A good lead-nurturing strategy can drive many positive results for your business.
- Lead nurturing is a strategy that businesses use to maintain and grow relationships with potential customers.
- Lead nurturing can help you gain your audience’s trust and increase sales.
- There are several lead-nurturing strategies you can try, such as focusing on content marketing, using data to target prospects by email and learning more about your audience via surveys.
- This article is for marketing professionals and business owners who want to build stronger relationships with customers via lead nurturing.
Companies that invest in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost, according to Forrester Research. Lead nurturing falls by the wayside at many companies, but it is important to consider implementing a lead-nurturing strategy. Before getting started, make sure to understand why lead nurturing is important and how it can be applied to your business.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing involves developing relationships with potential customers. It is a key component of inbound marketing, which uses various online communication tools and strategies to draw customer attention. If someone is interested in your business but not yet ready to buy something, lead nurturing can be helpful in encouraging them to come back when they are ready to make a purchase.
The more you nurture a lead, the more you’ll get out of the relationship. However, if you don’t work to strengthen the relationship, it will eventually break down.
The key point to remember is that lead nurturing is all about building relationships with potential customers. By nurturing these relationships, you can better position yourself to sell to them down the line.
What is the importance of nurturing your leads?
Although the ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to drive sales, it offers several other benefits:
- Introduces prospects to your company. Lead nurturing is an effective way to teach prospects about your services and products. You may not have enough space on a landing page to truly explain the impact of your products and services, but lead nurturing allows you to show potential customers a more complete picture of who you are and what you can do for them.
- Helps you gain your audience’s trust. Showing your potential customers that you understand their pain points or giving them useful tips can help you connect with your audience and gain their trust. Sharing your knowledge lets them know that your relationship isn’t just about your company making a sale but also about providing them with necessary tools and information.
- Makes you a thought leader. As you create thoughtful, relevant content and communications, lead nurturing can boost your reputation and help you be seen as a leader in your industry.
- Helps your audience remember you. If you communicate regularly with your prospects, they will likely remember you. Staying top of mind is especially helpful so they will turn to you when they need or want your products or services.
- Bolsters your sales strategy. Sales teams are usually focused on selling in the moment, which means many potential customers aren’t being targeted. Lead nurturing gives you the opportunity to target future customers.
- Reduces customer acquisition costs. Lead generation allows you to turn to less-expensive methods of attracting customers, and spending less on marketing is good for your customer acquisition costs (CAC = total marketing cost/number of sales).
- Increases sales. With lead nurturing, you can turn prospects into higher-quality leads. In fact, nurtured leads make purchases that are 47% bigger than non-nurtured leads, Annuitas reported based on research from Marketing Sherpa.
It’s not just about making sales—lead nurturing can also help improve your company’s reputation and gain your audience’s trust.
7 Effective Lead-Nurturing Strategies
There are various strategies you can use to develop relationships with your potential customers, but it is important to remember that these methods may change over time. A tactic that you used previously to interact with your target audience may not be as effective in the future. The ideal CRM software will give you the ability to automate many of the strategies required to convert leads into customers.
Here are seven effective strategies for nurturing leads:
1. Use Email Marketing
A majority of marketers say that email marketing is the most effective digital marketing strategy in terms of return on investment.
Email marketing is more cost-effective than advertising, and can be personalized through data and user behavior research. Email segmentation, or the division of email subscribers into smaller groups based on different parameters, allows you to target leads more effectively.
For example, if your company created an e-book, you could target subscribers who have engaged with past e-books or similar content. By targeting this group, they are more likely to welcome the e-book. If you were to send it to your entire email list, some recipients would not open it which could damage your relationship.
Email segmentation gives you the ability to target customers based on a variety of factors, including the products they browse, the type of content they download, their location in the sales funnel, which emails they open, and more. The more information you have about your prospects, the more customized and personalized your messages can be.
In addition to segmenting emails to increase engagement, you should do the following:
- Keep the subject line short, and make sure it stands out.
- Spend time writing compelling preview text.
- Add calls to action (CTAs).
- Be concise.
- Make your emails mobile-friendly.
- Send relevant emails.
- Encourage prospects to reply.
- A/B test as much as possible.
The advantage of email nurturing is you can automate it by using the right tools to easily create email lists and schedule when to send them.
It is important to maintain a balance when using this strategy so that you are not overwhelming your audience with too many messages and appearing as spam.
