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Our Senior Living Marketing System

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We recently became part of Duct Tape Marketing, a network of marketing agencies and consultants from around the world.

As the Duct Tape Marketing website explains, “Duct Tape Marketing is founded on the simple belief that marketing is the most important small business system. And we just so happen to believe that small business owners are the true heroes of business, so we’ve made it our mission to build, train, support, and teach small business marketing strategies and tactics to as many of these heroes as possible.”

For us, we joined Duct Tape Marketing for three reasons:

  1. We wanted to bring in thought leadership from outside the senior living industry.
  2. We wanted to participate in a community of professionals who are as passionate about marketing as we are.
  3. We wanted to use a proven system that simplifies digital marketing.

Being a part of the network has helped us refine how we work with our clients. This has resulted in our ability to offer clients more choices, dependable delivery of work within budget and timeframes, and consistent results.

So, what is this marketing “system” that Duct Tape promotes? The system’s foundation involves creating three levels of marketing support: Build, Grow, and Ignite.

For the Build phase, we create a solid digital foundation that enables prospects to easily find your senior living community.

A strong digital foundation includes many components:

Once that work is complete, we move into Grow.

This is when we focus on content, such as . . .

When it comes to content, we create compelling pieces for all stages of the prospect journey so they will keep coming back to your website. With this new content, we can also optimize a variety of social channels (think Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest). In addition, we often start (or re-start) a monthly email newsletter to re-engage existing leads.

Then, we move to Ignite.

We fire up the lead generation turbo booster known as marketing automation. Marketing automation offers many benefits, but the biggest one is that it automatically scores and segments leads.

Remember, not all leads are created equal! Some leads are in the early stages of their journey, conducting research. They have no interest in talking to sales—yet. Other leads need to decide soon. And still other leads will fall somewhere in between.

How you treat different leads will—and should—vary, based on where the lead is in their journey. Your marketing team will work on nurturing the “not ready” leads (i.e., marketing-qualified leads or MQLs). In the meantime, the sales team will work on the sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

The marketing automation system makes this process seamless, by automatically serving up the SQLs to the sales team (and, ideally, your senior living CRM). For the MQLs, the marketing automation funnels them to appropriate lead nurturing workflows based on how they engaged with your site and what answers they provided on opt-in website forms.

This saves everyone time, and it increases conversions, since your sales team will only be focusing on high-intent leads rather than ALL leads.

During the Ignite phase, we often implement paid advertising to increase the number of qualified prospects coming to your site. We are good stewards of client budget. And we don’t recommend pursuing paid advertising until we reach the Ignite phase. After all, why waste money driving people to a bad website with poor navigation, limited content, and nothing to do when they get there?

This three-prong approach to senior living marketing has many advantages.

First, it aligns expectations and timelines for deliverables. Second, it keeps everyone focused on results. And, finally, it works! Interested in learning more? Let’s set up a complimentary 30-minute brainstorming session so we can discuss your senior living marketing and sales challenges.

Connect with us to learn more!

Let’s chat about your senior living marketing and sales challenges.

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Senior Living Marketing Automation Platforms: How to Choose

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If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know we’re big fans of marketing automation platforms for senior living communities.

Last year, we provided some tips for evaluating different platforms. That discussion resulted in some good questions from readers, including costs and our recommendations. So we’re addressing some of these questions here.

What’s the most important thing to consider when choosing marketing automation?

The most important thing to consider is the functionality your marketing and sales teams need. THIS WILL VARY COMMUNITY TO COMMUNITY. Survey your teams regarding what they want and what they feel is currently lacking when it comes to things like scoring leads (marketing-qualified vs. sales-qualified), segmenting leads, nurturing leads, and analyzing leads and conversions.

For example, maybe you simply need lead nurturing, not a centralized marketing hub that does everything (including your laundry).

Or maybe your teams have gotten adept at deciphering Google Analytics. If that’s the case, you might opt for marketing automation that provides only basic key performance indicators (KPIs) rather than endless options for sophisticated reports.

Or perhaps you already have a thriving blog on your senior living website. You won’t need blogging functionality, which tends to be a popular option in many high-end automation platforms.

How much does marketing automation cost?

Price points vary just as widely as the products themselves. And here’s the thing: Pricier products aren’t always better. Typically, the more expensive, the more functionality. (But, of course, some products might have inflated price points. Always make sure you understand what you’re buying.)

Remember, buy for your marketing and sales teams’ needs. Start with what the automation software must do. Then, look for companies that offer products that match those desired capabilities.

