You don't build successful, intimate, beautiful relationships overnight.
Instead, you build them over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of little interactions that eventually aggregate into a fuller picture of the relationship as a whole.
Similarly, although it's possible for businesses to immediately persuade and win the business of certain target customers, it's much more effective for those businesses to build more familiar, warmer, deeper connections with their customers over the course of several interactions.
This is, essentially, the idea behind lead nurturing.
But what exactly does it mean to nurture leads?
Why is it so important?
And how can you get the most out of lead nurturing for your business?
You’re probably familiar with the basics of lead generation.
Basically, it's the process of generating new interest in your products or services. We use a ton of tactics for lead generation, including cold calling, cold emailing, social media, content marketing, and much, much more. If you're like most businesses in the modern era, you're doing something similar.
But what do you do with those leads once you generate them?
Unfortunately, many businesses have a simplistic, black and white approach. They reach out to leads or otherwise get them to a website, hope that each lead makes a purchase, and then discard any leads that don't successfully convert.
On some level, it's easy to see why this is the impulse. After all, if someone is interested in buying from you, why would you keep bugging them?
But the reality is much more complex. A person may have any number of reasons for not buying from you. Maybe it's not the right time. Maybe they don't have the money. Maybe they're on the fence between you and a competitor. Maybe they simply forgot to finalize the transaction. Maybe they're not familiar enough with your brand and they want to get to know you better before they follow through.
The solution to all of these “maybes” is lead nurturing, the ongoing process of communicating with and connecting to people with a relatively high likelihood of successfully becoming your customers.
As we'll see, lead nurturing can take many forms, but it's always focused on intermittently and consistently reaching out to leads, including those who have converted and those who have not. The end goal is to get these people more familiar and acquainted with your brand, motivate them to take the next step through the sales funnel, and ultimately guide them to conversion.
We've seen a number of successful lead nurturing campaigns that have multiplied conversions many times over. It's a simple additional measure that can make your lead generation efforts much more beneficial.
When done successfully, it can help you with:
· Keeping the sales funnel moving. The sales funnel isn't some stagnant, unmoving entity. It's a series of ever-moving processes. If you want to keep your sales funnel moving, you'll need to continuously reignite the momentum of your leads and push leads who haven't acted or converted to either take action or remove themselves from your funnel. Without lead nurturing, this momentum can quickly subside.
· Increasing the value of each lead. When executed properly, lead nurturing can help you increase the average value of each lead in your pipeline. Instead of simply dropping off the map, each lead has practically countless opportunities for engaging with your brand and buying from it. If you can recapture even a portion of leads who didn't convert initially, you can greatly increase the overall payoff of your lead generation strategy.
· Improving brand visibility and reputation. Even if your lead nurturing strategy doesn't result in many conversions directly, it can benefit your organization by improving your brand visibility and reputation. Each interaction with your leads and customers has the potential to make your brand more recognizable, more trusted, and more likely to be recommended to others. This is especially true if your content and messaging are on point.
· Gathering more data. One underrated benefit of lead nurturing is its ability to provide you with more data on your customers. By consistently interacting with your leads and paying attention to how they engage with your brand, you can learn more about what they value, how they feel about your brand, and how best to appeal to them. Just be aware that this benefit only exists if you're taking appropriate measurements and acting on your new insights.
There are many different approaches you can take to lead nurturing.
These are some of the most common channels and tactics to use:
· Drip email campaigns. One of the most common methods of lead nurturing is using a drip email campaign. It's inexpensive, it's capable of being automated, and it can be highly personalized and customized so that it's more relevant for each individual customer. Even if you plan on using other channels, you can use this as the backbone of your lead nurturing campaign.
· Email segmentation and personalization. In line with this, you should also take advantage of email segmentation and personalization. Lead nurturing is much more powerful when it reaches people on an individual level with unique, highly relevant messaging. Every time we've made the effort to segment lists and personalized messages, we've been happy with the results.
· Remarketing/retargeting. Remarketing and retargeting are essentially strategies designed to advertised directly to people who have already interacted with your brand in some way. For example, you might remind a customer that they have products in a cart on your website. It's a highly effective way to stay top of mind.
· Social media marketing. You already know that social media is a powerful channel for marketing and sales, but it’s also important for lead nurturing. It's one of the easiest and least expensive ways to interact with your customers directly.
· Phone calls. Depending on the nature of your business, it may also make sense to follow up with your leads via phone call. Even if your lead isn't picking up, they may be listening to your voicemails – and they may pick up in the future.
· Content marketing. You can also use a host of content marketing strategies to bolster your lead nurturing campaign. Hosting webinars, distributing white papers, and sending out educational materials can all help you demonstrate your expertise and authority while simultaneously keeping your leads better acquainted with your brand.
You can also devise different types of lead nurturing campaigns, and use several of them in conjunction with each other to get the best possible results.
· The welcome series. A common approach is to welcome new people to your brand community with a series of emails, phone calls, or other interactions designed to make them more familiar with your business. You can teach them how to use your app or website, give them helpful tip sheets for how to get started, explain the details of your products or services, or simply tell them what your brand is all about. It's a great way to build familiarity and trust.