To get started with email nurturing, you’ll need the right tools. Here are some to consider:
- For analytics and data:
- Google Analytics
- Marketo
- Seventh Sense
- For email campaign creation and automation:
Email marketing tools can make your life much easier by helping you with some of the work.
2. Rely on Content Marketing
Utilizing various forms of content is a great way to nurture your leads. Quality content is something that your audience will find useful or entertaining. They’ve got a problem, and you’ve got the solution.
In addition to blog posts you can also create content such as:
- Videos
- White papers
- Infographics
- Case studies
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
A company’s most valuable asset is its high-quality content. As we mentioned before, most potential customers are not ready to buy right away. Instead, you need a way to engage with them that doesn’t involve a hard sales pitch. Quality content is the perfect tool for this. We’ll discuss more content marketing strategies below.
3. Personalize Your Content
It is important to personalize your content as much as possible when engaging in lead nurturing. This will help make the recipient feel like the company is speaking directly to them. Personalize email by including the name of the lead and using language that is direct and specific to the their field. Sending out this type of message to a specific group is an effective way to engage and nurture those leads.
You can make your campaigns more personalized by using smart segmentation. For example, if you send an email to a customer support agent, it wouldn’t be as effective if you sent the same email to someone else. It’s important to segment your email campaigns, PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads, and web push notifications so that they are relevant to the person receiving them.
You should segment your audience into different groups based on factors that are relevant to your industry and sales goals. For example, you could divide them based on their interests, demographic factors or their activity on your website. Create separate campaigns for each group of people, tailored specifically to their needs and preferences. This is an effective lead nurturing tactic, as research shows that 90% of people have a favorable view of personalization.
4. Optimize Your Timing
It’s important to have well-established lead nurturing tactics in place before you start collecting leads. Timing is crucial for successfully executing a lead nurturing campaign. Even the best lead nurturing campaigns can fail if you don’t optimize your timing.
The speed of your follow-up directly impacts the likelihood of closing a deal. You should follow up with a lead as soon as possible once they are gathered.
It’s not just about making initial contact with your lead, it’s also about timing how often you follow up with them. You don’t want to bombard them with too many messages, but you also don’t want to wait too long between messages or they’ll forget about you. Finding the right balance is key to success. A sample strategy might look like this:
- Initial follow up: Within 5 minutes
- Second follow up: 1 day later
- Third follow up: 3 days later
- Fourth follow up: 5 days later
Depending on who your target audience is, you can figure out what works best for you. Always look at your results and make changes accordingly so that you can take care of your leads as much as possible.
5. Automate Your Campaigns
Automate your lead nurturing for a more reliable system! It requires much less effort to maintain your lead nurturing campaigns when they are automated, especially your initial follow-up campaign. This is crucial because of how important timely contact is. You would need round-the-clock monitoring of your leads if you tried to do this yourself, which is unlikely to be successful.
An automated campaign could be set up so that all new leads receive a web push notification after submitting a lead generation form on your website. For example, notice that the first name custom attribute can be added to the title section. Personalization combined with automation can produce excellent results!
It is worthwhile to set up a drip campaign which enables you to contact potential customers at regular intervals and in a way which is personal to them. You should also consider other elements such as timing, so that your campaign is as effective as possible.
6. Remember the Buyer’s Journey
Lead nurturing is all about eventually converting a lead into a paying customer. The buyer’s journey is a framework that can be helpful when planning lead nurturing campaigns.
It is important to create unique content for each stage of the customer journey, as this will ensure that each lead receives relevant information that is appropriate for their stage in the journey.
The most effective way to nurture a lead is to show them relevant content at the right time. You can do this by setting up your campaigns to follow a natural flow, which will hopefully result in a conversion. Automated email series or web push series are the best way to do this, as they can dial up the content as a lead becomes more invested and learns more about your business and products.
7. Nurture Leads Post-Sale
You’ve learned that generating leads is just the beginning of your job–not the end. The next step is to nurture those leads, with your most qualified ones converting into customers on your site. But even once a lead has converted, you need to continue nurturing them. Why? Because repeat customers are invaluable to any company.
Customers who visit your store more than once spend on average three times more money than those who only visit once. That’s a significant difference! These customers also act as advertisements for your store by telling their friends about their experiences. You should already be aware of how effective word-of-mouth marketing can be.
Once a lead converts to a customer, you then have new opportunities to upsell or cross-sell them additional products, or encourage them to repurchase from you at a discount or with an invitation to a rewards program.
Lead nurturing is a continuous process that should never end. Closing a sale is a cause for celebration and a signal to shift into another avenue of lead nurturing that will secure these customers for life.
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