Did you know that a successful lead nurturing campaign can help generate a 47% higher average order value? In fact, without proper "convincing," many leads suddenly become cold, and a well-established lead nurturing strategy works like a microwave oven, heating and even defrosting everything it targets.
If there's no properly structured lead nurturing strategy that you regularly use within your organization, this article will be of great use to you. Here's what you'll find out:
- What lead nurturing is
- What benefits it has for your business
- 7 most effective lead nurturing strategies
- Reasons to implement lead nurturing in your organization
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Within the current sales frame, there's no longer a place for old-fashioned strategies that are aimed at pressuring and pushing potential customers towards buying. As customers, we all prefer to conduct our own research and decide whether the product is a good fit for us based on our conclusions.
Now, lead nurturing techniques help salespeople and the marketing team target an inbound prospect in an inconspicuous and unobtrusive manner, gently directing them towards the final goal - obtaining a product or subscribing to a service.
Think of it as making friends. You need to know the person before you can trust them. It's the same principle here: you need to earn customers' trust and respect before they decide to invest in you. This way, you engage, support, and build long-lasting, trusting relationships with your customers.
Why Lead Nurturing Is Important
Lead nurturing strategies are, surprisingly, not that popular among marketing specialists, and a big portion of businesses don't really have an established campaign in place. To be precise 65% of marketers consider lead nurturing their biggest challenge, and 80% of leads never translate into paying customers. This leaves businesses with a lot of missed opportunities, and tons of warm leads in the sales funnel turned cold.
For instance, here are a couple of benefits that you can expect from a well-executed lead nurturing campaign:
- More qualified leads
- Increased average order value
- Increased loyalty and retention rates
Let's just look at some lead nurturing statistics for a moment:
- 96% of your website visitors are not ready to buy. This means that for you to take advantage of your website traffic and turn visitors into clients, you need to invest in lead nurturing.
- Companies that excel at it generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
- In addition, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases during their buying journey compared to non-nurtured ones.
Top 7 Compelling Lead Nurturing Tactics
If you feel convinced about implementing such a strategy into your business practice, we have prepared a list of the most efficient lead nurturing tricks and tactics that are most relevant nowadays.
1. Align Marketing and Sales teams
The first rule of lead nurturing is to align sales and marketing efforts to create a profitable symbiosis between the two. It often happens that sales and marketing seem to chase different goals. But when the two teams sit together and strategize their customer approach, the path becomes clearer, and conversion rates improve dramatically.
First, you need to identify the exact points in the customer journey and the sales cycle where the transition between marketing and sales teams happens. Then, outline the mutual expectations, goals, and responsibilities at each point for the two teams to share and follow.
With shared efforts from both sides, the teams will be able to target more leads and convert them into opportunities much faster.
2. Use targeted content
Practice shows that nurturing your leads with targeted content significantly improves lead conversion.
Initially, you need to establish your company's unique buyer personas, as one standardized approach won't work effectively in every case scenario.
Buying personas are fictional characters who represent your ideal customer. You can create one based on educated speculation about their demographics, histories, etc.
Find out as much as possible about your typical customer's objectives, interests, pain points, and other marketing triggers. Then, work on the relevant content that will target specific groups of your clients and resonate with them.
To help you identify, group, and target your buyers, make use of marketing automation and analytic tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, Xtensio, etc. They will save you lots of time and resources.
3. Follow up with leads in a timely manner
This strategy seems quite obvious, but many organizations neglect the rule of timely follow-up calls or emails and thus, miss out on good opportunities.
Strategizing your lead nurturing and developing a straightforward plan that covers timely follow-ups is essential for consistent inbound opportunities influx. What's more, the chances of converting a lead into an opportunity are significantly higher when you follow up with prospective customers in the earliest stage of the buying process, right after the website conversion.
4. Utilize multi-channel lead nurturing tactics
Simple email drip campaigns with generic messages sent out automatically across your client network won't bring worthwhile results these days. You need to invest in a more holistic approach, targeting more channels and covering a larger pool of customers than just a simple email list.
An efficient strategy involves the combination of multiple tactics, including paid targeting, email marketing, social media posts, marketing automation, and direct sales outreach.
Using these tactics all together or at least a couple of them at once will increase your chances of reaching out to more people and converting more of them into actual clients.
5. Employ the lead scoring technique
Lead scoring is a relatively unexplored concept for many marketers and sales teams. So if you're new to this method, lead scoring involves ranking prospects according to the perceived value they represent to your business.
To assign correct scores to your leads, you need to use marketing automation and analytic tools and platforms to assign numeric values to specific leads according to their browsing behavior, media interactions, etc.
According to the result, you will be able to see which leads are "warmer" and can be contacted directly by sales reps, and which still need some "convincing" and nurturing.
6. Send personalized emails.
Email campaigns are still a powerful and highly effective tool in lead nurturing practice. However, to make the most out of the email marketing campaign, make sure to personalize the emails to generate better results and improve relationships with prospects.
What’s more, a study found that 41% of clients decided to switch businesses due to insufficient personalization.
To streamline the process and create more tailored and customized emails, you need to gather as much info about your customers as possible. Send an email each time a visitor demonstrates a high level of interest and engagement on your website and prompt them for further actions.
This way, you combine behavioral triggering with the power of personalized messages and communicate the right idea to the right person at the right time.
7. Test and optimize the process along the way
Never leave your lead nurturing campaign to its own devices. Check on it and monitor the campaign regularly to adjust the marketing strategy according to your current needs. Conduct multiple tests to see what works better for your audience in terms of content, its length, and design.
Lead Nurturing Generates More Opportunities for Your Business
Lead nurturing is an essential function for sales and marketing, but it often gets overlooked.
Meanwhile, a well-crafted lead nurturing campaign can deliver great results and significantly increase the lead conversion and retention rates for your business. Therefore, companies that invest time, budget, and effort in lead nurturing will have the resources to overshadow their competition and transform cold leads into fresh and warm opportunities.