B2B Marketing: 74% lift in leads from email segmentation, content marketing and tool consolidation

One of the most helpful and useful approaches for an effective nurture strategy is knowing where potential customers are on the buyer’s journey.

However, when your email tools and strategies are not aligned for your global company, implementing this strategy can become problematic. That’s the challenge Stephen Bruner, Marketing Manager, Vertical Markets, Precor, and his marketing team faced.

Precor is a global manufacturer of fitness equipment and the second largest industry manufacturer in the United States. The company is owned by Amer Sports, which is a sporting goods company headquartered in Finland with net sales that, according to the company’s site, totaled EUR 2,228.7 million in 2014.

According to Bruner, Precor has been around since 1980 and has two divisions to its company — a commercial and consumer division. Bruner and his team focus on the commercial side of the business, which represents 80% of Precor’s revenue.

The company had a crude nurture system in place when Bruner joined Precor, but he saw room for improvement. Specifically, there was no link between the lead nurture cycle and the CRM (customer relationship management).

"As you might imagine if we in marketing are going through this customer lifecycle, but we’re not being informed by the CRM, which regularly gets data inputs from the sales force and support organization, we just didn’t know where people were," Bruner said.

Bruner and his team developed a system that helped them integrate the lead nurturing cycle with the CRM and, as a result, improve the buyer’s journey and lead nurturing process. This system can be broken down into four steps:

1. Educate your team and vet out ideas


2. "Persona"-fy your CRM


3. Plan and execute email automation


4. Nurture with relevant content

"We wanted to put the customer’s interests first and say, 'let’s not confuse the customer,'" he said.

Through this effort, Precor was able to achieve:

• 74% increase in raw leads (by integrating behavioral approaches)


• 3x the engagement from the previous year


• 67% increase in MQL to SQL velocity

Learn in this session from MarketingSherpa Summit 2015 how Bruner and his marketing team were able to consolidate their tools and data to implement automation into their email program and increase new leads through this updated nurture process.

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Marketing Automation: Precor achieves 74% lift in new leads via segmented database overhaul