#10 Best Practices for Effective Lead Nurturing
Since the very inception of B2B marketing, marketers have been employing effective lead nurturing practices for branding purposes, to educate the prospective customers of the value of their products or services, as well as to build awareness around their products or services, as well as to build trust so that the prospective client chooses you when it’s time to buy.
B2B lead nurturing is all about engaging with a targeted group of prospective customers by providing hyper-tailored solutions to their pain-points according to their specific stages in the buying cycles. Effective lead nurturing is all about succinctly and relevantly addressing the problem areas of the prospects with the intention to boost sales.
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Your prospects might often not be in the immediate mood to buy; however, with the help of effective lead nurturing strategies you can effectively the prospects down the sales funnel. Hence, effective lead nurturing strategies are crucial to bringing your marketing and lead generation efforts to full fruition.
Employing effective lead nurturing strategies positively influences sales, as is evident in the following quote from Anthony Iannarino, President and Chief Sales Officer at SOLUTIONS Staffing:
“Care enough to create value for your customers. If you get that part right, selling is easy.”
Some of the effective lead nurturing strategies include developing targeted content, multi-channel nurturing, multiple touches, proactively follow-ups and personalization refined to the level of individualization.
Execution of effective nurturing strategies has innumerable benefits as is evident from the data collected by several marketing research agencies.
According to Forrester, companies that excel at effective lead nurturing strategies, generate 50% more sales leads. Moreover, research from Gartner shows that executing an effective lead nurturing campaign strategy can save nearly 80% of your direct mail budget and bring 10% or more increase in revenue over a period of 6 to 9 months.
Employing effective lead nurturing strategies not only help you boost ROI and consolidate your branding endeavors but also helps you with a better omnichannel reputation management framework and having an upper hand over your competitors.
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Ways to Excel Effective Lead Nurturing
Thinking of effective lead nurturing strategies, savvy marketers are baffled by several questions in mind, such as:
- How to figure out the effective lead nurturing strategies that deliver the best results?
- What are the best practices within the industry and otherwise to develop an effective lead nurturing campaign strategy?
- How to build effective lead nurturing campaigns to start with?
Lead nurturing is one of the core components of inbound marketing and marketers can employ the following practices to be successful with effective lead nurturing strategies:
1. Leveraging Targeted Content Strategy
In order to deploy effective lead nurturing campaigns, targeted content can effectively boost the results of your inbound marketing strategy.
Using targeted content for effective lead nurturing is pretty basic, yet most of the marketers tend to miss out on this.
According to research from Forrester, 33% of marketers consider “targeted delivery of content” (i.e. delivering the right content to the right people at the right time) as their biggest lead nurturing challenge.
To execute a targeted content strategy for effective lead nurturing, marketers need to have a clear understanding of their persona and they need to create content tailored to the specific stages in the buying journeys of the prospects.
To effectively execute effective lead nurturing strategies marketers need to have suitable marketing automation platforms in place to help them identify, segment and target their unique buyer personas in the process of scaling-up their inbound marketing game.
Leveraging targeted content for running an effective lead nurturing campaign strategy includes the use of dynamic content strategy and the use of data-driven content strategy based on predictive insights about customers’ behaviors according to their specific stages in buying cycles.
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2. Personalizing Your Lead Nurturing Campaigns
An effective lead generation campaign strategy is hyper-personalized to meet prospects at individualistic levels.
You can personalize your email marketing campaigns. This helps the cause of effective lead nurturing and has the following benefits:
- List segmentation can be used to target specific behaviors or various target groups of prospects
- Add the name of the targeted prospect to the top of the email
- Incorporate details about customers’ demographics, their firmographic, technographic, psychographic, fit-data and Intent-data wherever applicable
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Tailoring emails according to the interests and behaviors of the customers makes it more relevant to them, thereby helping the purpose.
3. Executing effective omnichannel marketing strategies for effective lead nurturing
Marketers need to understand that in an era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and data-driven decision making, optimizing the digital spaces of the customers isn’t enough. Customers’ expectations are on an all-time high and to provide them with seamless experiences across omnichannel, marketers need to optimize their digital as well as physical experiences.
