As more businesses use inbound marketing to create leads, the need of having an efficient lead nurturing plan becomes evident. In most circumstances, only a tiny fraction of your inbound leads will be ready to buy right away, leaving up to 90% of your inbound leads on the table.
This post will go through the most effective lead nurturing strategies you can use at your organisation and also analyse helpful tips for successful lead nurturing.
What is Lead Nurturing?
The process of creating and reinforcing relationships with buyers at each level of the sales funnel is known as lead nurturing. A successful lead nurturing plan directs marketing and communication efforts on listening to prospects’ requirements and giving the information and answers they require:
- Build trust
- Increase brand awareness
- Maintain a connection until prospects are ready to purchase
That is why it is critical to cultivate buyer relationships using a systematic lead-scoring system. Furthermore, prolonging sales funnels encourages independence in prospects, necessitating the requirement for well-crafted lead nurturing programmes.
Understanding Lead Nurturing
Not every prospect is ready to purchase right now. According to statistics, 70% of the leads that sales professionals follow up on are not qualified. However, ignoring those leads is a mistake. After all, 80% of prospects who do not qualify today will buy from someone over the following 24 months. When they do, you want your business to be at the top of their list.
Once prospects are in the funnel, nurturing them with useful, relevant content advances them naturally through each step of consideration until they’re ready to be handed on to sales. Nurturing serves as a safety net at every stage of the purchase cycle, ensuring that no income opportunity is lost.
Lead nurturing often focuses on converting contacts who have already scored highly in your marketing database rather than generating new inquiries. This improves the results of previously collected leads. According to the Demand Gen Report, nurtured leads generate 20% more sales chances than non-nurtured prospects.
Inquiries in your system are nothing more than hand-raisers without lead nurturing—they’ve shown interest but need more profiling and cultivation before being forwarded to sales. Lead nurturing is the mechanism by which this occurs.
What is the importance of nurturing your leads?
Although the ultimate purpose of lead nurturing is to increase sales, it also has various other advantages:
#1. Introduces prospects to your company
Lead nurturing is an efficient method of informing prospects about your services and products. You may not have enough space on a landing page to fully explain the impact of your products and services, but lead nurturing allows you to provide a more comprehensive picture of who you are and what you can do for them.
#2. It helps you gain your audience’s trust
Showing your potential consumers that you understand their problems or providing them with relevant advice will help you connect with them and acquire their trust. Sharing your knowledge demonstrates to them that your relationship is about more than simply generating a sale; it is also about equipping them with the required skills and information.
#3. It elevates you to the status of thinking leader.
Lead nurturing may increase your reputation and help you be viewed as a leader in your industry when you develop thoughtful, relevant content and messages.
#4. It assists your audience in remembering you.
If you communicate with your prospects on a frequent basis, they will most likely remember you. Staying top of mind is especially important so that people will contact you when they require or desire your products or services.
#5. Bolster your sales strategy
Because sales teams are typically focused on selling in the present, many potential consumers are not targeted. Lead nurturing allows you to target potential clients.
#6. Lowers the cost of customer acquisition
Lead generation enables you to use less expensive techniques of drawing customers, and spending less on marketing lowers your customer acquisition costs (CAC = total marketing cost divided by number of sales).
#7. Boosts sales
Lead nurturing allows you to convert prospects into higher-quality leads. In fact, nurtured leads make 47% larger sales than non-nurtured leads.
Lead Nurturing Strategies That Work Like Crazy
Although there are many lead nurturing tactics available, these are seven of the most effective, regardless of the sort of business you work for.
#1. Leverage targeted content.
One size does not fit all when it comes to caring. According to the research, nurturing your leads carefully with focused content will considerably increase results.
Begin by attempting to comprehend each of your distinct buyer personas. Then, based on their qualities, construct a collection of personalised content meant to nurture each of your personas, such as interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers.
As you scale your plan, you should also have a marketing automation technology in place to assist you identify, segment, and target your distinct buyer personas.
#2. Use multi-channel lead nurturing techniques
Most lead nurturing techniques used to include creating a simple email drip campaign that sent out generic emails to a list of prospects.
Marketers like you are looking for new methods and solutions that go beyond email nurturing. Savvy marketers are now implementing multi-channel lead nurturing methods with the support of strong marketing automation technologies.
Marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content, and direct sales outreach are all frequent components of effective multi-channel lead nurturing. Because there are so many methods involved, you must guarantee that your sales and marketing teams are effectively connected and working collaboratively.
#3. Pay attention to several touches.
While the buyer’s journey for each product and service is unique, research has shown that prospects receive ten marketing touches on average from the time they become aware of your brand until they convert into customers.
As you might expect, the most effective lead nurturing tactics provide material that assists prospects in progressing through the buyer’s journey by answering frequent queries and concerns. Consider how you may nurture your prospects into customers using a variety of content forms, such as social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, or even direct mail, in addition to email methods.
#4. Follow up with leads as soon as possible.
The benefits of fast follow-up calls appear obvious, but most businesses are still slow to act.
