Businesses can use lead nurturing to maintain and grow relationships with potential customers. Lead nurturing will translate into more customers, more closed deals, and more sales.
Read on to discover what lead nurturing is and how it can help your business to:
- Create a strong, effective lead nurturing program
- Discover tactics and strategies for effective lead nurturing
- Generate more quality leads for your sales team
- Close more sales, retain more customers, and grow your business
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Managing leads is a multi-step process that starts with locating qualified prospects and leads through inbound marketing strategies like social media, content marketing, and other digital communications.
Once your business has identified a lead, you can support and communicate with them through lead tracking. After you know more about the lead, you can qualify them and look for the best prospects among your group of leads.
Once you've generated and identified your leads, it's time to nurture them. There's no "one size fits all" approach to nurturing leads, but there are "best practices" to get the best results in sales and conversions.
Lead nurturing is a focused marketing and communications strategy that increases your brand awareness, maintains connections with leads, and builds trust with them, eventually leading to decisions to buy or purchase.
Why Lead Nurturing Is Important
Every lead isn't ready to buy immediately. At some point, the lead will be ready to buy, and your lead nurturing program's goal is to be the business that the lead will turn to when they are ready to buy. Lead nurturing can:
- Introduce your business to potential customers
- Help your business gain your audience's trust
- Strengthen your business' reputation and thought leadership
- Help your potential customers to remember your business
- Strengthen your sales strategy
- Reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC)
- Increase sales volume and amount of purchases
Lead nurturing programs help your business to build relationships with prospective customers over time. They also build connections with leads in diverse ways. Through a strong lead generation program, you can strengthen your brand image at the same time as you offer a seamless journey for your customers from their initial contact with your brand to becoming ongoing customers.
Finally, nurturing leads is cost-effective. According to Forrester Research, businesses with successful lead nurturing programs generate 50% more quality, sales-ready leads for one-third the customer acquisition cost (CAC) than businesses that don't have strong lead nurturing programs.
Here are a few more reasons why a good lead nurturing plan with good follow-through and execution can grow your business:
- Lead nurturing emails can get four to ten times better response rates than non-targeted or generic email blasts.
- Qualified leads may fit your ideal customer profile and are able to buy, but are not yet ready to make the decision to purchase.
How To Nurture Leads
Effective lead nurturing combines targeted content, a marketing automation platform, and an effective way to identify, segment, and target the unique buyer personas among your leads. In order to develop targeted content, it's important to understand your unique buyer personas, including their goals, objectives, pain points and triggers, and their interests.
Common Challenges Lead Nurturing Can Solve
Some challenges that contribute to leads that never convert to sales include poor timing, a lack of strong relationships with leads, poor content match for lead interests, and weaknesses in marketing plan strategy and execution. A good lead nurturing program with effective tactics can solve these challenges.
Lead Nurturing Examples
There are many tactics you can use to nurture leads, and many of them can be automated. Here are a few examples of lead nurturing activities you can use:
- Email Marketing: according to Campaign Manager, email marketing has the highest ROI (return on investment) of all digital marketing tactics.
- Content Marketing: From blogs to e-books and white papers, webinars, and videos, content marketing feeds into other lead nurturing strategies.
- Social Media: Hootsuite reports people ages 18-64 spend over two hours a day on social media, giving you the opportunity to reach them with social content and engagement.
- Aligning Teams: Don't keep your sales, marketing, and customer support teams separated. Collaboration and teamwork will strengthen lead nurturing and KPIs (key performance indicators) among these related teams.
- Evaluation: Evaluate and score your leads, from newsletter signups to web visitors with high click-through rates.
- Retargeting: follow up with leads after they make a purchase
- Surveys: Design and implement surveys to discover customer pain points, interests, and needs.
How To Create A Lead Nurturing Strategy
Whether your business refers to your customers' sales journey as a sales funnel or a sales filter, lead nurturing plays an important role. Customers will select brands and businesses that understand their needs over brands that don't show an interest or have a coherent lead nurturing strategy.
