It’s important to note that a lead is someone who has responded to your marketing communications. Although there are times these leads are not fully on board with the view or idea of your product or service.
Lead nurturing is required for any firm that wants to develop. Companies that are good at nurturing leads produce 50% more sales-ready leads at a cost that is 33% lower, claims Forrester Research.
However, many businesses tend to neglect lead nurturing. If you haven’t previously done so, you ought to think about implementing a lead-nurturing strategy. But before you begin, be sure you comprehend the significance of lead nurturing and the tactics you may use for your own company.
Implementing an effective lead nurturing strategy can significantly impact the outcomes of your inbound marketing strategy, customer loyalty, client retention, revenue, and other factors.
Your overall lead generation effort will be far more fruitful if you nurture leads.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Relationships are the foundation of business and require care to develop and endure. Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your potential customers at every stage of the sales funnel.
It is a crucial component of inbound marketing, which uses content marketing, social media, and other forms of online communication to grab the attention of customers.
In a simple definition, the process of fostering leads who aren’t quite ready to buy is known as lead nurturing.
Successful lead nurturing considers the buyer’s demands in light of their identity (using profile attributes like title, job, industry, etc.) and places them in the buying process.
By offering the most pertinent content (such as technical briefs, ebooks, and webinars) for their circumstance, nurturing keeps prospects interested. Lead nurturing, when done correctly, may foster strong brand loyalty even before a prospect is prepared to make a purchase.
In order to build trust, raise brand awareness, and maintain a connection with prospects until they are ready to make a purchase, a successful lead nurturing program concentrates marketing and communication efforts on listening to prospects’ needs and providing them with the information and solutions they require.
Companies can boost the conversion of unqualified leads into opportunities and generate more money by developing latent demand.
Giving potential customers the knowledge they need to make judgments about their purchases through nurturing also helps to accelerate active opportunities. Helping prospective customers in their buyer’s journey is the goal of lead nurturing. Because of this, it works best when prompted by a prospect’s actions or behaviors.
Automation tools for lead management are frequently utilized in real-time marketing. This kind of software (e.g., Sloovi) enables the tracking of leads, automated content delivery, gathering behavioral data, and related actions.
When you put so much work into generating leads, it’s really important to have a lead management process in place to handle those incoming leads
How to Nurture Leads
Compared to non-nurtured leads, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales possibilities.
The practice of nurturing leads is actively interacting with your target market by providing pertinent information, providing assistance as needed, and maintaining a positive attitude throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
Because these strategies directly affect a consumer’s decision to convert into a paying customer or not, it is essential to the success of your organization to nurture leads. Targeted content, multi-channel nurturing, multiple touches, prompt follow-ups, and personalization are just a few methods to nurture leads.
Despite the obvious advantages of lead nurturing, marketers sometimes find it difficult to develop the best plan for it. 60 percent of respondents to the 2019 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey rated their nurture programs a failing score.
For astute marketing and sales teams, there is a big chance to build lead nurturing techniques that are successful and gain an edge over your rivals.
Before discussing the strategies to nurture leads, let us analyze the importance of implementing a lead marketing strategy in your business. Also, check out B2B sales, SaaS sales and tech sales.
Importance and Benefits of Lead Nurturing
Although lead nurturing’s primary objective is to increase sales, it also has the following advantages:
Engage with Dormant Leads
Through lead nurturing, you can raise the likelihood that a consumer will purchase by fostering relationships with them. In today’s sales cycles, these connections are crucial; over time, they foster brand loyalty and trust.
Increase in Customer Engagement
Getting prospects engaged is necessary for your lead nurturing strategy to be successful. Your clients are impacted when you provide value through your content and knowledge. In the end, this results in a rise in engagement.
Aids in building audience trust
You may connect with your audience and win their trust by demonstrating to your potential customers that you are aware of their pain points or by providing them with helpful tips.
In addition, sharing your expertise demonstrates to them that your relationship is about more than simply making a sale for your business. Also, it’s about giving them the knowledge and resources they need to succeed.
Shortens Sales Cycle
Compared to earlier, shoppers now take more time researching their options and educating themselves before making a purchase. Since longer sales cycles are expected, it is crucial to nurture your prospects continuously. By doing this, you shorten your cycle and turn more leads into customers.
Introduces potential clients to your business
Lead nurturing is the best way to inform potential customers about your services and goods. The impact of your goods and services might not be adequately explained on a landing page, but lead nurturing enables you to give prospective customers a more thorough understanding of who you are and what you can do for them.