Going back to our example above: If you don’t need blogging capabilities, don’t consider products (or product tiers) that have a blogging function since that will only jack up the price.
A few other things to consider when comparing price points:

  • Will you be paying monthly or annually? Some marketing automation companies offer a discount if you opt for an annual subscription.
  • How does the automation company base its subscriptions? Is it based on the entire number of contacts in your database? How does it alert you if you’re skirting close to the next subscription tier? (Which can often result in a price increase.)
  • Do you need to consider who will be managing the marketing automation implementation and ongoing management? If you outsource this to a marketing agency, like ours, you need to consider those costs as well.
  • Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. This should be obvious, but in case someone needs to hear it, there you go!
Download our Hubspot for Senior Living Guide

Should my senior living CRM integrate with my marketing automation platform?

We believe integration is critical because you want marketing and sales to work in harmony. No more silo mentality here! Marketing automation, when implemented correctly, will serve up sales-qualified leads to sales while continuing to nurture the marketing-qualified leads until they’re ready for a sales interaction.

Connecting your CRM and your marketing automation software helps “close the loop” and supplies important insights to both teams about the quality of leads and conversions.

That said, buyer beware! You should NOT settle for an inferior marketing automation product that is “built in” to your senior living CRM.

Ugh, so does this mean I’ll be limited in marketing automation platforms based on the CRM I’m already using?

Not necessarily. The best solution is to find the marketing automation platform that best meets your needs and then find a CRM integration partner (like us!). We’ve done successful marketing automation integrations with almost all of the senior living CRMs.

What marketing automation platforms do we recommend?

HubSpot is an excellent “Cadillac” solution with plenty of sophisticated capabilities, like lead scoring, personalization tokens, smart CTAs, and amazing analytics (just to name a few items). ActiveCampaign marketing automation (not to be confused with ActiveDEMAND) is an excellent budget-friendly option for basic emailing and lead nurturing functionality.

If someone wants to have a centralized marketing portal to run their paid/social campaigns, blog, and lead nurturing plus CRM integration and robust custom reporting, HubSpot is the way to go. But we recommend that you work through a HubSpot certified partner (like us!). An integration partner will make sure you get the right package. In addition, they can negotiate pricing on your behalf. We recently saved a client over $70,000 in first-year licensing fees!

Still need help choosing a marketing automation platform? You're in the right place!

Trust us, we get how overwhelming it can be. We’d be happy to provide guidance and/or our thoughts on the products you’re considering (even if you plan on handling everything in-house!). Get in touch and let’s chat about your marketing automation needs.

Let’s Chat!
What to look for when choosing a Senior Living CRM software

3 Tips for Evaluating Senior Living Software: Marketing Automation

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Senior living communities need a wide variety of senior living software to support operations—from electronic medical records to CRMs to everything in between. Today, we’re going to talk about an important piece of senior living software for the marketing and sales department: marketing automation.

First, what is marketing automation?

With marketing automation, you can easily schedule and duplicate various marketing tasks (typically connected with actions on your website) to happen without any further work on your part.

For example, you can have your marketing automation “score” every lead that comes into your website as a marketing-qualified lead or a sales-qualified lead based on criteria you set. The marketing leads will automatically enter email workflows that will nurture them. The sales leads will immediately go to sales for follow up. All of this happens AUTOMATICALLY without anyone having to label things manually. This frees up the marketing and sales teams to focus on substantive tasks.

Learn more about what marketing automation is.

Does your senior living community need marketing automation?

The goal with marketing automation is to make everyone’s lives easier. Think marketing, sales, and even your prospects. Every senior living community operating today needs some level of marketing automation in order to remain competitive.

In other words, the question isn’t whether you need it. The question is what type of marketing automation you need. Below, we discuss three tips for evaluating this important piece of senior living software.

How should you evaluate different marketing automation solutions?

1. Consider what your teams need.

Marketing automation companies typically offer different tiers ranging from basic products to the Cadillac version. Get the right solution for your needs. You don’t want to spend dollars on features your teams don’t need or won’t use.

Questions to ask as you evaluate marketing automation:

