No template can help companies win over or build meaningful relationships with potential customers. After all, lead nurturing requires time, dedication, data, and thoughtful approaches.
While the importance of implementing an effective lead nurturing strategy stands beyond doubt, companies still struggle to generate leads that are ready to make a purchase. But the right approach to nurturing prospects through the sales funnel can work wonders. Businesses implementing well-researched lead nurturing strategies tend to attract 50% more sales-ready leads at a lower cost.
Naturally, there are many factors that companies need to take into account to manage, educate, encourage, and nurture leads effectively. This guide will help you understand the lead nurturing process and level up your nurturing strategy for long-term success.
What Is the Definition of Lead Nurturing?
Building trust and relationships with potential customers are the principal goals of lead nurturing. Companies use lead nurturing B2B and B2C strategies to engage different audiences and motivate them to take more interest in brands, connect with them, and make purchases.
Implementing nurturing strategies is crucial for any business’s success since it helps grow your database, improve the quality of relationships with prospects and clients, and help create more targeted content.
Source: QuickEmailVerification
An effective nurturing program should be based on prospects’ needs. This way, brands can keep their communication efforts customer-centric and provide all the essential information to increase brand awareness, build trust, and maintain connections with potential customers at every stage of the buying cycle.
How To Develop a Nurturing Process
Businesses tailor relevant content, create targeted marketing campaigns, and develop the lead nurturing process to guide leads through different stages of the customer journey and down the sales funnel.
Email marketing is often part of lead nurturing campaigns since it’s one of the most effective ways to expand market reach, convert more leads, and connect with the target audience. Such campaigns typically start when leads add items to their cart or subscribe to the company blog or social media account.
After leads perform the target action, companies launch a lead nurture email sequence that includes limited-time offers, curated lists of personalized recommendations, or purchase reminders. Here are a couple of lead nurturing examples illustrating how different companies keep their leads engaged after they checkout or abandon their carts.
Source: ReallyGoodEmails Source: ReallyGoodEmails
But brands must remember that lead nurturing is never a single marketing campaign. On the contrary, it is a long game that implies the need to keep the conversation going. For that reason, coming up with in-depth ideas for your lead nurturing campaigns is essential to proceed smoothly with your marketing efforts, boost sales, and ensure long-term business growth.
Here’s a short lead nurturing plan template that can help you develop or customize your strategic plan aimed at higher conversion rates and successful communication with leads to move ahead systematically.
Source: Adobe Marketo
There’s no denying that lead generation is a high-effort and high-reward activity. The same is true of targeted content, which matters because it is precisely what brands need to ensure that they accommodate every prospect and bring in more marketing-generated leads.
But understanding how to apply it to different channels and treat different prospects is an entirely different story. Let’s explore how businesses can leverage specific marketing channels and make the most of their lead nurturing efforts.
How To Use Lead Nurturing Channels
The performance of marketing channels is essential to the company’s ability to help potential customers along the buying cycle. Here are some of the most popular channels used to cultivate, educate, engage, and motivate leads:
- Relevant content on the company website: Brands use blog posts, landing pages, personalized offerings, and calls to action to catch the attention of prospects.
- Email marketing automation: Emails help businesses use automated lead nurturing that often includes news, follow-ups, in-depth informational content, and more.
- Social media and voice interactions: Businesses use social media accounts and the IVR system to deliver educational content, launch surveys, extract essential data from person-to-person conversations, and reach prospective clients unfamiliar with your products.
- Cross-channel remarketing: Since the attention spans are getting shorter, businesses must re-engage the lost prospects, create a clear brand impression, and ensure a seamless experience across platforms.
- Webinars, offline and online events: Webinars and industry events allow marketers to interact with potential clients, ask questions, get responses from the target audience instantly, and make brands more humanized.
Identifying the best-performing channels requires time and appropriate marketing automation solutions like a lead management and distribution system, call tracking, email and SMS marketing system, and more. But the most important thing is understanding when and how you should reach the prospects.
Lead Generation vs. Lead Nurturing
The process of lead generation implies pinpointing and collecting contacts that have the potential to become future clients. Lead nurturing, on the other hand, focuses more on introducing prospects to the brand, building trust, and motivating them to make a purchase.
Ultimately, both processes are essential to any business strategy while aiming at different business goals.
Data Businesses Need to Develop a Nurturing Strategy
Capturing relevant data is the number one task for any company looking to analyze current business performance, optimize marketing spend, and predict outcomes, trends, actions, or scenarios.