Enables the Audience to Remember You
Your prospects are more likely to remember you if you frequently stay in touch with them. It is beneficial to remain top of mind so that customers will contact you when they require or desire your goods or services.
Strengthens the Sales Strategy
Since sales teams are frequently preoccupied with immediate closing deals, many potential clients aren’t being pursued. Using lead nurturing, you may focus on that potential customer.
lowers the price of acquiring customers
Your customer acquisition costs (CAC = total marketing cost/number of sales) will benefit from using less expensive strategies to gain clients, thanks to lead generation.
Higher Return on Investment
With lead nurturing, you can boost revenue and, ultimately, ROI. Lead nurturing specialists produce roughly 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% cheaper.
Sales Increase
Your leads will be encouraged to purchase if you use good lead nurturing. 79 percent of marketing leads never result in sales, according to studies. This is a result of inadequate lead nurturing.
You may convert prospects into higher-quality leads by using lead nurturing.
Larger Purchases
Larger purchases are motivated by lead nurturing. People that are correctly targeted make purchases that are 47 percent larger than those made by non-nurtured leads.
Having discussed the importance and benefits of lead nurturing, it is essential to note the components that make up lead nurturing.
Components of Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of maintaining relationships with prospects and customers through cross-channel communication, marketing automation, and content marketing.
Remember, as stated earlier, your overall lead generation effort will be far more rewarding if you nurture your leads. What are the requirements to successfully develop leads?
Let’s take a look at the many platforms you can use to develop your leads:
Lead Scoring
For a lead scoring strategy to be effective, sales and marketing must collaborate to determine whether a particular lead is within the company’s buying model. This shared characteristic is the foundation of a decisive lead nurturing process since it establishes the best times, places, and methods for communicating with each prospect individually.
The lead fit (demographics), BANT (budget, authority, need, and time), and lead interest (how long have they been on your site? They are interacting with what content?), lead behavior, buying stage, and time are factors specific to each brand’s lead scoring system.
Content Marketing
A good internet marketing strategy relies on lead scoring as its skeleton and content marketing as its muscle. Information marketing entails producing and disseminating valuable and relevant content. You may use this to create content for your website, social media platforms, videos, podcasts, emails, and more.
“Presenting customers with relevant content that they want to look at is one of the most effective ways we’ve seen to move them through the sales funnel,” according to Paul Hickey of Data Driven. “It can assist people to comprehend the worth of the good or service without making them tune out like they might during a pitch because it keeps them interested and engaged.”
Multichannel Distribution
All your channels need to be connected to perform lead nurturing campaigns successfully. This enables you to stay in touch with leads on a global scale.
Website
By including exciting forms and popups, your website is a terrific way to gather new email addresses. Additionally, it’s a great location to start and carry on conversations. Your visitors’ web experience should be dynamically tailored to continue and expand the conversation initiated in emails.
It’s essential to get this part right. By improving the functionality and content of your website, you may increase the likelihood that both new and existing leads will have a favorable impression of your company and proceed through the sales pipeline.
Retargeting
Your marketing budget may include a significant amount for display ads and retargeting. But how can you ensure that your customers get a consistent experience across all channels?
It’s easy. Retargeting ads must be branded consistently and tailored to the various consumer segments you aim to retain. Each advertisement should also consider the page from which the user initially left your website and offer pertinent information.
Social
A key component of cross-channel nurturing is social media. While launching social campaigns is fantastic, optimizing each campaign for social media yields superior results. When you link your lead nurturing strategy and social campaigns, they complement one another.
Running social media campaigns can be a great way to attract target leads for one-off campaigns.
Marketing Automation
Businesses can streamline and automate their marketing activities across a variety of channels with the help of marketing automation. This boosts productivity and encourages more sales. In addition, by automating a workflow, you can coordinate your marketing initiatives and messages so that the proper lead is exposed to the most pertinent information at the right moment.
Getting Started with Lead Nurturing Strategy
Starting with your current customers is a good idea for your lead nurturing strategies because they were previously leads too, and you can learn from their experience.
For example, which marketing strategies did they most identify with? Could there have been anything you could have done to hasten their decision-making? How might their trip be improved for potential future outcomes? How many leads moved through all stages?
You should thoroughly understand the lead and be aware of their customer journey, according to Michelle Chen of Woveon. A 360-degree view of the customer enables this.
She says, “Having a 360-degree perspective of the client doesn’t only mean you have a customer relationship management (CRM) with their profile information and previous phone calls and email conversations. “That doesn’t depict all of the lead’s interactions with the business. With a 360-degree perspective, you can see every engagement someone had with you, including when they opened an email marketing your business, messaged you via social media, swiped their loyalty card at a store, or called a customer service representative.