  • What’s your number one reason for investing in marketing automation right now? Make sure you can articulate this clearly.
  • How easily does the marketing automation software scale? For example, if you’re looking to expand your senior living portfolio in 2021 and 2022, how easily can new communities get on board with the solution?
  • How much does it cost? When comparing products, make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. Some solutions might bill based on the number of contacts. Others might bill on the number of marketing emails you send. Understand ALL the costs.
  • Can it easily integrate with your existing technology? Will it “play nice” with your current website? Will it integrate with your senior living CRM? These are the two most important pieces of technology to consider. But if your community uses any other apps/technology, make sure you understand any integration limitations.
  • Is it intuitive? You’ll want to sit in on a few demos. Does the interface make sense? Can you follow along with how things work? Can you see your team using the software?
  • Is it built specifically for the senior living industry? If not, can it adapt to the industry’s needs? Most marketing automation companies will highlight the industries they serve. Check out their websites. Look for case studies that talk about how the software is used in other senior living settings.
  • What sort of support does the company offer? Ideally, look for a company that builds relationships with its customers. You will need tech support at some point.
  • What are the analytics like? The best marketing automation provides solid insights into results—click-through rates, conversions, engagement, etc.
  • Will you be managing the marketing automation yourself? Or will a third party, like a marketing agency, be assisting? While marketing automation does save time by automating many functions, you shouldn’t treat it as a “turn it on and forget it” sort of system. If you only have the budget for one or two people to manage it, then you might want to opt for a simpler solution or a basic version of a product that has tiered options.

2. Read reviews on marketing automation software.

Capterra does an excellent job curating reviews and providing objectives pros and cons. However, the list for marketing automation software is overwhelming. So you might want to start with Capterra’s Top 20 Report.

When perusing reviews, don’t simply read the five- and one-star reviews. Those will be predictable. The five-star reviews will make the product sound like the best thing since sliced bread. The one-star reviews will make the product sound like it was developed by a child. Instead, pay close attention to the three-star reviews. Those will often provide the most revealing—and helpful—insights regarding the solution.

Pay attention to how the marketing automation company responds to negative reviews. You can tell a lot about a company by how they respond to critical feedback.

3. Ask for recommendations from senior living marketing agencies.

Again, you could ask any marketing agency for its preference. (They will definitely have one!) But asking an agency with senior living experience makes much more sense. A senior living marketing agency will understand the types of software a community like yours needs in order to achieve its marketing and sales goals.

At Senior Living SMART, we’re big fans of HubSpot. (Full disclosure: We’re a HubSpot Gold Solutions Partner.) But that doesn’t mean we’re not fans of other products. Many good marketing automation products exist. (As well as not-so-good products.) If you’ve whittled down your list to three or four (even if HubSpot isn’t on the list), we’d be happy to discuss your options in a free 30-minute brainstorm.

Download our Hubspot for Senior Living Guide

And if you're just getting started with thinking about marketing automation, even better!

We can help you from start to finish, including choosing the right product for your community, setting it up, and analyzing the results. Get in touch!

Let’s Chat!

Robot helping sales person write emails and complete tasks

Senior Living Sales Strategies: 3 Surprising Benefits of Marketing Automation

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We don’t have to tell you that senior living is an ultra-competitive industry. You live and breathe it every day, right? Which is why you always need to find ways to enhance your senior living sales strategies. Good news! Marketing automation is an effective budge-friendly way to do exactly that.

Here are three surprising benefits.

1. Say hello to your “always on” sales assistant.

When it comes to successful lead conversion, here are the two biggest factors:

  • How quickly leads are responded to
  • The persistence of follow-up attempts

Let’s tackle that first factor. Marketing automation ensures that your senior living leads receive an instant response after they take an action on your site. If they fill out a form, for example, they’ll automatically be redirected to a thank-you page that speaks directly to them. AND they’ll receive an auto responder email.

Everything happens automatically in the background—whether it’s 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. And it happens no matter what’s going on in the world, like a pandemic. In other words, marketing automation becomes your 24/7 sales assistant.

Now, let’s discuss the second factor: persistence of follow-up attempts. Remember, you want to implement effective senior living sales strategies. With marketing automation, instead of lumping all leads together and handling them the same way, you can segment leads, score them appropriately, and create custom lead nurturing workflows.

Gone are the days of treating cool leads the same way you do hot leads. Truly hot leads—for example, someone requesting a tour tomorrow—can be passed off to sales and handled ASAP. But cooler leads can be nurtured according to their needs, interests, and timelines. You can customize your messaging so it speaks TO the person (rather than simply some generic message that you share with everyone).

BENEFITS RECAP: Marketing automation ensures that every prospect gets an almost instantaneous response and a reliable follow-up plan. Follow-up effectiveness and timeliness no longer depend on the availability or skillset of the community sales person. Now, the sales team members can focus on their strengths, such as building relationships with prospects, rather than performing rote tasks (like sending brochures).

2. Eliminate the blind spots in the sales process.

Marketing automation provides visibility into every action a prospect takes on your site. Think the number of times the person visited a specific page, the blog posts they read, how long they spent on a page, and so forth.

So, for example, if someone requests a tour and the sales person can see that the prospect spent a lot of time consuming financial-related info as well as articles about amenities your community offers, the sales rep can be sure to discuss those two areas.

