Lead nurturing strategies refer to personalized email sequences, segmented lead lists, value-driven content marketing, multi-channel outreach, lead scoring, automated workflows, follow-up timing, social proof & case studies, etc. More than 79% of leads do not convert into customers because of poor lead nurturing, so following a nurturing strategy has become essential for a better conversion rate. Organizations that nurture leads get 50% more conversions with 33% lower costs.
In this article, you will walk through the most widely used and proven lead-nurturing strategies that have the maximum possibility to convert into loyal customers, so without wasting time, get started.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is a process of building a relationship with potential customers throughout their journey, by providing them with relevant information, engagement with personalized content, with the intention of converting them into customers. Lead nurturing has a direct impact on two things.
- Converts leads into customers.
- Identifies areas of improvement
Nurturing leads begins from marketing and ends when the potential prospect becomes ready to convert into a customer or make a purchase. The entire journey takes you to follow up with sending emails for reminders, offers, personalized content, explainer videos, pain point solutions, etc.
Stages of Lead Nurturing
Pivotal stages lead the nurturing process, which means how you keep holding rapport with potential prospects according to where they are in your sales funnel. The buyers’ funnel stage shows you how much effort you need to put into them to take them to the final stage. Let’s take a closer look at several stages of lead nurturing.
The Awareness Stage
This is the very beginning of a random person who is looking for a product or service and wants to know about your brand, company, service, or product you sell. At this stage, you need to let them know or educate the potential customer regarding your service or product, but not to encourage them to make a purchase at this stage, with a transitioning CTA, it may ruin your lead.
So, try to find your prospects’ pain points and let them know how your product or service can mitigate their pain and how trustworthy, popular, and reliable your service is. This is how you create a relationship with a potential customer at this early stage, and this is named the awareness stage.
Interest Stage
If your lead starts showing interest in your service or product, then you can consider the respective leads as in the interest stage of the sales funnel. As your prospect begins showing interest, you can offer them.
- Lead Magnets
- Webinars
- Events
- Personalized Emails
- Case Studies
Which will take your potential customer one step closer to the consideration or decision stage, which is the last or final stage of a lead to converting a customer.
Consideration Stage
When the leads start thinking about your service or product, considering it as a good deal, or thinking about purchasing, then your prospect is in the consideration stage of lead nurturing. Now this is one of the most important stages to take a prospect to the final stage by sending personalized details of your product or service, and how it can give them a better solution.
You can send them an email to schedule a meeting to show a presentation to a potential prospect. It’s also a good time to offer a product demo or guided tour, let their interest become extreme, and make a purchase.
Decision Stage
If you have a good strategy for lead nurturing, then you can hope for no last-minute surprises. Your prospect is in the decision stage, which means they have decided to make a purchase, but make sure you have given all the correct information, pricing, and detailed steps, including CTS. These steps follow
- Consider offering a friendly closing consultation to happily answer any questions or hesitations your leads might have.
- Gently encourage them with a clear and inviting call to action, inspiring confidence to move forward.
- You could also highlight limited-time promotions or discounts, adding a warm sense of urgency to inspire immediate action.
- Lastly, share a little about the onboarding process to reassure your leads that they will receive full support and guidance after their purchase, making the entire experience feel seamless and welcoming.
The above actions are supposed to give a smooth transition to closing the deal with a happy smile.
Components of a Lead-nurturing Strategy
Components of a lead-nurturing strategy mean what is inside it, not the tactics to follow or successful conversion, but we definitely will discuss tricks and strategies below as well. So let’s open it and read all those components used to implement a strategy in lead nurturing.
- Multi-Channel Outreach
- Phone call
- Social media
- Direct SMS
- Live chat
- Segmented Lead Lists
- Value-Driven Content Marketing
- Lead Scoring
- Automated Workflows
- Follow-Up Timing
- Social Proof
- Case Studies
A successful lead-nurturing involves the above components, and these components gather value, build relationships with potential customers, and guide prospects through the sales funnel.
What Are the Effective Lead-nurturing Strategies?
An effective lead-nurturing strategy takes planning and execution to guide a potential customer through our sales funnel. Perfect practice makes your sales and marketing team perfect at closing sales deals. So let’s break down those strategies, which are key to successful conversion.
