Has your campaign successfully landed you good leads? These leads should result in sales and not go stale. Yet, alas! The leads neither generate sales on their own nor convert overnight. Lead nurturing, on the contrary, is a lengthy process. Forrester’s research stated that companies that use lead nurturing practices have approximately 50% higher conversion rates.
Despite the massive influence of this practice, research shows that merely 36% of companies have embraced and adopted it so far. If you haven’t already been practicing it, now is the time to start! And we’ve got you covered here with how to go about it.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Every effort by a marketer to convert a lead to a sale and later to build strong promoters is lead nurturing. Instead of coerced advertising and marketing, lead nurturing necessitate appropriate content and is premised on the behavioral trends of the leads.
It is more like a process where you build a relationship with your customers and engage them in a way that they can connect with you through their attention, doubts or queries, complaints, or needs; It must ensure their satisfaction with the value of money they are paying.
To ensure that the leads grasp the value of your solution, they need to be nurtured with the potential content.
Is Lead Nurturing and its Automation Important?
Both are a resounding YES! Lead nurturing is intended to create trust and a relationship with potential leads that lasts longer and goes deeper than a single sale. In a competitive buyer’s market, your campaigns are more likely to succeed if a valuable lead feels engaged and attended to in a consistent dialogue. As a result, lead nurturing has become critical in any company’s marketing strategy.
According to recent studies, approximately 96% of leads who have been to your website aren’t yet prepared to buy. To convert these leads to sales, you must educate them and maneuver them through the marketing funnel.
Now, this is a lengthy process if resorted to age-old manual methods. Marketing Automation Is The Way to Go! Using Automated lead nurturing as part of the marketing strategy ensures that each potential customer receives quick services and appropriate content. Automation brings you closer to realizing your aim to grab each lead! It assists in the automation of repetitive marketing tasks such as social media ads, emails, and so on.
Even small marketing teams can boost their work performance with the help of good marketing automation tools/software, which include:
- Automate campaign tasks
- Obtain data-driven insights into campaign performance and customer satisfaction
- Create Campaign
- Send out emails and promote your brand on social media.
This process of lead nurturing consists of three stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
Sales occur when a potential lead reaches the final stage of decision-making. Before this, businesses must cultivate relationships through consistent engagement to reach the point where they can begin to consider.
7 Tactics to Enhance your
1. Segmented Customer List
For obvious reasons, one would not expect an artist to participate in an advertisement campaign for a new type of angioplasty stent. It is always beneficial to find out and know different customers. A good automation tool can be the best aid to segregate your customers and clients. Segmentation allows you to deliver more personalized content.
You can sort the leads according to the following criteria:
- Demographics
- Planned emails for people associated with a particular event
- Segmentation based on what stage the potential customers are at – awareness, consideration and decision
The behavior of the potential leads that have previously engaged in your website.
2. Email Marketing
Naturally, the second step after the segmentation is email marketing. It involves sending commercial emails to a segmented list of potential customers and clients. Lead nurturing relies heavily on email marketing. While it is one of the most effective ways to nurture leads, it takes comparatively more time and effort. Strengthening your email marketing automation is essential in improving lead nurturing and, ultimately, developing credibility. Here are some types of emails that you can send out to your potential leads:
- When someone subscribes to your group/community, send them a welcome email.
- When a lead converts to sales, receives a donation, or receives feedback, write them a thank you email.
- Got new leads? Send them an onboarding email that provides them with essential information about your business
- Putting up discounts and special offers? Let an email notify your potential leads
- Updates and newsletter
- Emails inviting your previous customers to re-engage
- Ping your leads stuck in consideration and left the items in the cart
- Notification emails – Got inquiries about an out-of-stock product? Send them notification emails regarding the re-stocking
Sending out emails at well-timed intervals to remind leads about your company without bugging or annoying them can be very beneficial.
3. Lead Scoring Leads to Impactful Lead Nurturing
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4. Marketing Workflow Automation Templates
Making a proper workflow for anything is always a good idea, and this is especially true for the process of nurturing leads, which is a time-consuming process. Creating an automated flow for each step, such as segmentation, tagging, and scheduling emails and their content makes the process easier, more effective, and more comprehensive. It frees up your time and energy to focus on more important and urgent matters.
5. Push Notifications and SMS Campaigns
These two tools are excellent for sending out quick reminders and notifications about information or updates that are either time-sensitive or could lead to sales quickly. Push notifications and SMS are the best ways to deliver dynamic content. Dynamic content is content that changes based on the browsing history, demographics, and other factors of the leads. The ability to connect with leads, regardless of device, is critical for improving lead nurturing.
6. Content Marketing for Lead Nurturing
The content of the deliverables is at the heart of the entire marketing system and strategy. While marketers are implementing various methods for digital marketing and generating qualified leads, content marketing plan development is at the top of the list.
This strategy is founded on the customer’s progression through the three stages of lead nurturing. Content is tailored to support, encourage, and educate buyers at their current stage: introduction or awareness, consideration, and decision-making.
- Awareness Stage: Educational content works best at this stage where you provide more and more information about the business to the leads.
- Consideration Stage: At this stage, people have already been through your content and are perhaps seeking the best fit for their expectations. At this stage, you can provide them with the solutions that encourage them to move to the final stage of the funnel.
- Decision Stage: At this point, your leads are now aware of their problem, have considered all potential alternatives, and have finally agreed on a solution strategy. To incentivize them to decide in your favor, provide them with content that shows them the value benefits they’ll get upon choosing you over your competitors. Or content that motivates them to make the purchase. This may include Vendor and Product Comparisons, Product Demos, etc.
7. Optimized Campaign
Analysis and reporting is the most crucial part of any stage in the marketing funnel. Without lead analysis, it is impossible to understand where your campaign and leads are falling short and how you need to improve to boost sales. Features like time-span reports, detailed analytics, region-wise reports, and others in the automation tools help examine the campaign performance and lead quality.
All of these new features allow you to create processes and tactics that attract and help push new leads into the sales funnel and drive them to convert. This in turn creates an impactful lead nurturing system. In times of dilemma among the multiple creative campaigns, running an A/B test is also quite effective. You may be able to find out which segment of lead is better converting to sales, which kind of content is attracting better engagement through this practice.
Conclusion
Well, it is safe to conclude that an lead nurturing is most impactful when automated. Following all the steps discussed above help you guide your leads all the way through the sales funnel and make the purchase. However, lead nurturing does not end with the purchase stage. Building a loyal community of customers and keeping them satisfied is extremely important for every business.