18 Lead Nurturing Statistics to Lift Your Sales in 2024

Answer quick! What’s the biggest marketing challenge marketing and sales teams encounter? If you’ve answered the lead conversion process, you’re not alone. Generating high-quality leads is hard enough, but guiding them through the buyer’s journey is a new level of difficulty. In fact, many companies struggle, and 80% of new leads never translate into sales.

That’s why lead nurturing becomes a necessity. It involves consistently engaging with potential customers, providing them with relevant information and support, and guiding them through the sales funnel until they’re ready to purchase.

If you and your marketing team are driven by data-backed knowledge like us, you’re on the right track. Our compiled nurturing statistics are not just numbers; they’re insights that can help you better understand how to improve your marketing efforts today. 

But first, we’ll look into how lead nurturing helps turn potential buyers into paying customers. 

Importance of Lead Nurturing on Marketing

There’s more than one good reason to implement the lead nurturing process in your marketing campaigns:

• Increased conversion rates. The math is simple. You provide valuable information and maintain communication with your marketing leads. They move through the sales funnel more effectively. The result? Higher conversion rates.
• Enhanced customer relationship. As with any relationship, trust and loyalty take effort. You demonstrate care and attentiveness by nurturing leads, increasing customer satisfaction, and building warmer relationships with potential customers.
• Improved sales efficiency. A lead nurturing strategy helps you focus where it really matters – on quality leads that are most likely to convert. This allows you to optimize your sales process and allocate resources more efficiently.
• Reduced sales cycle length. The ever-so-long journey through the sales funnel can be much shorter. Plus, faster revenue generation. 
• Better targeting and personalization. It takes a lead nurturing one to know one (and to send more targeted and personalized marketing efforts that resonate on a new level).
• Higher return on investment (ROI). When you nurture warm leads, you’re not just spending; you’re investing. And the returns? They’re significantly higher, leading to greater profitability.

Key Statistics for Lead Nurturing

First of all, let’s look at the bigger picture of the lead nurturing process through lead nurturing statistics:

• Companies that do well at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.*
• 65% of marketers haven’t implemented lead nurturing yet.*
• 52% of marketers plan their lead nurturing strategies for next year.*
• For 37.1% of businesses, lead generation is their top marketing challenge.*
• 48% of the marketers think their lead nurturing initiatives need improvement.*
• The top priorities of lead nurturing strategies are improving customer retention and increasing engagement.*

Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing through email marketing is akin to fostering a friendly conversation — sending personalized and friendly emails to potential customers, sharing valuable content, and gradually building trust and rapport over time. This ensures that when sales-ready leads make a decision, they see you as a helpful ally rather than just another salesperson.

Let’s see why and how lead nurturing emails pave the way from lead generation to conversion:

• Email is the most frequently used channel during the lead nurturing process.*
• 47% of marketers believe email marketing is the most effective lead nurturing tactic.*
• Lead nurturing emails get up to 10x the response rate compared to standalone email blasts.*
• Lead nurturing emails generate an 8% CTR compared to general email sends, which generate a 3% CTR.*

Email marketing is great not only for lead nurturing. Check out the latest stats of email marketing campaign effectiveness for 2024.

Content in Lead Nurturing

The success of lead nurturing campaigns also strongly depends on the quality and relevance of your content. To state the obvious, the more invaluable content you offer, the more leads you get. The more valuable content you provide, the more successful the lead becomes.

But don’t just believe us. Let the numbers speak for themselves:

• 56% of marketers find targeted content the most important element of a lead nurturing program.*
• 55% of B2B marketers say articles are the most effective content for moving prospects through the sales funnel.*
• Aligning content with a prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey can boost conversion rates by 72%.*

Automation in Lead Nurturing

Marketing automation optimizes your engagement with qualified leads by deploying personalized emails, targeted follow-ups, and automated responses tailored to their interests and behaviors. This guarantees consistent communication and liberates your time for more strategic endeavors. 

Additionally, it empowers you to scale your efforts efficiently and yield superior outcomes, ensuring your competitiveness in today’s dynamic digital landscape!