Multi-Channel Outreach
A multichannel lead-nurturing strategy includes nurturing leads through different kinds of channels or media, including social media, email, cold calling, SMS, etc. A/B testing in multi-channel outreach is also very effective. You can choose your marketing channel according to the needs of the potential customer.
When your marketing team hones multi-channel lead outreach for lead nurturing, they can also automatically generate leads using those channels. Multichannel outreach lead nurturing strategy can be executed through the following five steps:
Segment Audiences
Segmenting the audience means not all prospects are the same, so divide them and send them your concern in a different relevant way for different people. For example, if you are reaching a CEO, then your content should be according to the role of the CEO. Otherwise, when reaching A CFO or a COO, your approach and content should be according to their post and responsibilities.
Outline Your Content According to the Buyerâs Journey Stage
When you prepare content to outreach someone like a CEO of an organization, then you need to understand their interest or problems, previous history with your company, etc, so that your content becomes impactful for nurturing.
Choose the Best Channels That Suit Your Needs and Connect Effectively
If you try to reach a lead for nurturing through a channel that your prospect is not active on, then all your effort on the content will be nothing but a waste. So, find out which channel your prospect is active on and then pitch your content.
Make Sure to Keep Messages Well-timed and in the Right Order
The most important step of this strategy is timing. If you have better pitching content, researched, and a regular opening channel, but you miss the timing, then it will not. For example, you have sent an email to a CEO at 10 P.M., but the prospect doesn’t open mail after nine, then more mail will take you down and possibly decrease the opening rate.
Make Your Strategy Truly Yours
Keep some uniqueness in your content while creating nurturing content for your prospect so they identify you as something valuable and different, and it works. Personalize according to your prospect’s profile and need, but this does not mean you need to make it complex or overly lucrative.
Following these steps of a multichannel outreach strategy can be effective and impactful for closing more deals successfully.
Educational Content
When you are a lead and have a chance of conversion, you apply strategy to provide value with content. You can let them walk through your free guide, blog content, or invite them to a webinar to build a relationship and make them trust in your service reliability. Those approaches are all time-proven, and content is one of the most budget-friendly strategies for lead nurturing.
Lead Scoring & Prioritization
Lead scoring is a strategy where your assigned team analyses ICP, buyers’ interest, industry matches, buying authority, etc, and gives a score for every instance and leads that cross 50 or 60 (you can set any cut mark to let a lead qualify) or whatever you fix will be counted as hot, warm, cold or disqualified leads. There are more lead scoring methods to qualify a sales-qualified lead, like
- BANT
- CHAMP
- MEDDIC
- MEDDICC
- MEDDPICC
- GPCTBA/C&I
Lead scoring and qualifying is a very smart move and strategy to enhance the sales process, but make sure that the strategy fits in your business. If your business already has better sales and a large number of leads, then the scoring method may not be ideal for your business.
Behavior-Based Email Campaign
Sending targeted emails based on user actions is a strategy that makes potential customers feel that you understand their pain points, and they start feeling your moves are authentic. When you send an email based on their action, it becomes more effective. Let’s see an example.
If someone added a few products to their shopping cart but did not make a payment, then you mail them a reminder that the products they added are still hanging in the cart of our e-commerce site. It can push the potential customer, or if someone just opened an account on your business site, you can send a welcome email highlighting a discount or an exclusive item that can drive them to your site.
Retargeting Ads
A prospect who previously visited your website but did not make any purchase can show personalized content to those potential visitors to remind them about your brand name, products, services, or special offers, which can trigger them and drive them to your website. While showing retargeting ads to your potential prospects, keep in mind not to show repetitive and irrelevant ads.
Social Media Engagement
Before nurturing your leads on social media, know your target audience, their needs, and where they are struggling, and then you can show ads to them or reach out to them. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Twitter Analytics to gain helpful insights into your audience’s demographics, interests, behaviors, and preferences.
Lead nurturing in social media is one of the most powerful strategies of lead generation. Mostly used social media by business persons are now LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Medium, black hat world, etc. You target those social media platforms for nurturing your leads into more sales-qualified leads.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
ABM(account-based marketing) is a B2B lead-nurturing strategy where the sales and marketing departments work together to target an account that shows a significant revenue opportunity. ABM focuses on individuals’ needs and interests rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. It means you take a shorter list and hit on exactly what they require. ABM strategy is a very well-organized, proven, and effective approach for lead nurturing.
