Your Leads Should Ideally Follow the Marketing Funnel on Their Own.

Real life, however, doesn't work that way. In order to motivate site visitors, leads, buyers, and advocates to advance through the many stages of the marketing funnel, lead nurturing is essential. This is not a one-time event that will end tomorrow. Rather, nurturing leads is a continuous process. Businesses with institutionalized lead nurturing programs witnessed a 50% boost in finalized agreements, according to a Forrester study. Additionally, another study on eCommerce reveals that nurtured leads are 47% larger than unnurtured leads. Despite the statistics, a relatively small percentage of businesses and brands—just 36%—use lead nurturing.

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What is Lead Nurturing?

An essential component of inbound marketing is lead nurturing. A marketer's attempt to turn leads into purchasers and advocates is known as lead nurturing. This isn't forced marketing, and it shouldn't be. You, as a brand or product, are responsive to customers' feedback, comments, and requests. Lead nurturing leverages relevant content based on lead behavior or needs. A brand's goal in lead nurturing is to establish a personal connection with its ideal customers; hence, the term "lead nurturing" can be understood as a synonym for "relationship building." You may eventually turn qualified prospects into paying customers by having these kinds of conversations with them.

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Reasons to Implement Lead Nurturing:

Lead nurturing entails personalizing interactions with potential customers throughout their lifespan. You get paid to provide them with the solutions they seek and the data they require. Unlike lead management, lead nurturing involves valuable leads in conversation to build rapport and trust. To engage prospects, marketing and sales organizations require a solid lead nurturing strategy. A company's foundation, sales procedure, and communication will all improve if its leads are not nurtured. TrueNorth study indicates that 96% of website visitors are not ready to buy. Lead nurturing identifies and nurtures these possibilities or non-nurtured leads until they are. The three crucial stages of lead nurturing are awareness, consideration, and decision. It is your responsibility to educate leads in order to advance them along the funnel. When a lead gets to the decision stage, that's when you may start selling them on your goods or services. Building relationships is your primary priority before that, thus Lead Nurturing stops at the "Decision" stage?

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Not at all. Lead nurturing is an ongoing process. Let 's examine an illustration. Sam chooses to take a KLM flight to Turkey. Since he has made travel arrangements with the selected airline, he has passed the "decision" step and is now considered a customer in the language of marketing. It's possible that someone believes Sam has reached the bottom of KLM's marketing funnel. So a lead such as his wouldn't require any more care, right?

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False. It was evident that Sam trusted the business as he paid for its services. He chose this airline even though there were numerous others offering flights on the same route. And KLM is aware of this. Sam is likely to forget about a firm if they desert him as a possible client. If a business ceases to communicate with its clients, a plethora of other businesses will view them as prospective leads after visiting their websites and will continue to pursue business with them. Lead nurturing is a revolving door that opens when a potential customer visits your website and continues as long as you stay in touch with that person. This is why you should continue nurturing leads even after they have entered the "purchasing" stage.

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How Should Brands Strategically Nurture Leads?

Marketing Automation: By automating repeated marketing tasks like emails, website activities, social media posts, and more, marketing automation allows you to save time and effort. Marketing automation is necessary for lead nurturing to occur. To properly nurture a lead, you need data on them. You might then go on to things like social media interaction, educational content, and targeted email marketing. Before you begin nurturing your leads, it is crucial to build a buyer's persona. A buyer's persona is a fictionalized representation of your leads as they sign up for your platform. Lead data is sorted and segmented using a marketing automation software based on factors like job title, browsing habits, and demographics. You can determine the services and solutions a lead requires by creating a buyer's persona. In order to provide them resources, you can infer their issue statement from their browsing behavior. Successful lead nurturing starts with having a deep understanding of your leads. And marketing automation holds the key to that achievement. These are eight practical ways that marketing automation can support lead nurturing.

