go another direction or just hasn’t had the time to read your content and trigger a high lead score.  In addition, many buyers are becoming accustomed to general top-of-the-funnel emails that look like “one size fits all” — so these efforts need to be complimented with personalized, human interactions.

Interestingly, some experts in the industry will recommend a 60/40 split between digital and human touches in nurturing programs – with the 60% weighing more heavily on the human side.  This is not always easy to accomplish as it may require work from a lead development or sales team to manage these human touches and could lead to more challenging discussions on sales and marketing alignment.  However, there are simple ways to start incorporating human touches in your nurturing programs, such as:

• Using email as a tactic to help filter and prioritize a large list down to only engaged parties that would require a human touch
• Developing a simple activity threshold in your program that would trigger a human touch – and it doesn’t need to be a complex calculation in a lead scoring program
• Depending on the source of your nurtured leads, using a first-touch phone call to identify who should receive nurturing emails and who should be completely removed from the list going forward
• Getting sales involved earlier in the funnel to help generate interest – and not necessarily only after a lead has been qualified
• And of course, developing automated, personalized messages that may give the perception of a human touch

With all the various media formats available today, adding the human touch can range from a simple direct message through social media channels to a full-fledged qualifying phone call.  The key is in coordinating these efforts in a way that positions your company as providing insightful value to the prospect – even if they are not ready to buy yet.

Dann Marty leads the development of demand generation programs at ADP under the Lead Center and Sales Enablement groups. As the head of the enterprise Lead Center, Brian Teevan is responsible for leading ADP’s lead development initiatives.