7-lead nurturing strategies

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is when businesses build relationships with prospects. It is an important aspect of inbound marketing, which is the use of content marketing, social media and other online communications methods to attract customers’ attention. When a potential customer finds your business, they may not be ready to purchase your products or services. Nurturing leads is an effective strategy for driving sales, because it can keep you top of mind for prospects so they come back when they are ready to purchase.

Lead nurturing is similar to any relationship: The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. But if you fail to strengthen a relationship, then you’ll naturally drift apart. [Looking for customer relationship management software to help manage your leads? Check out our reviews of the best CRM software solutions.]

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.

7 effective lead-nurturing strategies

There are plenty of strategies you can use to nurture leads, but keep in mind that they can change over time. A method you successfully used to engage with your prospects in the past may not work in the future. The right CRM software will allow you to automate a lot of the nurturing strategies you need to close new business.

Here are seven effective strategies for nurturing leads:

Use email marketing.

Fifty-five percent of marketers say email marketing drives the highest return on investment of all digital marketing strategies, according to research from Campaign Monitor.

Not only is email marketing more cost-effective than advertising, but it can also 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 send it only to subscribers who have engaged with past e-books or similar content, because they are more likely to welcome it. If you were to send it to your entire email list, some recipients would not open it and might even be annoyed by receiving an extra email, which would damage your relationship.

Email segmentation is versatile. You can target customers according to the products they browse, the type of content they download, where they are in the sales funnel, what emails they open and more. As you get more information about your prospects, you’ll be able to create more-personalized messages.

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.

Another benefit of email nurturing is that you can automate it. With the right tools, you can easily create email lists, as well as schedule emails when it’s most convenient for you.

Keep in mind that with this strategy, you must strike the right balance. You want to communicate with your audience regularly so that you’re building a relationship but not too often that they feel you are spamming them.

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:
  • Constant Contact
  • Benchmark
  • Sendinblue
  • HubSpot
  • Mailchimp
  • Keap