In addition, when you integrate your marketing automation software with your senior living CRM, you’ll get an excellent big picture regarding sales conversion points (i.e., tours, deposits, and move-ins). With this knowledge, you can measure the ROI of every marketing effort and channel. This is critical since more and more marketing budgets are being slashed and/or coming under greater scrutiny.

BENEFITS RECAP: Building a profile of each prospect and passing that information on to the sales team empowers them with relevant information to personalize their interactions.

3. Nurture “not ready” leads until they ARE ready to decide.

We touched on this in the first point, but let’s take a deeper dive. The majority (up to 90%) of the prospects visiting your website are “early stage” opportunities. They want to remain anonymous and gather knowledge, information, and resources in a self-directed way.

Your website should provide everything the early-stage prospect seeks. You should provide this info without requiring the prospect to engage in a sales interaction.

Once you get people’s info, you need to be thoughtful in how you handle it. Your sales team shouldn’t be wasting valuable time pestering “not ready yet” leads with calls and emails.

Instead, marketing should handle these leads by entering them into custom lead nurturing workflows. When we say “custom,” we mean custom, too. The workflows shouldn’t be one size fits all. You should have a set of workflows to match specific lead attributes, like buyer persona and timeframe. Robust marketing automation can ensure the right person gets the right set of emails at the right time.

BENEFITS RECAP: With strategic lead nurturing, you’ll build trust and demonstrate your community’s expertise. When the person is ready to book a tour, request pricing, or make the leap and move in, your community will be top of mind. (BONUS: We’ve designed a turnkey lead nurturing program for SUPER COLD senior living leads. We’re talking leads that have been sitting in your CRM for over six months. LEARN MORE.)

Download our Hubspot for Senior Living Guide

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Senior Living Sales: How to Cater to the Prospect’s Journey

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When it comes to senior living sales and marketing, understanding what your prospects want and need at any given moment is critical. But here’s the thing: The prospect journey is rarely linear. A prospect doesn’t wake up one day and decide to move into a senior living community the next.

For some prospects, they might research and think through options for several years before making the move. Other prospects might be on a tighter timeframe and make a decision within six months. For others, it might be three months.

Plenty of prospects aren’t even buying for themselves, but rather someone they love. Not to mention, many prospects often go back and forth between being “sales qualified” and “marketing qualified.” And, of course, the sales cycle for all of the above has grown more complex, thanks to COVID-19.

The biggest challenge for senior living marketing and sales teams is finding a way to meet each prospect wherever they are on their individual journey. This level of customization was impossible two decades ago. But now, thanks to marketing automation, you can create custom experiences based on a prospect’s actions, interests, and motivations.

How marketing automation enhances the prospect journey

1. Keeps prospects engaged with your brand

Even if the prospect doesn’t always open your lead nurturing emails, simply seeing your name show up in their inbox helps to keep your community front and center in their minds. For those who do open the emails, a personal touch and warm, reassuring tone can go a long way in helping the prospect feel positive about your brand.

2. Entices prospects back to your site

Through engaging lead nurturing emails, you’ll offer helpful content that entices prospects back to your site. Once there, and depending on how well your site is developed, you can engage with them further by offering more content or by providing ways to interact with the site (through live chat or interactive surveys, for example).

3. Automatically matches the right content/message to the right prospect

Again, the main tenet of successful lead nurturing is providing the right content to the right prospect at the right time. You can gather much of this intel through your website opt-in forms and lead scoring. This info will automatically funnel to your marketing automation system. From there, every lead will enter a workflow that makes the most sense for them.

4. Provides real-time insights on what’s resonating and what isn’t

Instead of cold calling all leads (regardless of their level of interest), your sales team can dip into the backend analytics and see how prospects are responding to lead nurturing in real time.

For example, maybe your sales rep notes a prospect who has opened the last three lead nurturing emails and clicked on each offer inside. From there, the person ends up spending 10-15 minutes on the site. This person might indeed be a “hot prospect” and the sales rep might actually get somewhere if they call the person.

In addition, marketing and sales can get a good sense of what type of content works best. Perhaps your prospects love videos. Or maybe they love free guides. You can develop more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

5. Helps move marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs) over time

Lead nurturing’s main purpose is to move MQLs to SQLs over time. A thoughtful approach and robust marketing automation can help make sure you achieve this goal.

6. Offers a much less intrusive way for your brand to stay in front of prospects

People will often engage with a brand a half dozen (or even more) times before they’re interested in taking a call with a sales rep. Lead nurturing caters to this shift by providing a much less intrusive way for your brand to stay connected with prospects.

Of course, before you can create the right customized journeys, you need to understand your prospects.