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8 Efficient Lead Nurturing Automation Techniques:

Advanced automation is a great instrument for improving the lead nurturing procedure. It can help you nurture leads in real time and expedite the direct mail marketing process. The most crucial thing to remember is that automation and traditional marketing tactics should work together. Lead nurturing begins with segmentation. Thus, improved email list segmentation is the first step towards better lead nurturing. This is where we will begin our list:

Advanced Contact List Segmentation: Creating and sending relevant emails to each group is made simple by segmenting leads. It is unrealistic to expect a sixty-year-old businessman to be interested in plush toys unless he has a child and has looked through that section in the past. Processing by hand requires a lot of work. For this reason, it becomes sense to entrust your lead grouping into appropriate categories to a reputable automation service. As building relationships with people is the essence of marketing, segmentation can be based on factors such as:

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- Age, gender, nationality, country, location, religion, etc.

- Events, where a particular action triggers pre-planned emails

- Buyer stage-based lead segmentation and email campaign redirection

- Website/app-based behavior of your leads

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Let's look at this DropBox email case. These potential customers have passed away right in the start of the sales process. This kind of correspondence is called a "re-engagement email," and it is directed toward potential users who haven't been in touch with Dropbox after registering for a while. This is the method by which the buyer's stage is considered for more efficient lead nurturing. Let's examine an additional example that is common to all of us. You are looking at some shoes you like online but don't really plan to buy in a casual manner. You close the website after a few minutes and go with your routine. The next thing you know, you get an email from that shoe retailer detailing a ton of shoes that would be of interest to you. This is probably because you spent a lot of time browsing shoes on their website, especially from the brand you were most interested in. Sending emails on what the leads desired and making it simple for them to continue rather than give up is another method for nurturing leads. Segmentation is the first step in targeted email marketing.

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Email Marketing for Lead Nurturing:

Lead nurturing is the act of guiding prospective customers toward becoming devoted clients. While email marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective strategies to nurture prospects, it also requires a great deal more work and dedication than other channels. Enhancing your email marketing automation can help you better nurture your leads, which will help you gain the confidence of your customers. Email marketing is the process of using an email marketing solution to send promotional emails to a database of current or future clients

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Marketers can automate a variety of email types:

- Welcome emails: these are sent when someone subscribes or joins a community.

- Thank you emails: these are sent after a purchase, donation, or piece of feedback has been completed.

- Onboarding emails: these are a series of emails sent to new leads to help them get started or to educate them about the industry.

- Newsletters and updates.

- Abandoned cart emails (for eCommerce).

- Email notifications.

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Set up autoresponders for when specific events happen, like a new subscriber, a new comment, etc. Furthermore, you have the option to create "drip" email campaigns based on user behavior. When creating drip email campaigns, the "if-then" condition is frequently utilized. For example, you may get in touch with a customer who reads your new page through the email link and informs them of the various ways your product can make their life better. Alternatively, you might offer them more informative content with the aim that they would visit that page later. Email is a constant means of two-way communication for businesses and their clients. If you don't stay in contact with your leads, they can forget about you.

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- Lead Scoring:

Lead scores refer to the numerical values you assign to every potential customer based on their interactions with your marketing collateral, including emails, websites, and mobile applications. You design a system of ratings where each action is assigned a numerical value. The most promising lead is the one with the highest ranking, which is based on how good each lead is. Sales can result from giving this lead a little more attention.

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- Landing Pages:

Landing pages are another aspect of automation that aids in lead nurturing. A landing page serves as the homepage or entry point to a specific section of your website. The objective of the page is to draw in visitors and persuade them to remain and explore further. To create a landing page that converts, you must ensure that it is reliable, has tracking, and is presented in an intelligent and stylish manner. Landing pages are specific pages on your website designed to compel visitors to take an action. You should also consider landing page trends and what your competitors are doing. Most automation tools include drag-and-drop editors so you can customize the elements of your landing page. Limiting the form's length is the first rule of developing an effective landing page. If you ask too many inquiries of your leads, they will become unresponsive. That is an error that you cannot make. Use progressive profiling in this situation, gathering only the most necessary data (e.g., name, email address, and physical location). The remaining information you gather over time. Progressive profiling is sometimes compared to going on a first date.

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We understand that navigating these waters can be challenging, but you're not alone. Schedule a free strategy call with our ABM agency CEO, Alex Hollander. Or visit our homepage for more information regarding B2B SaaS & Tech Growth Operations!

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