Chatbots & Live Chat
Instant engagement to answer questions is a direct approach strategy that can make people feel important and within the visitors’ compulsive buying period. A research study says that the compulsive buying (depending on age and other situations) ratio is 4.9% to 12.3% whereas the non-compulsive or regular buying ratio is lower. So, helping someone in limerence on an object or service can be more effective through chatbots and live chat.
Exclusive Offers & Trials
Potentia customers are more likely to convert if you offer them something exclusive, a discount, or a free trial. What happens if you give a free trial for 10 or 15 days? The user gets used to the trial version and gets benefit from the features, and that habit pushes them to be a customer by the end of the trial period.
Sales Follow-Ups
Timely calls or emails from sales reps for warm leads are an essential strategy for lead nurturing. Regularly following your leads can change your mind to buy your service or product anytime. You follow up on your lead by:
- Segment your leads to better understand their needs.
- Respond promptly to show you value their time.
- Nurture your leads by sharing helpful content that builds trust.
- Personalize your messages to make each contact feel special.
- Use a variety of communication channels to stay connected.
- Develop a follow-up schedule to keep the momentum going.
- Track your communications to see what works best.
And remember, sometimes it is okay to let go when a lead is truly lost because continuing to try can waste your time, and it can make you feel down. Sometimes keeping a customer support is also beneficial because if any questions arise, potential customers call you, and based on your solution, they can be converted as well.
How to Build a Lead-nurturing Strategy
Building a lead-nurturing strategy needs analysing your target audience, their interest, your manpower, budget, etc. Once you have met the requirement, you should go for a strategy that gives a flow of lead nurturing.
Get to Know Your Customer’s Journey
Before setting a strategy, you need to deeply analyse who you are going to target. Try to know your customers’ journey, because not all of your potential customers will fit your entire strategy. Different prospects may be attracted through different strategies. So finding this key value is essential to building a nurturing strategy.
Prepare Required Tools
Some tools are mandatory, like lead management software; some are optional, but very effective. But the most needed tools to build and execute a lead-nurturing strategy are:
CRM software: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive
Marketing automation software: HubSpot Marketing Hub, ActiveCampaign, Marketo
Email marketing and tracker tools: Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot Marketing Hub
Social media management tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite
Data analytics tools: Google Analytics, Mixpanel
Website optimization tools: OptinMonster, Unbounce, and Leadpages
Some additional tools for live chat, content writing, and creation, et, can also be helpful for executing a nurturing strategy.
Assign a Creative Team or Analytics Team
If you have enough budget, you can assign a creative team to build a strategy for specific or segmented potential prospects. Then you can just explain it to the execution team to drive results to your court. There are multiple strategies, such as
- Lead scoring
- Social media outreach
- direct/ live chat
- discount/coupon code, demo, or trial
The above strategies are widely used and effective; there are more that you have already walked through above in this article. Now you can choose any of them multiple times to execute your lead-nurturing process.
What is a Lead Nurturing Campaign and Why Do You Need One?
Lead nurturing campaign is a strategy for building a relationship and trust with customers to guide them to the final state of closing deals through your sales funnel. Let’s have a look at lead-nurturing campaigns’ attributes from a point of view.
- Building Relationships
- Guiding Through the Sales Funnel
- Personalized Engagement
- Providing Value
Why do you need one? Especially in the B2B lead generation business, lead nurturing campaigns are very important to achieve better results, and there are more reasons such as:
- Increased Conversions
- Improved Customer Relationships
- Higher ROI
- Cost-Effective Marketing
Investing in the wrong strategy can ruin your brand value and money, so analyzing and setting a proper strategy is equally important.
Measure Your Lead Nurturing Strategy Results With CallingAgency
In any professional work, what is the ultimate goal? It is the result or final revenue. So don’t go through a wrong strategy that makes your business flow shitty. So, filter out all strategies you are using if they are not working well. Start your lead nurturing when a potential prospect shows interest in your product; otherwise, investing in a lost prospect is a waste.
Even though you need some more quality lead generation service or lead nurturing consultation to boost your sales, you can take help from CallingAgency. Don’t miss the opportunity to rule the sales industry with the best lead-nurturing strategy with CallingAgency.