These statistics shall reveal just how superior outcomes can be expected:

• 91% of users have agreed that marketing automation is crucial to nurture leads across various channels successfully.* 
• 74% of marketers have mentioned that the main benefit of automation in lead nurturing is to save time.* 
• 66% of marketers use automation for lead nurturing purposes.*

Lead Nurturing and Social Media

In social media marketing, the key is to create relationships while simultaneously increasing brand awareness. Through authentic engagement, valuable content sharing, and active participation in relevant conversations, businesses can foster connections with their audience, ultimately enhancing brand visibility and recognition. 

This approach strengthens the bond between the brand and its followers and lays the groundwork for successful lead nurturing and conversion further down the line. These statistics will give you a sense of how lead nurturing happens across multiple channels, especially social media:

• 68% of marketers say social media marketing has helped them generate more leads.*
• 66% of marketers generate leads from social media by spending only six hours per week on social media marketing.*
• More than 80% of B2B leads on social media are from LinkedIn.*
• The average conversion rate (CVR) on Facebook Ads is 9.11% across all industries.*
• 58% of people say they have become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Instagram Stories.*

Lead Scoring in Lead Nurturing

Lead scoring helps businesses prioritize their efforts, while lead nurturing ensures that each lead gets the attention and care they need to move smoothly along the path to purchase. To illustrate how this powerful duo works, let’s look into some interesting statistics:

• 84% of companies trust CRM for lead quality evaluation, emphasizing CRM’s key role in customer relationship management.*
• Lead scoring models can cut deal-closing time by 50%, highlighting their efficiency.*
• 75% of businesses see increased conversion rates with lead scoring, proving its effectiveness.*
• Using a CRM application for lead scoring and follow-ups can help increase sales by up to 29%.*

Key Takeaways

When nurtured leads can make almost 150% of purchases that non-nurtured leads would, it goes without saying that all businesses could use lead nurturing strategies. To wave you goodbye with motivation for making lead nurturing a part of your sales and marketing process, we’ve compiled a few things to remember:

Ready to explore more stats? The numbers are waiting to spill their secrets:

• 55+ Personalization Statistics & Facts for 2024
• 50+ Lead Generation Statistics & Trends To Drive More Profits
• 40+ Latest Inbound Marketing Statistics (2024 Report)

Author bio

Vesta Oldenburg is a content writer specializing in email marketing strategies. In her daily work, creativity intertwines with a strategic mindset to create content that captivates its readers.

*Sources

• https://www.hq-digital.com/blog/lead-nurturing-drive-sales-by-following-these-5-steps
• https://www.invespcro.com/blog/lead-nurturing/
• https://www.ruleranalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/Marketing-attribution-and-reporting-survey-2021.pdf
• http://e61c88871f1fbaa6388d-c1e3bb10b0333d7ff7aa972d61f8c669.r29.cf1.rackcdn.com/DGR_DG134_SURV_LeadNurture_Sept_2020_Final.pdf
• https://ascend2.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/The-State-of-Lead-Nurturing-Survey-Summary-Report-210427.pdf
• https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31178/6-different-emails-every-marketer-should-consider-sending.aspx#:~:text=According to HubSpot’s research , lead,you should keep in mind.
• https://www.statista.com/statistics/274986/best-content-marketing-elements-for-lead-generation-in-the-us/
• https://www.business2community.com/inbound-marketing/10-eye-opening-statistics-on-lead-nurturing-in-2019-02203965
• https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/b2c-research-report-2021.pdf
• https://go.impact.com/PDF-PC-CN-TEI-of-Impact-Partnership-Cloud.html
• https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
• https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/2021-content-management-strategy-final.pdf
• https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/lead-nurturing
• https://findstack.com/resources/linkedin-statistics
• https://www.ruleranalytics.com/blog/inbound-marketing/lead-generation-statistics/
• https://startupbonsai.com/lead-generation-statistics/
• https://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Web-Exclusives/Viewpoints/Why-CRM-Is-Critical-to-Small-Business-Success-Right-Now-143212.aspx
• https://www.nected.ai/blog/lead-scoring-strategies
• https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2019/11/12/facebook-ad-benchmarks
• https://gitnux.org/instagram-marketing-statistics/

About author

Skirmantas Venckus

Author

Sender

Skirmantas Venckus leads marketing at Sender, bringing hands-on experience helping brands connect with customers. He deeply understands email marketing’s evolving role and is passionate about making it work smarter, not harder, for everyone.