We call this work persona development. Think about your favorite residents. Wouldn’t you want to fill your community full of residents just like them? You can! Persona development helps you identify the traits and behaviors of your ideal prospect. You then develop a customized journey that will attract and nurture more of these ideal prospects.

Remember, when it comes to senior living marketing and sales, it’s not about getting more leads. It’s about getting the right leads—those that match your ideal prospect persona and are a good fit for the lifestyle services that you provide.

 

 

Process of leads production on the conveyor belt.

Not All Senior Living Leads Are Created Equal (the Pizza Shop Analogy)

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Read that headline again: Not all senior living leads are created equal. Too often, however, marketing and sales teams treat every lead the same way. We’ve discussed this point ad nauseam on our blog. So maybe it’s time to mix it up. Let’s use an analogy that demonstrates the problem with this approach.

Pretend you own a pizza shop. Would you serve every person who walked through the doors a small pepperoni pizza?

Of course not.

Some folks might prefer sausage to pepperoni. Others might be vegetarians craving peppers and onions. Some might be perfectly fine with pepperoni, but they need to feed a family of four, so a small pizza won’t work. Others might be in the mood for a calzone, sub, or salad. And, of course, some people might simply be looking for directions—or a job.

This is why when someone calls or enters a pizza shop, the pizza shop employee says, “How can I help you?” rather than “We’re giving you a pepperoni pizza whether you want one or not.”

You need to start thinking of your senior living website as if it’s a pizza shop.

Don’t serve everyone the same small pepperoni pizza. Instead, find out what they need and help them accordingly.

People typically go to a senior living website because they are…

  1. Researching options for themselves or someone else, but the need isn’t urgent—yet
  2. Comparing different communities and scheduling tours because they need to make a decision sooner rather than later for themselves or someone else
  3. Looking for a job in your community
  4. Doing broader research on senior living in general (for example, trying to understand costs)
  5. Going to your site directly because they heard about your community from a friend, family member, or advertising

How you approach the senior living leads in one group will be different from the way you approach the leads in another group.

For example, let’s compare the leads in the first group (interested, but not urgent) to the leads in the second group (interested and urgent). To extend the pizza shop analogy, the first group is akin to someone browsing the pizza shop’s online menu because they might go there at some point in the future. On the other hand, the second group reflects someone who needs to order food in an hour for a hungry group of teenage boys returning from soccer practice.

With the first group, you might invite the leads to download the menu and receive a discount on their next order if they sign up for your newsletter. For the second group, you’d direct them to where they can order online RIGHT NOW or a number they can call to talk to a human.

The first group is being “nurtured” by marketing. But the second group goes directly to sales.

The same is true for senior living leads. The leads who are “ready to order” should go directly to sales for immediate follow up. But the ones who aren’t ready to order should be nurtured over time with content and resources based on their needs and interests.

Let’s talk about “needs and interests” and use the pizza shop analogy yet again.

Let’s say someone follows a gluten-free diet. It would be great if the person could download the gluten-free menu from the pizza shop website. This way, the person can see at a glance what items can be made gluten-free.

Going back to your senior living website . . . when you engage with a lead (via a website form or Live Chat), you should ask pointed questions that will help you provide the best content for their needs.

For example, maybe someone indicates they’re interested in information relating to financing. You could enter them into an automated content “stream” that sends them targeted information about financial topics.

Again, think of the question the pizza shop employee asks on the phone or in person: “How can I help you?” You need to do the same thing with your senior living leads!

Managing senior living leads is easier when you use marketing automation.

Now, here’s the good news. You don’t need to do everything by hand. Marketing automation can triage leads based on the actions people take on your website. The sales-qualified leads (SQLs) will automatically get served to the sales team. The marketing-qualified leads (MQLS) will automatically go into lead nurturing workflows based on their needs/interests and timelines.

In other words, no more pepperoni pizza for everyone. Instead, you’re serving up a customized experience, one that will enable your sales and marketing teams to work more efficiently and effectively.

 

 

Computer sending automated emails all day to help sales and marketing teams follow up with leads and schedule appointments and phone calls and meetings

Senior Living Leads: Auto Responders vs. Lead Nurturing

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Sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and define terms we use a lot, especially when it comes a complex topic like senior living leads. So let’s discuss two terms you’ll likely encounter: auto responders vs. lead nurturing.

What are auto responders?

An auto responder is exactly as it sounds. It’s an automated response, typically in the form of an email, that’s generated after someone takes an action on your senior living website.

