Some video games like to force the player to watch every cutscene between the gameplay. They’re unskippable.
And it’s infuriating. If I’ve already played the game before, or if I just want to get to the action now, let me skip it. It’s amazing to me that even in 2018, this practice is still pretty commonly found in major video game releases.
But it’s super common in B2B marketing too. We design our lead lifecycles and nurture programs like they’re this linear, step-by-step path that every customer must flow through exactly as designed.
Yet when we view the data, customers are going from point A to point Z, skipping all the carefully designed steps in between. Though you may have crafted an ideal experience for your users – they are most likely indifferent to it. They’ve got their own priorities.
Instead, we should be building flexible experiences that work out of order. Don’t build nurtures gating off high value resources until the next email send – feature your best additional content with each interaction. And by extension – stop measuring nurtures as if sending every email in the stream is the ideal scenario. If a lead wants to burn through your content in an hour instead a month and convert- that’s not a failure on the nurture’s part – it’s a byproduct of allowing flexibility into your processes.
So when you’re building your next marketing experience – make sure to account for the people who want to skip the cutscenes.