Although automated lead nurturing can help you contact huge groups of prospects, a timely follow-up email or phone call is generally the most effective approach to turn incoming leads into qualifying sales possibilities. Because the chances of converting a lead into a sales opportunity increase enormously when the lead is contacted soon after a website conversion.
It is significantly more effective than any volume of cold calling to make a timely, well-planned call to an inbound lead. You know exactly what the prospect is looking for based on their recent browsing behaviour, and you have enough information on the prospect to do some preliminary research on the company they work for and their role within it.
#5. Send personalized emails.
Email marketing remains a highly effective lead nurturing method, and personalization of those emails produces better outcomes. According to an Accenture study, 41% of consumers switched businesses owing to a lack of personalization.
There are numerous methods for personalising emails to boost your lead nurturing approach. When a visitor completes an action, such as downloading gated information, clicking on links in your emails, visiting specific pages on your website, or displaying a high level of engagement, you can send triggered emails.
When the power of marketing customisation is combined with the power of behaviorally triggered emails, you can deliver the appropriate marketing messages to the right people at the right time.
#6. Use lead scoring tactics.
For those unfamiliar with the notion of lead scoring, it is used to evaluate prospects on a scale that expresses the perceived value each lead provides to the organisation.
Most marketing automation tools include lead scoring by assigning numerical values to specific website surfing behaviours, conversion events, or even social media interactions.
The resulting score is used to identify which leads should be directly followed up with by a sales rep and which prospects should be nurtured further.
#7. Align your sales and marketing strategies.
When sales and marketing work together, lead nurturing tactics succeed and customer retention rates rise.
Determine the precise points in the buyer’s journey where prospects should be transferred across teams so that both sales and marketing may contribute to lead nurturing. Consider several triggers such as lead scoring, workflow enrollment, and conversion events to accomplish this.
A sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA) should establish the agreed expectations, duties, and goals for this cross-team collaboration. Creating a SLA will allow the two teams to hold each other accountable for properly converting leads and nurturing them into paying clients.
Steps to Lead Nurturing Success
Launching a lead nurturing strategy and programme establishes the foundation for converting new and returning clients. Follow these four steps:
Step #1: Define your leads.
To define the ideal lead, sales and marketing must agree on a joint lead definition. You’ll need to figure out:
- Your industry
- Who already exists in your database?
- Prospects for the future
- Which buyers are completing transactions?
Once you’ve determined this, you can use these parameters to determine lead scoring thresholds, lead fit, and lead engagement points.
Step #2: Create your lists.
List-building strategies must be used to feed the top of the funnel in order to expand your business and put up a comprehensive lead nurturing programme. Check your leads on a regular basis, detect and cleanse duplicates, and eliminate inactive or garbage contacts.
Step #3: Divide your audience into groups.
We recommend that you employ two dimensions of segmentation in your basic lead nurturing programmes: purchase stage crossed with another measuring variable vital to your organisation. This results in a happy balance.
One dimension is insufficient, and each dimension beyond two results in an increasingly more complex framework. Consider it in terms of segments and subsegments.
Step #4: Test and optimize your campaigns.
You must frequently check and test your lead nurturing process. Testing reveals parts of a nurture track that should be improved, such as:
- How many times are you touched in a certain period of time?
- The various sorts of messages sent
- What time of day did the exchanges occur?
Lead nurture frequency, path, content and creative (including copy length and design), and content mix must all be optimised.
How Do We Nurture Leads?
The term ‘nurture leads’ refers to the process of developing a relationship with potential consumers or clients. Then guiding them through the purchase process, ultimately leading to a sale.
The dictionary definition of “nurture” is “taking care of something or someone to help them develop.” This is what happens when you nurture leads, as you learn about their problems, assist them in figuring out potential solutions, and provide them with relevant material.
What is Lead Nurturing Content?
Lead nurturing content establishes a direct relationship with a prospect by demonstrating that its creators understand their requirements and concerns. An bespoke whitepaper developed expressly for a group of prospects that focuses on a specific concern they have highlighted is one example.
The whitepaper would empathise with them and contextualise their predicament with statistics. It would also give a practical answer, usually in the form of a product or service offered by the firm that produced it.
How Do You Demonstrate Nurturing at Work?
The following are some suggestions for nurturing relationships at work:
- Make an effort to become acquainted with your employees.
- Everyone should be treated with dignity.
- Show your gratitude.
- Be encouraging.
- Make time for enjoyment.
What is Customer Nurturing?
Building effective and long-term relationships with potential consumers throughout their self-directed journeys is what customer nurturing entails. Developing a best-practices-based customer nurturing strategy begins with setting goals, adopting the right solution, and integrating your nurture programmes.
What is Nurturing Good Values?
Value nurturing entails enhancing the client’s perceived value from the solution rather than extracting every dollar from the customer. The more successful you make your customers, the more successful your firm will be in the long term. Revenue growth is a natural byproduct of well-executed value nurturing.
Conclusion
Lead nurturing can assist you in developing personalised business-to-business interactions with clients and prospects at each stage of the sales funnel. We hope that this guide will assist you in understanding the common challenges that a solid lead nurturing process may solve, as well as the potential returns on your investment.
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