For example, after someone fills out a website form, best practices suggest that you direct the person to a thank-you web page AND that you send an automatically generated email. The benefits are two-fold. First, the thank-you page and email reassure the person their form successfully went through. Second, the thank-you page and email provide an opportunity to serve up additional content the person might find interesting.

The reason you should do BOTH the thank-you page and auto-responder email is because the email gives the person something tangible to refer to. The thank-you page will “disappear” once someone navigates away from it.

BENEFITS: Auto responders are an effective way to personalize the experience for your senior living leads and to continue engaging with them.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing involves sending a series of emails to senior living leads who are not ready to “buy” right now. The goal? To continue engaging with them until they are ready.

Again, everything is automated thanks to your senior living software. Over time—days, weeks, even months—the person will receive a set of emails. The emails will engage and “push” the lead further along the sales funnel until they are ready to make a decision. At this point, sales would take over.

The types of lead nurturing emails that you send—the content, the frequency, how many overall—will be something that marketing and sales will (ideally) figure out together based on lead scoring and lead attributes (e.g., persona and decision timeframe).

Not all leads will enter a lead nurturing program. Leads that your marketing automation indicates as sales-ready/sales-qualified will go to sales for direct follow up.

BENEFITS: Lead nurturing will help your community stay in front of prospects who aren’t ready to buy right now, but who might be ready in the future. The content can help persuade people that your community is the best fit for their specific needs.

How auto responders and lead nurturing affect senior living leads

This isn’t an “either or” situation. You should use auto responders and lead nurturing in your ongoing marketing efforts. So, for example, after someone downloads a piece of content from your site, they will be redirected to a thank-you page and they will receive an auto responder email. Both things happen IMMEDIATELY after the person hits “submit” on the form.

If your marketing automation software identifies the lead as sales-qualified, the lead will go to sales for direct follow up. If the software labels the lead as marketing-qualified, the person will enter an appropriate lead nurturing workflow to engage them further.

The right senior living software is critical for lead scoring and lead nurturing.

If you need help choosing the right senior living software and setting it up correctly, give us a shout! We live and breathe marketing automation for senior living communities.

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Re-Engage Cold Senior Living Leads with Our Stay in Touch Program

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When it comes to the senior living leads in your database, does any of this sound familiar?

  • You have a CRM filled with hundreds of leads that fizzled and went cold—and you don’t know what to do with them.
  • Your sales team has strategies for nurturing leads that come in now—but no strategies for nurturing leads that are eighteen, twelve, or even six months old.
  • You don’t have the people-power to manually call or email all your colds leads, yet you know that you’re missing out on good opportunities.

If you were nodding your head YES as you read through the above, you’re not alone. Your senior living CRM is likely home to many old/cold leads—leads that never received any follow up.

Why didn’t they receive any follow up?

Well, as you know, prospects inquire at various stages of readiness, but sales people can only work 10 – 12 active leads at a time, so they focus on leads closest to decision. Providers know this is a problem. But most don’t have a strategy for addressing it. So, what do they do? They just keep buying new leads.

This isn’t a SMART approach.

And that’s precisely why we created our “Stay in Touch” program-to help busy sales and marketing teams re-engage cold senior living leads through a SMART marketing automation solution.

All you have to do is provide the list of cold leads, and we take it from there. Sounds great, right?

Below are some FAQs about the program.

How does the Stay in Touch program help re-engage cold senior living leads?

We’ve already created a series of surveys, offers, and emails that have proven to re-engage colder senior living leads. This content will help score and segment the leads according to their level of interest.

  • Leads with good potential get served up to your sales team.
  • Cooler leads continue through the various lead nurturing paths until they’re closer to decision and ready to talk to sales.

Why should my community use the Stay in Touch program?

We’ve done the heavy lifting for you! We’ve thought through the messaging that will most likely resonate, the offers that will entice people to take action, and the branching “logic” for the workflows.

We customize all pieces according to your community’s branding guidelines, set up everything (from emails to landing pages), and schedule emails at a rate that makes sense. Once it’s set up, it works on its own. (That’s the power and beauty of marketing automation!)

What will my community “get” from the Stay in Touch program?

The benefits are many. You’ll get . . .

    • A turnkey solution to engage cold leads and turn some of them into warm and hot leads that convert into tours and move-ins
    • More accurate views of your sales pipeline
    • A cleaner, nimbler database/CRM
    • Buy-in from marketing and sales regarding marketing automation
    • And did we mention cold leads that actually CONVERT?

I want the Stay in Touch program. What should I do next?

Let’s set up a 30-minute brainstorming session. There’s no cost for this session (and no obligation, of course). It’s simply an opportunity for you to get to know us and for us to get to know more about your community (or communities) and how you manage your senior living leads. We can also walk you through how the various elements of the Stay in Touch program work.

