One lead, then another one, and one more… imagine that ten leads have been lured into your sales funnel!
You already see them as your future customers in your mind’s eye. You sit and wait till your leads turn into buyers. But they don’t. Eight out of ten leads leave, never turning into sales.
Unless… you nurture them. Don’t wait and make hay while the sun shines – convert them with an effective lead nurturing strategy.
This article is the only instruction you need to develop it. It contains everything worth knowing about nurturing leads. This guide is also packed with tried-and-tested lead nurturing tactics for business success.
Dive in!
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of interacting with leads and building relationships with them through content marketing, email advertising, or other promotional techniques. The purpose? To convert leads into paying customers.
It is a critical part of the lead generation funnel, the top of your sales funnel. First, you generate a lead and then move on to the lead nurturing process. It lasts until your leads are willing to start the buying process. That’s when the sales-ready leads are handed over to the sales team.
It is not uncommon, however, for sales and marketing teams to collaborate and nurture leads together.
Why is Lead Nurturing Important?
Consider the most significant benefits of lead nurturing below:
- Better email marketing results. Lead nurturing emails receive considerably higher response rates – four to ten times higher than regular emails;
- Positive brand reputation and stronger identity. Through the high-value, personalized content you offer when nurturing leads, your company stands as caring, knowledgeable, and trustworthy in the eyes of your prospective customers. Your unique brand identity becomes more visible, too;
- Higher purchasing potential. Nurtured leads typically make a 47% bigger purchase than non-nurtured leads;
- Increased sales. Brands that nurture leads drive 50% more sales;
- Enhanced customer loyalty. By building meaningful relationships with your potential customers, you evoke trust and increase the likelihood they will become repeat customers and stick with your company longer.
How Do You Nurture Leads?
Before building an effective lead nurturing strategy, you should learn the key elements in the careful choreography required for guiding your potential customers smoothly throughout the buyer’s journey.
These are four stages your leads pass through before becoming your customers:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Consideration
- Evaluation
Let’s explore them in detail with examples.
Awareness
The awareness stage is when your potential leads spot your brand, product, or service on the horizon at the very dawn of the buying cycle. And this is where relationship building and lead nurturing start.
Arm your leads with helpful information to address their pain points and provide relevant content for an effortless buyer journey:
- Product/service explainer video
- Informative blog post
- Resource page
- Guide or ebook
- Podcast
- Webinar
Best way to do it? Email newsletters. And don’t worry, you don’t need any design or coding skills to craft a professional newsletter with Sender’s drag-and-drop builder.
Interest
At the interest stage, brands direct their lead nurturing strategies to fan the fire of curiosity the lead has developed.
For example, Aura Bora uses the email subject line “Something new is coming…”, in their new product launch newsletter:
Copy is short and simple, yet very compelling. The blurred image of the new product induces the fear of missing out.
While Sender wins the users email address with the “Crush Black Friday” form and a free ebook as a lead magnet.
It contributes to the lead nurturing experience and kindles the lead’s interest even more, encouraging them to share the business email address.
Consideration
The consideration stage concerns the customer researching, thinking, and deciding whether the product or service is a perfect fit.
Help your potential customers decide and buy from you with:
- Free sample or trial
- Demonstration
- Case study
- Testimonial
- Review
- Influencer’s recommendation
In fact, testimonials and reviews make 72% of people trust a brand more. Check out this example of using a review and a demo for lead nurturing.
Pro tip: You can experiment with different testimonial types: written, video, or influencer-generated. Influencer marketing is an indispensable tool when marketing to Gen Z.
Also read: What is Testimonial Advertising? Definition, Examples & Strategies
Evaluation
Evaluation is the last, the pre-buying stage. That’s when your prospects evaluate your products and compare them with your competitors.
The lead nurturing activities to convert leads at this stage are product comparisons. A comparison video may be one of the best videos to fulfill marketing objectives in this step. It helps leads evaluate your product by highlighting the contrast in quality, features, etc.
For example, in this TikTok video, Nevaeh Jewellery showcases the distinguishing features of Nevaeh compared to other brands offering similar jewelry items and price point:
How to Create a Lead Nurturing Strategy
Now, it’s time to develop a strategic approach and nurture leads with a comprehensive plan in your hands. Here are the main steps:
Examine Your Previous Lead Nurturing Efforts
If you had a lead nurture program earlier, how powerful was it?
It would help if you analyzed all the wins and failures in the lead nurturing process you performed then.
What if you made some gruesome email marketing mistakes?
For instance, you may have ignored such factors as bounced emails or spam complaints. Now, you would want to avoid repeating the same mistakes again and reconsider all other methods you used to develop a successful lead nurturing strategy and build relationships with your prospects.
Define Your Lead Profile(s)
Defining the target audience and profiling leads lay the foundation for good lead-nurturing strategies.
What does your prospective customer look like?
To answer this question, you need to profile leads based on the following characteristic points:
- Demographic segmentation: age, gender, family status, etc.
- Geographic segmentation: location, climate, urbanicity, cultural preferences, etc.
- Psychographic segmentation: values, beliefs, interests, etc.
- Behavioral segmentation: product usage behavior, time-bound shopping behavior, etc.
- Needs-based segmentation: unique requirements and needs
After accumulating customer data, you may create not one but several lead profiles for lead nurturing.
For example, Beyond the Bookends segments leads during email subscription into three groups based on age and interest in either adult and YA books, reading challenges, or books for kids.
Ensure Accessibility for Leads to Contact You
Make sure you’re accessible via multiple communication channels for positive lead-nurturing results:
- Chat
- SMS
- Phone
- Social networks, etc.