Launching a lead nurturing program establishes the foundation for converting old or potential leads.
If you want to measure and increase lead quality, look at the conversions over time and measure how many marketing leads turn into sales leads. Be sure to measure how many leads come in, how many get handed to the sales team, and how many enter into the lead nurturing program.
This can be done in four (4) steps:
Define Your Leads
The cooperation of marketing and sales to work together is crucial for lead nurturing. Work on a joint lead that has been previously defined by the collaboration of marketing and sales to ascertain the ideal lead for your firm.
To establish the lead score levels and lead engagement points, first evaluate your market, the people who are already in your database, your current prospects, and the buyers who are closing.
Build Your Leads
According to studies, email attrition causes you to lose up to 25% of your subscribers annually. Even some engaged subscribers won’t eventually convert to paying clients.
Therefore, you must use list-building strategies to fill the top of the funnel in order to expand your business and establish a strong lead nurturing program. You can achieve this by giving your leads a frequent checkup, spotting and eliminating duplicate leads, and deleting inactive or scrap contacts.
Segment Your Audience Groups
The key to any successful marketing effort is lead segmentation, especially when it comes to lead nurturing. Your lead nurturing program will be more pertinent the more you segment your audience.
Your audience will not pay attention if you are not relevant to them. it is advisable to employing two segmentation dimensions to your basic lead nurturing program: the buying stage in conjunction with a different measuring variable crucial to your company.
As one variable is insufficient and any dimension above two leads to an increasingly more complex process, this will result in a happy equilibrium.
Consider breaking it down into segments and sub-segments. Your lead nurturing campaigns will be more relevant and engaging across channels if you add lead behavior segmentation and targeting.
Test and Optimize Your Campaigns
Your campaigns need to be tested and watched over constantly if you want to optimize them. The program’s health and efficacy are preserved as a result. Through testing, you can gain knowledge of the elements that require optimization.
These can include the number of touchpoints you need to have in a certain amount of time, the messages you should send, the time of day, and other factors. The lead nurture frequency, path, content and creative (the copy and the design), and platform are all features that can be optimized.
Things to Consider for an Effective Lead Nurturing Strategy
You should consider the following variables now that you are familiar with the lead nurturing procedure and have a basic understanding of the strategy. Once this is achieved, it will be linked to the strategies to be discussed.
Campaign Types
Lead nurturing programs can be of many different forms. The best one for your company will depend on what you hope to achieve with the marketing.
Do you wish to reactivate dormant leads? Do you prefer to create sales leads instead? Is it your intention to alert current clients that their contracts are about to expire? You can decide what kind of campaign to start by figuring out the answers to these questions.
Campaign Content
The type of marketing you are developing will affect your content. For instance, if the goal of your campaign is to produce sales leads, choose and send material that you are confident your prospects will find interesting.
Depending on where your buyer’s journey is in the sales cycle, you should ensure the marketing team creates several types of content to distribute. Consider each piece of content you provide as a new chapter in your marketing narrative; this will make you more relatable to your audience.
Nurturing Different Audiences
You must segment your audience if you want to produce lead nurturing programs that are highly targeted. You can divide your audience into various categories if you wish to nurture a certain audience segment, such as fresh prospects or loyal clients.
By audience location, product interest, and level of involvement, you can create more segments. New prospects will automatically be added to the appropriate groups and lists once you have filtered your audience based on your own specifications.
Campaign Complexity
Your lead nurturing efforts might take your audiences down a variety of different paths. You can choose how complex or basic you want these pathways to be. Everything depends on what and at what touchpoint you want your audience to engage.
Campaigns for lead nurturing can either follow a linear structure that the prospects walk through or they can branch out to take different pathways based on the prospects’ interests, personas, and behaviors.
Lead Nurturing for Small Business
Small businesses benefit in some ways from lead nurturing. Small firms can nurture relationships with clients more personally, and they frequently move more quickly than larger ones.
Lead nurturing programs allow small businesses the ability to differentiate themselves from the competition by introducing themselves and their special solutions to prospects. Lead nurturing helps small businesses stand out in the minds of their target audiences even though the majority of prospects may not be ready to transact business just yet.
Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics
Despite the fact that there are numerous lead nurturing strategies available, these are the top ones regardless of the kind of company you run.
Utilize Content that is Targeted
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to lead nurturing. According to research, nurturing your leads with relevant material will help you achieve much better outcomes.
Work on understanding your buyers as it helps develop buyer personas. Create a variety of customized content depending on each of your personas’ traits, such as interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers, to nurture each of them.
