What is Lead Nurturing? Everything Small Business Owners, Marketing Managers, and Startups Need to Know
What is Lead Nurturing? Everything Small Business Owners, Marketing Managers, and Startups Need to Know
Not every prospect is ready to make a purchase right now. In fact, according to research firm SiriusDecisions, of the 20% of leads that sales reps follow up on, 70% are not qualified. But ignoring those leads could be a costly mistake. After all, 80% of prospects that don’t make the grade today will go on to buy from someone within the next 24 months. And when they do, you want your company to be at the top of their short list.
Once prospects are in the funnel, nurturing them with helpful, relevant content moves potential buyers through each stage of consideration at a natural pace until they’re ready to be passed on to sales. Nurturing is the safety net for every stage of the buying cycle, helping ensure that no revenue opportunity is missed.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is a marketing strategy focused on engaging with prospects by providing valuable information and building relationships over time. It involves guiding potential buyers through the sales funnel, addressing their needs and concerns, and keeping your brand top-of-mind until they are ready to make a purchase.
Why Lead Nurturing Matters
Lead nurturing is essential because it helps convert high-quality leads within your marketing database into customers. Without lead nurturing, inquiries in your system are nothing more than hand-raisers—they’ve demonstrated interest but require further profiling and cultivation before they get passed to sales. Lead nurturing is the process that makes that happen.
Here are some compelling statistics that underscore the importance of lead nurturing:
On average, it takes 10 marketing-driven touches to convert a lead into a sales-ready opportunity (Aberdeen Group).
Email marketing, a core component of lead nurturing, offers as much as a 4400% ROI (Campaign Monitor).
Almost 80% of marketing leads don’t actually convert into sales due to a lack of lead nurturing (Marketing Sherpa).
Only 27% of leads are sales-ready when initially generated (Gleanster Research).
Lead Nurturing Basics
Marketers often mistakenly think of lead nurturing as nothing more than email communication. Instead, you should think of lead nurturing as a workflow, or series of communications, in which each step has a clear and concise objective—whether moving someone to the next stage or driving another desirable action.
Effective nurturing incorporates questions, which help you collect the information necessary to continually refine the relevance of your messages and move prospects through the buying cycle. Building lasting relationships based on trust requires an extensive knowledge of your prospects. Only then can you provide them with the most relevant content, messaging, and assets.
Key Elements of a Successful Lead Nurturing Process
Segmenting
Segmentation allows you to use title, role, industry, or sales stage to account for nuances in messaging. This ensures that your content resonates with the recipients and reduces unsubscribes.
Customer Nurturing
Lead nurturing isn’t just for prospects. Even when you’re bringing on a new customer, there are plenty of ways to nurture the relationship and drive adoption. Here, too, is an opportunity to segment based on user role. Is the customer a “champion,” “power user,” or “executive sponsor”? With this knowledge, you can funnel customers through onboarding programs tailored to their roles, making the transition smooth and seamless.
Give to Get
At two points in the buying cycle, you have prime opportunities to gather information about a contact: when someone is new to your organization and when someone decides to become a customer (or transacts new business with you). During these times, you can increase the frequency and number of touches.
Customer Focus
Use personalization whenever possible, calling the customer by name or mentioning the company name. Provide assets relevant to the customer’s industry and ensure that every communication is matched to that buyer’s need at that point in time. Each communication should be designed to answer a specific question. If you can’t answer the question “What’s in it for the buyer?” the messaging probably isn’t valuable in your nurturing program.
Progressive Profiling
Requiring registration in exchange for an offer is called gating. However, because lead nurturing typically applies to contacts that already exist in your database, it’s not necessary to put forms in front of every offer. Progressive profiling—which incrementally asks contacts for additional information—can help you build a rich, actionable dataset on each prospect.
Five Steps to Lead Nurturing Success
1. Understand Your Buyer
Prospects go through stages. You need to understand those stages and know what content assets best apply to each. Interview your customers—as well as those that did not buy from you—to define your ideal customer profile and develop buyer personas. What are your customer’s pain points? What purchase process do they follow? Why should they be interested in your product? Define what messages are most appropriate at each stage of the buying cycle and who is responsible for delivering each communication.
2. Pinpoint What Motivates Your Buyers
Analyze your past marketing campaigns and determine how they contributed to revenue. Look at the percentage of responses to campaigns and determine how many leads moved through all stages, and the messages and content offered at each stage.
3. Whiteboard the Ideal User Experience
Come up with a lead nurturing structure that best reflects your buying process, then troubleshoot to see where it might be difficult to put into practice. Consider personalizing the experience based on what you know about the prospective buyer. Then modify the flow of communication based on that person’s behavior and engagement with your content.
4. Plan Your Lead Nurturing Process
Determine the campaign goal, message flow, content offers, communication channels, and overall cadence based on previous interactions. Be sure to think through all possible scenarios. If the objective is to send six emails and make three phone calls over eight weeks, what happens if you don’t get the intended response? What happens once someone expires from a nurture program? How do you keep that prospect engaged, and who owns the relationship?
5. Automate Communications
An automated welcome campaign is a great place to get started. Set up automated communications to greet those who enter your database and start delivering educational information. What are the three most important things you want them to know? And what more do you want to know about them?
Real-World Examples of Successful Lead Nurturing Strategies
E-commerce Startup:
This startup utilized personalized email campaigns to nurture leads based on browsing history and past purchases, resulting in a 30% increase in repeat purchases within a 6-month period.
B2B SaaS Company:
Implemented a lead scoring system combined with targeted content delivery through marketing automation, leading to a 25% increase in qualified leads and a 20% higher conversion rate from lead to customer.
Local Service-Based Business:
Integrated SMS marketing into their lead nurturing strategy, sending timely, personalized messages to leads, resulting in a 15% increase in appointments booked and a 10% higher customer retention rate.
Lead Nurturing Best Practices
If you’re ready to join the industry leaders and begin a lead nurturing program, you can increase your chances of success by adopting some best practices.
Start Simply:
Focus on a specific segment of your database with a simple call to action (CTA). See how you perform against your goals and then make adjustments. Once you’ve done this, you can slowly add paths based on buyer persona or sales stage, and personalize content as you learn what does and does not work.
Use Incremental Steps:
For example, a welcome program for new leads can be a simple one-two-three touch program that provides new contacts with helpful information about the problems your product or service solves, the kinds of companies you help, and where to find additional information (for example, pointing them to your most popular downloads).
Personalize Communications:
Send the same three pieces of information to everyone at first. Then, as contacts consume your content and spend time on your site, use digital body language to personalize future communications.
Automate Touchpoints:
Use a layered form—or progressive profiling—to gather information. As contacts engage and move further along the path, you can adjust your strategy.
Keep it Simple:
A simple text-based email with a relevant signature (perhaps the CEO for the first email and sales rep on subsequent emails) can be just as effective as a fancy HTML email.
Identify Behavior Triggers:
Look for opportunities to automate. Identify a behavior trigger (such as welcome, shopping cart abandonment, or contract renewal) and enter contacts into an automated sequence where either an action or a date stamp triggers the process.
Conclusion
Lead nurturing is a crucial element of any successful marketing strategy, ensuring that no revenue opportunity is missed. By understanding your buyers, pinpointing their motivations, and planning an effective lead nurturing process, your business can significantly increase its chances of converting leads into loyal customers.
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