With the term “lead generation” often bandied around, many business owners believe that’s all there is to it: you obtain some leads, convert them, and make some money.
It’s unrealistic to expect to identify a lead, contact or email them with your pitch, and seal the deal right away. Leads are nothing more than possibilities. They’re not a sure thing – not yet, at least.
This is where the concept of lead nurturing comes into play.
Scroll down to learn about the 7 easy and efficient techniques you can employ in your lead nurturing campaign.
What is the process of lead nurturing?
Simply said, lead nurturing is the process of cultivating relationships with leads and nurturing them through the purchase process.
There are dozens of ways to create leads, but the truth is that just because someone gives you their information doesn’t mean they’re ready to hand over their cash. Expecting them to do it so quickly is foolish, and might even turn someone away.
Instead of launching into your hard pitch right away, you should use a more gradual approach.
You don’t want to collect a new lead’s contact information and then yell at them, “Hey, look at these fantastic things we have!” “Go out and get some!”
No.
You should offer them marketing materials that will pique their interest in what your company does and why they should partner with you.
It’s critical to understand where your leads are in the buying process so you can offer them relevant, focused material rather than stuff that will turn them off since they aren’t far enough down the sales funnel.
Consider lead nurturing to be a guide who leaves educational breadcrumbs for prospects to follow. Prospects learn more about how you handle their problems as they pick up each crumb on their route to making a purchase that will help them achieve their objectives.
What does lead nurturing mean in marketing?
Relationships built through lead nurturing efforts benefit prospects, customers, marketers, and salespeople.
When a new lead joins up for marketing communications, you have the opportunity to demonstrate to them who you are and how your products may help them. Every phase of a nurturing campaign should be an invitation for people to interact with your brand more.
Lead nurturing gives your audiences a virtual hand to grip while you lead them through everything your company has to offer, whether they’re new prospects or existing customers.
The actions customers take and the clicks they make help marketers create a picture of their needs, allowing them to provide targeted content and solutions that truly address pain spots and solve problems.
Every nurturing campaign is an opportunity to demonstrate who you are and how you can assist your brand’s target clients. Marketers who effectively fulfill the promise of lead nurturing are rewarded with a steady stream of recurring transactions and a growing list of loyal clients.
Lead nurturing examples
Email is one of the best ways to carry out your lead nurturing efforts. There are a few ways you can go about this strategy:
- Education
Some companies teach readers a helpful skill in their emails. They are providing value in exchange for a favor. It’s worth noting these companies use only one call-to-action in each email.
- Videos
If you are trying to sell and advertise a visual product, you can go wrong with a video. A visual presentation for a visual brand is an effective way to show off the product and grab the lead’s attention.
7 Amazingly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics
There are numerous lead nurturing tactics available, but here are seven of the most effective, regardless of the sort of company you work for.
1. Leverage targeted content
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to lead nurturing. According to the research, properly nurturing your leads with tailored content can enhance results dramatically.
Begin by getting to know each of your distinct buyer personas. Then, based on their interests, goals, ambitions, and marketing triggers, build a variety of customized content designed to nurture each of those personas.
As you scale your plan, you should also have marketing automation technology in place to assist you to identify, segment, and target your distinct buyer personas.
2. Use multi-channel lead nurturing methods
Most lead nurturing techniques used to entail creating a simple email drip campaign that sent out generic emails to a list of prospects.
Today’s marketers are on the lookout for new strategies and technology that go beyond email nurturing. 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.
Be careful, though. Since there are so many methods involved, you’ll need to make sure your sales and marketing teams are well-aligned and working together to do this right.
3. Focus on multiple touches
While every product and service buyer’s journey is unique, research shows that on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they first learn about your company to the time they become clients.
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 questions and concerns.
Consider how you can nurture your prospects into customers using a mix of content forms such as social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, or even direct mail.
4. Follow up with leads promptly
The advantages of making prompt follow-up calls appear to be obvious, but most businesses are still slow to act.
Although automated lead nurturing can help you contact huge groups of prospects, the best approach to convert incoming leads into qualified sales possibilities is still to send a timely follow-up email or make a phone call. The chances of converting a lead into a sales opportunity skyrocket when the lead is contacted right after a website conversion.
It’s significantly more effective to make a timely, well-planned contact to an incoming lead than it is to make a large number of cold calls.
You know exactly what the prospect is looking for based on their recent browsing habits, and you know enough about them to perform some preliminary research on the company they work for and their job within it.
5. Send personalized emails
Email marketing remains a highly effective lead nurturing strategy, and personalizing those letters tends to yield better results. According to one study, 41% of customers switched organizations because of a lack of personalization.
You can personalize emails in a variety of ways 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 demonstrating a high degree of engagement, you can send triggered emails.
When you combine the power of marketing personalization with the power of behaviorally triggered emails, you can send the appropriate marketing messages to the right individuals at the exact right time.
6. Use lead scoring tactics
For those unfamiliar with the notion of lead scoring, it is a means of ranking prospects on a scale that indicates the perceived worth of each lead to the company.
By giving numeric values to particular website browsing patterns, conversion events, or even social media interactions, lead scoring could be integrated into most marketing automation solutions.
The resulting score is used to identify which leads should be followed up with by a sales rep directly and which leads require further nurturing.
7. Align your sales and marketing strategies
Lead nurturing tactics are more successful and client retention rates rise when sales and marketing work together.
Consider different triggers like lead scoring, workflow enrollment, and conversion events to determine the exact points in the buyer’s journey where prospects should be migrated across teams so that both sales and marketing may participate in lead nurturing.
A sales and marketing service level agreement should spell out the agreed expectations, responsibilities, and goals for this cross-team engagement. Creating a service level agreement (SLA) will allow the two teams to hold each other accountable for converting leads and nurturing them into paying clients.
Final word
In this day and age of digital marketing, as your leads become more overwhelmed and less receptive to advertisements, firms that help people locate what they want and need, then move toward a purchase, will undoubtedly receive more responses.
These lead nurturing strategies are some of the most successful methods for getting people to engage with your content and eventually buy from you.
Meet your audience at the point in their journey where they are. Breakthrough the marketing jargon and provide your potential customers the information they need about the items and services they want when they want it.
Are you ready to start your lead nurturing campaign?