As you scale your plan, you should also have a marketing automation technology in place to assist you in locating, classifying, and concentrating on your distinct customer personas.
Utilize Multichannel Lead Nurturing Efforts
Most lead nurturing techniques in the past required creating a straightforward email drip campaign that sent out boilerplate emails to a list of prospects.
Marketers are looking for new strategies and tools that go beyond email marketing and include it. Smart marketers are now implementing a multi-channel lead nurturing process with the aid of strong marketing automation solutions.
Most frequently, marketing automation, email marketing, social media posts, paid retargeting, dynamic website content, and direct sales outreach are used in conjunction to create effective multi-channel lead nurturing campaigns. You must make sure that your marketing and sales teams work and be well-aligned and cooperate in order to carry out this strategy effectively because there are so many methods involved.
This strategy aligns with the multichannel distribution component stated above.
Concentrate on Several Touches
Despite the fact that every product and service has a unique buyer’s journey, research has shown that, on average, prospects are exposed to ten different marketing messages before becoming consumers.
As you can expect, the most qualified leads nurturing tactics distribute information that assists prospects in moving forward in the buyer’s journey by addressing frequent queries and worries. Consider how you may nurture your prospects into customers using a variety of content formats, in addition to email methods, such as blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, and even direct mail.
Keep in touch with leads as soon as possible
Even if the advantages of prompt follow-up calls appear to be pretty clear, most businesses still take their time to take action.
The greatest way to turn inbound leads into qualifying sales opportunities still frequently involves a timely follow-up email or phone call. Automated lead nurturing can help you reach big groups of prospects. This is due to the fact that contacting a lead soon after a website conversion greatly increases the likelihood that it will turn into a sales opportunity.
It is significantly more effective than any amount of cold calling to call an incoming lead at the right time and with a strategy. Based on their recent browsing habits, you can determine exactly what the prospect is looking for.
In addition, you have enough details about the prospect to conduct some preliminary research on the company they work for and their position there.
Send Personalized Emails
Lead nurturing strategies that use email marketing are still very successful, and personalized emails typically provide greater results. According to a study by Accenture, 41% of customers left a company because of a lack of customization.
Targeting your audience and consumers via email is known as email marketing. By giving subscribers and consumers useful information to further their goals, it aids in increasing conversions and income.
As soon as a lead fills a form, send them an email or give them a call.
Sales reps can develop an email marketing strategy that works and send emails that recipients truly want to read. It only needs a plan.
It is important the sales reps define your audience. Begin with your buyer persona, comprehend their needs, and then customize your email marketing campaigns to suit them. Then, establish your goals.
Building your email list follows. For your email marketing efforts to have a unified appearance and feel, make sure to build templates that can be reused.
Personalized emails improve your click rates.
Use Lead Scoring Tactics
For those who are unfamiliar with the idea of lead scoring, this system ranks prospects according to a scale that reflects the perceived value each lead provides to the business.
By giving numerical values to particular website surfing habits, conversion events, or even social interactions, lead scoring may be integrated in the majority of marketing automation solutions.
The resulting score is used to decide which leads should receive direct follow-up from a sales representative and which prospects require further nurturing.
Lead nurturing tactics are more effective and customer retention rates rise when you align sales and marketing.
Determine the precise stages in the buyer’s journey that prospects should be transferred across teams so that both sales and marketing may contribute to lead nurturing. To achieve this, take into account various triggers such as lead scoring, workflow enrollment, and conversion events.
A sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA) should specify the shared obligations, duties, and objectives for this cross-team collaboration. The two teams can hold each other accountable for successfully converting leads into paying clients by developing an SLA.
Conduct Surveys
You must comprehend your leads’ demands in order to connect with them. Leads can express their feelings on their own terms by participating in surveys. You can create a strategy for guiding them through the buyer’s journey if you inquire about their objectives or the challenges they confront.
Carrying out surveys should be an important part of your sales process.
The Preferred CRM Choice
Slooviis a lead management platform. Sloovi plays a role in helping your business generate leads via its marketing automation.
We can simply call Sloovi a lead nurturing tool as it helps smoothen your business.
The learning curve is not too steep with Sloovi’s simple lead nurturing tools, and you can still send automated emails at every level of the sales process.
With the help of the Sloovi tools, your sales team is free to focus on qualified leads while marketing automation cultivates your potential clients.
Those potential leads that need to be nurtured are not left behind as Sloovi Outreach will help with its personalized emails and updated data-driven reports on these leads.
Visit Sloovi to get your “right-hand man” who will help automate your sales activities effortlessly.