· Reengagement campaigns. Reengagement campaigns are more focused on interacting with leads who have already interacted with your brand in a substantial way, but who have not become full-fledged customers. For example, they may have had ongoing conversations with salespeople or put products in their cart, without ever finishing a full transaction. These nurturing messages can focus on reigniting the initial spark, sending out reminders, or introducing people to new possibilities they haven't considered.
· Deep dives and information. Some brands focus on doing deep dives and sending out more information on products, services, or various problems their brand is trying to solve. For example, if you own a company that sells emergency supplies, you might have a campaign focused on distributing information related to survival or stockpiling.
· The omnichannel approach. The omnichannel approach is a bit less focused, but potentially more powerful, since it allows you to take advantage of practically every communication channel simultaneously. Rather than committing to a single, linear path of communication, you can keep your brand at top of mind regardless of where your leads interact on a regular basis.
· Promotional campaigns. You may also practice lead nurturing through promotional campaigns. Offering sales, discounts, and other specials can catch the eye of people who have considered your brand in the past without moving forward.
How do you create a successful lead nurturing strategy?
· Acquire (and use) the right tools. We found lead nurturing much easier once we started using the right tools. Finding and tracking your leads effectively, automating communications, and appropriately measuring and analyzing your results are all critical for success.
· Get to know your target audience. You also need to be intimately familiar with your target audience. If you don't know who your customers are, what they value, or what types of messages are relevant to them, none of your lead nurturing strategies are going to pay off. Do a deep dive on market research before you begin structuring anything in your lead nurturing arsenal.
· Document your customer journey. You also need to thoroughly understand your unique customer journey. What does the average person go through when they consider products and services like yours? What do they think about? What major obstacles do they encounter? What keeps them moving through the sales funnel and how do you exploit that?
· Account for all available channels. You don't need to use every communication channel in your strategy, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you write any of them off immediately. Thoughtfully consider all available communication channels as part of your lead generation efforts.
· Create compelling content. Compelling content can make lead nurturing much more effective. What qualifies as compelling changes slightly from industry to industry, but the hallmarks are always the same. Your content needs to be relevant, original, well-researched, and focused if you want it to make an impact.
· Score your leads. Different leads have different value to your organization, so make sure you use a consistent, objective scoring system. This way, you can focus on your most valuable leads and filter out irrelevant parties from your lead nurturing system.
· Automate everything you can. Lead nurturing is all about consistency and repetition, so it's practically impossible to execute manually, especially at scale. Don't be afraid to harness the power of automation to make your lead nurturing strategy work.
· Measure your results. Always objectively measure your results. Are people persuaded or at least entertained by your content? How many of your leads are you able to recover?
· Experiment and improve. Finally, be willing to experiment and apply new insights from those experiments. If you change the angle of your messaging, do your leads respond more favorably? If you employ a different communication channel, do you get better overall results?
You can also use these extra tips for success:
· Nail the timing. If you reach out to your leads too frequently, they could become annoyed at your presence and unsubscribe from your mailing lists. If you reach out too infrequently, they may totally forget about you. We've tried a variety of different timing strategies over the years, and we can confidently say there is no universal standard here. Nailing the timing requires you to deeply understand your target audience and cater to their wants and needs.
· Stay relevant. All your messaging needs to be specifically relevant, or else it's going to be lost in the white noise of our ever-buzzing digital world. Don't spam your customers or give them things they don't care about.
· Keep your brand visible and top of mind. Lead nurturing only works if it connects to your brand in some way, so always keep your brand visible and top of mind. You don't need a call to action or a sales pitch in every communication with your customers, but they should be aware that it's you doing the outreach.
· Personalize as much as possible. People don't appreciate being mass messaged. They may find some of your materials valuable even if they aren't fully personalized, but the more you can reach your audience at the individual level, the better. Personalize and individualize everything you can in your lead nurturing campaign.
· Start small and scale up. In lead nurturing, you should generally start small and scale up. Don't bombard your leads with sales pitches or information right away; instead, pace out your outreach and only scale up when it's appropriate to do so. Not only will this minimize the risk of turning away valuable leads, but this will also keep your investment to a minimum as you figure out the ropes of lead nurturing and improve your process.
· Give before asking. Finally, try to give before asking anything of your leads. Instead of immediately asking your leads to buy your products and services, give them something for free, such as a piece of premium content. The more you give, the more your leads will trust you – and the more likely they’ll be to buy from you when you finally make the ask.
Unfortunately, lead nurturing isn't always straightforward. Every business is unique, and so are their target customers. On top of that, the landscape of marketing and advertising is constantly in flux due to new technologies and changing consumer preferences.
Everything gets much easier when you work with an experienced marketing firm who has worked with hundreds of brands to perfect the art of lead generation. With a team of skilled experts to help you analyze your options, you can identify the right opportunities, perfect your messaging, and ultimately make a bigger profit.
If you’re ready to get started, contact us today!
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