YES, I WANT TO SETUP MY BRAINSTORMING SESSION NOW!

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Senior Living Sales Strategies: Why Personalization Matters

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Today, we’re going to give you a simple, yet powerful tool to add to your senior living sales strategies: personalization.

When we say personalization, we mean exactly that: using a person’s first name, specifically in emails.

Why?

Well, as humans, we’re wired to respond positively when we hear and read our first names. It’s all about this concept called “implicit egotism.”

Marketers and advertisers for big companies already know this. It’s why you’ll often see your name in the subject lines of emails from your favorite brands. Subconsciously, we see our name, and our brains think “This was written for me.”

Of course, smart marketers don’t include names simply to stroke people’s egos. We do it because of the results: more opens and clicks. In fact, Campaign Monitor reports personalization increases open rates by 26%.

If you haven’t been using personalization in your prospect emails, it’s time to spruce up your senior living sales strategies with a little first-name magic.

Here’s how to add in personalization when communicating with your senior living leads:

Email subject lines

Good marketing automation software (and even email marketing software, like Mailchimp and Constant Contact) makes personalization super easy through the use of personalization tokens.

Typically, when you enter the text for your subject line, you’d enter a series of characters that would indicate to the software to automatically add the person’s first name.

For example, the string of characters might look something like this *|FNAME|*

Or some marketing automation software, like HubSpot, includes a button that says “Personalization” and you can choose how you want to personalize the subject line.

When you’re done, the subject line box of the email might look something like this:

*|FNAME|*, do you have questions about financing senior living?

When the email is sent, the marketing automation software will insert the person’s first name. So, this is what the person would see in her email inbox:

Mary, do you have questions about financing senior living?

Note: In order to personalize using a prospect’s first name, you need to make sure you’re GETTING this info on your online forms. This is why you should have separate FIRST NAME and LAST NAME fields on any online forms, rather than one generic NAME field.

Email body copy

With good automation software, you can do the same thing with your email copy and include the person’s first name.

A caveat: ONLY DO IT IF IT SOUNDS NATURAL.

So, for example, maybe you’ve just described what a lovely Saturday night might be like in your community, with wine on the patio, a scrumptious dinner, and then dancing in the pub. After the description, you might write:

Sounds great, doesn’t it, *|FNAME|*?

When the email is delivered to the recipient, they would see their name in the copy like this:

Sounds great, doesn’t it, Mary?

In the above example, the line sounds natural.

Don’t overdo it! We don’t recommend adding personalization more than one time in the body of the email. And again, ONLY do it if it sounds natural.

Need assistance adding personalization to the emails you deliver to your senior living leads?

We’d be happy to help! Connect with us and let’s talk about your marketing needs.

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superhero delivering effective lead nurturing automated senior living email

Senior Living Lead Generation: Create Better Lead Nurturing Emails

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Congratulations! Your senior living lead generation is WORKING! You’ve enticed anonymous websites to give you their contact info, thanks to compelling content offers.

Now what?

Make sure you’ve set up your website forms to support a strong senior living lead generation program.

Any form on your senior living website should gather basic info: first name, last name, email, and state. But it should also ask two required questions that will provide further valuable insights.

First, ask something like this: “Are you gathering this info for yourself or a loved one?”

A drop-down would appear with these choices:

  • I’m looking for myself.
  • I am an adult child looking for a parent.
  • Other

You’re keeping the options simple here, because you don’t want to overwhelm people with questions. And you don’t want to create overly complicated lead nurturing paths, either. (More on this in a moment.)

Second, ask something along these lines: “What’s your timeline for making a decision about senior living?”

A drop-down would appear with these choices:

  • ASAP
  • 3-6 months
  • 6-12 months
  • 12-24 months
  • No timeline—just researching

Again, you’d don’t want to overwhelm visitors with too many choices. And you don’t want to complicate the lead nurturing paths you set up.

Now that you’ve set up proper lead forms, you can think about the next steps.

Lead nurturing best practices: Turbocharge your senior living lead generation program.

1. Score and segment your senior living leads.

See? Everything we recommended earlier with the website forms serves a purpose. By allowing your prospects to self-identify who they are and where they are in their journey, you can score and segment your senior living leads accordingly: marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

For example, an adult child who is looking to make a decision for her mother ASAP should be funneled directly to the sales team for immediate follow up. This is a classic SQL.

But you can place anyone who chooses one of the other timelines into a longer-term lead nurturing workflow. This way, you can nurture these “not ready yet” leads, or MQLs. The goal involves staying in front of them so that when they ARE ready, they will think of your community first.