For example, you can give your lead a chance to book a call via email, just like Gusto does, if you aim at lead nurturing for a winning SaaS marketing funnel.
And then, your next step is to establish cross-channel communication. Your leads should be able to hop between points of interaction smoothly without having roadblocks or misunderstandings on the way.
Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in Advance
You must set and track the KPIs to know that your lead nurturing program works. These are the metrics to measure the effectiveness of your lead nurturing efforts:
- Social media metrics. Post clicks, link clicks, post engagement rate;
- Email marketing metrics. Open rate, click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate;
- Website metrics. Number of leads, duration of visits, lead-to-customer conversion rate, lead acquisition cost;
- SMS KPIs. CTR, open, and conversion rates.
You can eventually see more leads turning into customers by setting, tracking, and improving those.
Of course, with the help of specific tools and techniques.
6 Lead Nurturing Tactics
So, after establishing the importance of lead nurturing practices, it is high time to round up the six best ways to nurture leads. Here, they are described in detail to help you understand where to apply what and when.
Prioritize High-Touch Tactics for Key Leads
With high-touch tactics, you put maximum effort into successful lead nurturing. You interact with high-value prospects more actively and rigorously to achieve your sales targets faster and generate more revenue.
It is similar to holding the prospect by hand and providing extra care on each step of the buyer journey. Use the following tips to do it:
- Notify your sales and marketing team;
- Assign a sales rep or manager to every particular lead;
- Personalize onboarding;
- Offer exclusive services;
- Schedule a one-on-one meeting.
When starting a free trial at Toggl Track, the user gets an onboarding email from the customer support agent offering personalized assistance and sharing a guide on how to track billable hours for further lead nurturing.
Employ Low-Touch Methods for the Remaining Leads
A low-touch, aka no-touch, method presupposes minimum interactions with the lead from the first contact to the point of conversion.
The low-touch tactics require less personalization and practically no hand-holding. It may be anything from the below list:
- Chatbot or self-service portal
- How-to guides
- Social media posts
- Calls to action (CTAs)
- FAQs
- Automatic newsletters, etc.
It can be as simple as sending an automated thank you email for subscribing.
Experiment with Different Tactics and Measure Results
Let’s see how you can use interactivity, retargeting, and gamification as marketing tricks in your lead nurturing strategy.
Interactive Website Content
Compared to static content, interactive content drives 94% more views and 52.6% more engagement.
Optimize your website with interactive content to engage a lead on a more entertaining and dynamic level and spice up lead nurturing:
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Image sliders
- Animated maps and infographics
- Calculators
- Dynamic QR codes
Moreover, numerous financial calculators exist to help you estimate investment, annuity, compound interest, life expectancy, inflation, taxes, etc, and learn how to distinguish between revenue and income.
Social Media Retargeting
Have you ever been “chased” on social media by an advertisement from the website you have just visited?
That was retargeting, often used by companies for effective lead nurturing.
Once leads leave your site, you can get them back into the sales funnel with the power of online advertising on social media.
PhotoRoom does that with this ad on Facebook tailored for the lead previously scrolling through PhotoRoom’s AI photo editing tools.
Gamified Email
Incorporate these into your emails to gamify them and nurture more leads:
- Game
- Puzzle
- Scavenger hunt
- Quiz
- Scratch card
- Spin-to-win wheel
Similar to the spin-the-wheel popup on the website, it can also appear in emails for lead nurturing.
Alternatively, opt for “grey-bearded” lead nurturing tactics like direct mail. It’s still used by Burger King, Amazon, and other brands in their lead nurture programs.
Customize Your Email Messages
Email personalization is one of the superb ways to break the ice and enable an emotional connection with your lead to begin lead nurturing. Consider this: personalized emails have an 83% higher open rate and a 138% higher CTR.
Here’s how to facilitate personalized interactions via email:
- Use behavior triggers;
- Congratulate your prospects on personal holidays (birthdays, anniversaries);
- Rely on the data from shopping platforms;
- Customize email content for each customer segment;
- Call the lead by name.
You can easily accomplish all of the above for comprehensive lead nurturing. For example – set up a trigger email based on the prospect’s behavior to personalize the buying journey.
Implement Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is one of the most potent lead nurturing strategies. You rank prospects on a scale of 0-100, depending on how ready they are to buy. The higher the score – the more likely your lead will convert into a buyer.
By implementing lead scoring, sales teams typically approach leads with high scores, finish lead nurturing, and initiate the sales process faster. In contrast, marketing teams concentrate on potential customers with low points and create additional nurture programs for those specifically.
Align Sales and Marketing Strategies
Typically, marketing teams promote a product or service. They also take an active part in generating and nurturing leads. At the same time, sales teams oversee the sales cycle.
But if you want a lead nurturing program to work, keeping sales and marketing teams on the same page and in one place would be better. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool becomes handy in this case. It is one of the best software types your online business needs for lead nurturing.
CRM tools like Salesforce or HubSpot can help you perfectly align both teams’ strategies and tactics.
Launch an Effective Lead Nurturing Program with Sender
Turning your leads into customers is relatively easy with a solid lead-nurturing strategy. And you’ve got all the tips and instruments to create it.
Sender is an essential tool for communicating with your leads on a more personalized level. Get started for free and see your pool of customers growing from a handful to thousands converted via lead nurturing.
Just like for dessert, there’s always room for more knowledge. Check out these articles:
- 10 Best Lead Generation Software in 2023 (Free and Paid)
- 11 Best Email Capture Software for Generating More Leads
- 9 Best Lead Nurturing Software in 2024 ( Free & Paid )
- 18 Lead Nurturing Statistics to Lift Your Sales in 2024
