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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.

 

 

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Senior Living Leads: How to Gain Deeper Insights

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Your website is bringing in senior living leads. Congrats! Now what? Enticing anonymous site visitors to give up their information is only the first step. Now, you must learn how to quickly gain insights into the website leads so that your marketing and sales teams know what to do next.

The following three tactics will help you effectively manage your senior living leads.

Keep in mind that you must have good marketing automation software to do any of these tactics. In fact, if you had to do any of these things manually, it would be impossible to keep up.

Tactic #1: Implement progressive profiling on website forms.

For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume your community website has multiple gated “offers.” By “offers,” we’re referring to guides, ebooks, checklists, and the like—information people seek when evaluating communities and senior living in general.

“Gating” means that the offer is behind a form. In other words, the website visitor fills out the form to access the content. Oftentimes, people will download several items during one visit. Or they might return in subsequent days/weeks and download more info. Each time they do so, they fill out another website form. This is where progressive profiling comes in.

Simply put, progressive profiling helps you get more information about the person every time they fill out a new form on your site. On the first website form someone fills out, you’ll capture the essentials like first name, last name, phone, email, and timeframe for making a decision.

When you set up progressive profiling thanks to good marketing automation software, the prospect can bypass most of these questions when they fill out subsequent forms. Why? Because the system will recognize the person (thanks to the magic of website cookies).

So, instead, you can ask the prospect other relevant questions that can help you market and sell to them better. For example, perhaps you ask the person about their hobbies and interests. The person’s new answers will automatically sync with their contact record in the system’s backend (as well as your senior living CRM if you’ve integrated the two). Now, marketing and sales have even deeper insights into the lead.

BENEFITS: Progressive profiling provides deeper insights that will allow your marketing and sales teams to create more relevant follow-up communications. For example, if the lead says they love traveling and going on day trips, your team can highlight any programs or amenities that speak specifically to this interest.

Tactic #2: Give your senior living leads a score.

With good marketing automation software, you can teach it how to score your senior living leads appropriately.

At its simplest, lead scoring allows you to automatically label those leads that are ready for a specific action. In most cases, we’re referring to the sales hand-off. You can teach your marketing automation software how to identify a high-value lead for sales to follow up on immediately.

Your marketing and sales teams would determine the criteria that would go into scoring a high-value lead. The criteria will likely include things like:

  • Specific content the lead downloaded
  • Engagement with lead nurturing emails (what did they open, what did they click on)
  • The amount of time spent on the site
  • What the lead indicated regarding timing for making a decision

The above is an incomplete list. Your marketing and sales teams will determine the criteria based on experience with leads who’ve gone on to ultimately convert into move-ins. What do those leads have in common? That’s the stuff that will fuel your lead-scoring criteria. Leads that aren’t ready to go to sales will continue to be nurtured.

BENEFITS: With lead scoring, your sales team can put its focus on high-value leads that stand a good chance of converting rather than on leads that aren’t ready. Marketing, on the other hand, can continue to nurture not-ready leads with relevant follow-up emails that will help move them down the sales funnel.

If you want to take a deeper dive into lead scoring, check out HubSpot’s detailed instructions. Or better yet, have us set up lead scoring for you!

Tactic #3: Segment your website leads according to personas.

If you do nothing else, at least do this. Segmenting leads according to your will help your marketing and sales teams have more meaningful follow-up conversations.

For marketing, this means the follow-up lead nurturing emails will talk to that persona, specifically the concerns and challenges the persona faces. For sales, this means the conversations the rep has with the person will be based on persona attributes.

Reminder: When we say “persona,” we’re talking about the prospective buyer and/or person influencing the buying decision. For senior living, personas can be divided into two main groups: seniors shopping for themselves or an adult child researching on behalf of a parent or older adult in their lives (like an aunt or uncle).

Those are BROAD categories. You can (and should) break them down even more:

  • Adult daughter researching for her mother
  • Adult daughter researching for her father
  • Senior searching for options for herself
  • Senior searching for options for himself
  • Adult son researching for his mother
  • Adult son researching for his father
  • Senior couple looking for options

Keep in mind that the above list is just a start. It doesn’t cover all the scenarios.

Our point is simple: How you communicate with an adult son researching on behalf of his father should be different from the way you communicate with an adult daughter researching for her mother. How you communicate with a single eighty-five-year-old man will be different from a 70-year-old couple getting ready to retire.

BENEFITS: Marketing automation will once again save the day by automatically identifying the persona it should attribute the lead to—and what communications should be served up to the lead as a result. And yes, persona identification will likely be one of the factors that goes into determining the overall lead score.

Bottom line: How you manage your senior living leads matters!

You’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and money into getting leads from your website. Don’t let them just “sit there.” And don’t group all of them together in one bucket. We know this might sound overwhelming. But it doesn’t need to be. Especially when you work with a partner like Senior Living SMART. Give us a shout and let’s talk about scoring your senior living leads appropriately!

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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.

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At Senior Living SMART, we love helping senior living sales and marketing teams shine.
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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