Depending on your internal resources at the outset, you can drill down deep into the lead nurturing “logic.”

So, let’s consider someone who is researching senior living for herself. If she is making her decision ASAP, she will become an SQL and go to sales. But if she chooses one of the following timelines, she’ll be considered an MQL primed for nurturing:

  • 3-6 months
  • 6-12 months
  • 12-24 months

Now, here’s the thing: You’ll need to create a separate set of lead nurturing emails for each timeframe.

For example, if the person conducting her own research enters the 3- to 6-month workflow, she would receive one set of emails. Another person entering the 6- to 12-month workflow would receive a different set. And so forth.

Yes, some of the emails in each set might be similar—or even identical.

Remember, you want to personalize the emails so that they match where the person is in their buying journey. An adult child researching options for her dad to move in 18 months is in a very different place from an eighty-year-old woman needing to move by the end of the year and researching for herself.

If you’ve been thinking, “Gee, that sounds like a lot of emails we need to write and set up,” you’re correct!

But, again: some emails will work in all of your lead nurturing campaigns. And others might only require a few tweaks. Plus, once you do the initial set-up, it becomes an extremely easy program to manage and even tweak, provided you use marketing automation, which brings us to our next best practice . . .

2. Use marketing automation for your senior living lead generation.

Your senior living sales and marketing teams don’t need to manually score leads, segment them, and send the emails. Marketing automation takes care of it. This way, the sales and marketing teams can focus on the RESULTS, specifically the analytics, so they can respond accordingly.

And it goes without saying, but most leads should change from MQL to SQL over time. At least, that’s the goal.

For example, let’s say a prospect in the “I’m an adult child researching for a parent in the next 6-12 months” category is opening your emails, downloading content, and spending more time on the site. You can change the lead score from marketing qualified to sales qualified. (And if you have a robust marketing automation system, you can program it to automatically make this change based on the lead behavior). Now, the sales team can follow up directly with the lead since the person appears to be super interested.

Bottom line: A good lead nurturing program helps salespeople focus on the best opportunities. And it helps the marketing team understand which types of emails and content drive conversions. Armed with this information, the marketing team can focus on creating more content like it.

Need help right away?

At Senior Living SMART, we love helping senior living sales and marketing teams shine.
Reach out and let’s talk!

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3. Follow email marketing best practices.

Like everything else, email marketing best practices evolve. But certain evergreen practices will always remain true:

  • Pay attention to grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Nothing yells amateur like careless mistakes.
  • Shorter is almost always better. First, leave long-form copy to your guides and e-books. Second, keep emails short and highly skimmable.
  • Make your emails mobile responsive. More and more people are reading emails on smaller devices like tablets and phones. (Yes, this includes older adults.) Test your emails on a variety of devices. Some marketing software, like HubSpot, bakes this feature into its platform.
  • Keep subject lines succinct. MailChimp recommends no more than nine words or 60 characters.
  • Send the email from a real person. You don’t want to make it look auto-generated by having a [email protected] email.

Remember, make it about the buyer. Don’t lead by talking about your community. Think about the pain points the person might be experiencing. How can you solve for these pain points? Offering a piece of helpful content is a great place to start.

As for current email marketing trends, here are some to consider testing:

  1. Personalization. Emails that include a person’s name in the subject line have a 29% higher unique open rate and 41% more unique click-through rates.
  2. Experiment with emojis (but still use sparingly). Emojis are a popular trend right now, and mileage varies widely. But you could test subject lines with one emoji.

For example, if one of the emails in your lead nurturing set includes inviting someone to have lunch at your community, your subject line could be something playful: Lunch on us! WE HAVE CAKE! (Then, include a cake emoji 🍰).

Test and see if the subject line with the emoji improves open rates, but also keep in mind that open rates are just ONE metric. Conversions are what matter most. In other words, do you get more people requesting lunch when you use a subject line with an emoji? THAT is what you need to pay attention to.

4. Don’t set it and forget it.

Marketing automation makes life easier because it reduces the manual labor. But you still have to use your noggin and regularly review the analytics and make smart decisions based on what the numbers are telling you.

You also need to make adjustments to lead nurturing emails when something unexpected happens. For example, if you run any lead nurturing campaigns right now, you’d be remiss if you didn’t acknowledge the pandemic.

5. Seek help with your senior living lead generation when you need it.

Setting up a well-designed senior living lead generation program doesn’t just happen. And not every marketing or sales team has the requisite skill sets. Working with a reputable senior living marketing agency that has experience in lead generation can save you time and money.

Need help right away?

At Senior Living SMART, we love helping senior living sales and marketing teams shine.
Reach out and let’s talk!

Let's Talk