When developing a B2B lead nurturing strategy, here are the questions you need to ask and the data your company needs to leverage:
The captured demographic and behavioral data can further be used for personalization, ensuring that your nurturing program is timely and relevant. For instance, with marketing automation, lead nurturing becomes a simple task that runs automatically, triggered by the client’s action (or inaction) of the clients.
If you decide that you need to personalize nurturing approaches based on behavioral data and lead scoring results, you can offer prospects several nurturing paths. It could look like if-then statements. Here are a couple of examples:
- If the potential customer is a marketing professional in the e-commerce business, the B2B lead nurture path is B.
- If the prospect is a salesperson in the e-commerce business, then the B2B lead nurture path is A.
Naturally, you would still need to invest time in building your workflows for the nurturing process to run automatically. But in the end, it would save you time, money, and effort.
Why Implement a Nurturing Strategy?
Connecting with leads and establishing a more substantial reputation are only some of the positive effects that efficient nurturing tactics offer to businesses. On top of that, lead nurturing helps brands shorten sales cycles, lower customer acquisition costs, and improve their marketing ROI.
Let’s take a closer look at the other pros of developing and implementing a nurturing process:
- Higher conversions and improved customer relationships
- Better audience segmentation opportunities
- Improved revenues and optimized marketing spend
- Additional sources for analytics and opportunities to improve the customer journey
- Capability to increase brand awareness
5 Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics
If you are looking to develop a nurturing strategy from scratch or improve your nurturing tactics to ensure long-term business growth, consider following these tips.
Build Buyer Personas
Understanding how your fictional buyers look – their preferences, lifestyle habits, or challenges – can help you segment your audience and make a calculated decision about your social media content or outreach strategies.
Here’s an example of a B2C buyer persona you can refer to when building your own.
Source: HubSpot
While buyer personas should be based on your customers, you must build a bond with real clients and ask them to take brief surveys. This way, you can improve your outreach efforts and elevate customer experiences.
Create Targeted Lead Nurturing Content
Every brand needs a solid content marketing strategy to help it find the right direction, shape marketing messages, and justify the investment. Otherwise, you will be working blind and serving your leads with irrelevant or not personalized content.
Source: Semrush
Here are the four primary stages of creating a content marketing plan for your brand. Consider answering the questions listed under each step to ensure that your content is designed to activate specific marketing triggers, meet your audience’s interests, and nurture each buyer persona.
Utilize Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing Tactics
While more than 30% of B2B marketers are convinced that email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads, running several drip marketing campaigns would not do the trick.
The drip approach is not only about set timing and action triggers but also about providing your prospects with relevant content in the moment of need. Otherwise, it will not add value or build trust with prospective customers.
Source: Business2Community
But it’s important to mention that lead nurturing success goes beyond email marketing and requires the power of marketing automation platforms and multi-channel strategies. The latter typically involves a combination of social media, retargeting, sales outreach, website content, and marketing automation solutions.
Use Lead Scoring
If you are new to the concept of lead scoring, it ranks leads based on the value they represent to your business. More often than not, marketers use a numerical score based on factors like readiness to convert, professional information, engagement level, and more.
Source: TechTarget
Based on the lead scoring model example above, you can create your model or customize the one your automation solution provides. It will help you focus marketing efforts on consumers who have already made specific steps and bring them closer to completing a purchase.
Implement Marketing Automation Solutions
Automation is the surefire way to deliver only relevant messages to your leads while guaranteeing an excellent and consistent customer experience. Brands equipped with marketing automation experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. It is possible due to the improved ability of businesses to identify, segment, and target their audience.
There’s no denying that it takes a steady stream of high-quality leads to keep any business successful. Such solutions as LMS Sync – Phonexa’s lead tracking and distribution software – can help companies tap into their lead data, identify the top-performing channels, and boost conversion rates.
To Wrap It Up
Whether you are in the B2B or B2C business, it’s essential to carefully plan lead nurturing campaigns to ensure that your efforts convert into sales and clients. Understanding your target market, developing buyer personas, capturing crucial lead data, and tracking and distributing your leads can help you increase revenue and stay top of mind with clients and prospects.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is lead nurturing important?
Lead nurturing helps businesses build long-term relationships with potential customers, convert more quality leads, and speed up their movement down the sales funnel.
What is a lead nurturing email?
Businesses send nurturing emails to prospects as they move through the sales funnel. These emails engage and encourage leads to continue their brand interaction and customer journey.
What is lead nurturing in email marketing?
Email marketing is integral to a lead nurturing strategy as it helps inform, educate, and engage prospects until they are ready to purchase.
Schedule a consultation to learn how Phonexa’s marketing automation solutions can help you drive more high-quality leads, deliver personalized experiences, and convert those leads into customers.
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