- Understand the sales funnel/filter process
- Align marketing, sales, and customer support teams - discover customer pain points, objections to sales, and support ticket queries. Marketing teams can contribute information about high-performing content and customer demographics.
- Identify high-quality leads and segment leads - research can determine where leads are in their cycle of interaction with your business. You can also segment leads into customer value levels and customer profiles, from job titles to firm sizes.
- Design and build strong email and content marketing plans that align with your top customer lead segments.
- Create content that fits with your lead segmentation and lead nurturing goals and objectives.
- Develop, measure, track, and analyze your lead nurturing metrics. Change your plans and your content if you see some tactics are working better than others.
Here are more ways that you can develop and strengthen your lead nurturing efforts:
Compare Your Last Lead Nurturing Efforts
Analyze your most recent lead nurturing efforts and use the results to develop a baseline for future analysis.
Create An Ideal Lead Profile
For each of your customer lead segments, develop an ideal profile that you can use to score leads and direct your content development and lead nurturing program.
Make A Lead Nurturing Content Program
Your ideal customer lead profile or profiles will help you to develop the content program you will need to reach and nurture each of these leads and move them through your sales funnel. You can design the content program to follow segments of the customer journey. An email content sequence could include:
- Welcome emails and campaigns
- Educational emails
- Competitor analysis emails differentiating your product or services
- Re-engagement emails
- Post-transaction/sale emails
Gather Lead Data
You will want as much data as you can get about your leads and prospective customers. You can use automated tools to gather data and content marketing strategies like newsletters, white papers, and industry-specific data. The data will help you score and segment your leads, identifying the most-valuable Highly Qualified Leads (HQL) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).
Organize Your Marketing And Sales Team
It seems that many businesses nowadays are consistently saying that their marketing and sales teams are "misaligned" or "rarely aligned." These two teams can work together well to create lead nurturing programs. Bring marketing and sales teams together by organizing meetings and work schedules to improve work and results in both departments/divisions.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one cornerstone of lead nurturing, and automated email sequences are one of the most powerful tools to develop and nurture leads. Emails can warm your leads up to your business, introduce your products and services, build trust, and help your business to stay in the front-of-mind.
Re-Engagement Campaign
Re-engagement is often overlooked, but this strategy can bring inactive leads and former customers back as current customers. The purpose of the re-engagement campaign is to re-involve leads, which can include leads at any stage of their customer journey, but especially prior customers who may have become inactive.
Score Leads Strategies
Your lead scoring system can and should be individualized to your business and its prospective customers. First, determine your ideal lead customer profile or profiles. Then, select the points system you'll use to prioritize the leads that fit into your ideal lead profiles. Focus most of your lead nurturing strategies on the highest scoring leads.
In a closely-related concept, Highly-qualified leads (HQL), Marketing-qualified leads (MQL), and Sales-qualified leads (SQL) can be identified using your lead scoring strategies. Sales-qualified leads will be businesses which have made appointments to speak with your sales staff directly.
Conduct Surveys
Surveys can help to uncover customer preferences, pain points, and reasons for buying or not buying your product or services. They can also be valuable tools in lead nurturing at any stage of the customer journey, especially in retargeting or re-engagement.
How To Get Started With A Lead Nurturing Strategy
We've given you some ideas about ways to create and build a strong lead nurturing program. There are several tactics proven to work well in B2B inbound marketing. Every business delivers a unique value proposition to its customers. Using data to learn who your potential customers and leads really are and creating a program that positions your business at the top of their mind when they're ready to purchase or initiate a contract is the core of lead nurturing.
Contact us at Green Leads to learn more about how you can move forward with lead nurturing that will grow your business and increase your ROI from digital marketing. Learn what kinds of content will produce the best results, and learn how to get your sales and marketing teams working together to produce real wins for your business.
Sources:
- Lead generation: How to create and execute a successful strategy. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2022/08/15/lead-generation-how-to-create-and-execute-a-successful-strategy/?sh=694323e66927