Consider employing a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic content strategy and having a direct sales outreach for effective and to optimize the experiences of the customers. Also, give importance to face-to-face interactions with your customers everywhere, be it meetings, when they walk down to your inventory or meeting up at events.
Omnichannel remarketing is also an effective way to engage your prospective leads and qualifies as an effective lead nurturing method, wherein you execute hyper-tailored campaigns to win back the prospects who showed interest in your products or services through online channels for a while and then drifted away.
Read more on How is Omnichannel Remarketing Effective in Accelerating Conversions
4. Don’t Email Your Prospects Everyday
Sending emails to your prospects is an effective lead nurturing method. Nonetheless, doing too much of it is bad. If you send emails to your prospects every day they might unsubscribe.
Marketers need to set an optimal limit to the number of emails being sent to the prospects. This is an effective lead nurturing method as it keeps the advertising interests of the brands intact as well as doesn’t bombard the prospects with too much information all of a sudden, giving them the time to digest the information.
5. Executing a multiple touch strategy to win over customers
Most effective lead nurturing methods use hyper-tailored pieces of content to help prospects sail through their individual stages in the buying cycles. This happens as the pain points and the queries and concerns of the prospects are aptly addressed.
Marketers can diversify their content strategy including a mix of content types. Besides the good old email marketing consider using content types such as webinars, social media, blog posts, whitepapers, direct mails as well as interactive calculators to nurture your prospects into customers.
6. Re-engaging with the prospects
Marketers need to re-engage with the leads. It is an effective method particularly when leads are not opening your emails or responding to your sales calls on time.
Marketers need to ask subscribers for their feedback and can even incentivize their prospects. Create a sense of urgency in the minds of the customers and offer them something they find highly valuable.
7. Coupling automated lead nurturing with timely follow-ups
Marketers need to automate their process. This helps them reach a large number of prospects and is an effective lead nurturing method. Coupling automated lead nurturing endeavors with timely follow-ups such as sending up of emails and making phone calls is the best way to convert inbound leads to qualified sales.
8. Employing lead scoring
Lead scoring is an effective method that most marketers are still oblivious about. Lead scoring is a method of ranking prospects on a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization.
Lead scoring is implemented with most of the marketing automation platforms. Certain website browsing behaviors, social media interactions, and conversion activities are assigned numeric values.
The lead score obtained as a result of the above activities is used to determine which leads should be followed up directly by sales representatives and which ones need to be nurtured further down the sales funnel.
9. Don’t Wait: Start ASAP
An effective method is one that doesn’t wait until the prospects have expressed explicit interest in buying your products or services.
Start nurturing your prospects ASAP once they express interest in your business is it your blog content or a subscription to your weekly newsletter.
10. Aligning Your Marketing and Sales Strategies
For executing effective strategies, marketing and sales teams should join hands to share responsibilities as well as expectations. The goals and responsibilities should be articulated in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Designing a formal SLA holds both marketing and sales teams accountable to convert leads to paying customers by executing effective lead nurturing strategies.
CSO Insights deduced that when sales and marketing teams bear cumulative responsibilities for executing effective lead nurturing strategies, the companies experience significant improvement in ROI. Furthermore, organizations with sales and marketing alignment witness 36% higher customer retention rates.
For the sales and marketing teams to jointly execute effective strategies, marketers need to identify when the prospects should be transitioned between the teams as they move down the sales funnel. This process can be executed with the help of marketing automation tools and using data-driven insights tailored to the specific stages in the buying cycles of the prospects.
For executing effective strategies, marketers can benefit from keeping a track record of insights such as lead scores, page views, conversion activities, workflow enrollments and sales contact to transition leads from automation to direct outreach on a one-on-one basis.
Wrapping Things Up
While there are some standard methods for executing effective strategies, personalization, too, is of paramount importance. For example, personalizing the marketing messages on your website using dynamic call-to-action (or Smart CTAs) is an lead nurturing strategy to prevent customers from drifting away from your website and to keep them engaged. Always be mindful of you have enough and important data at hand for the right initiation and execution of effective lead nurturing strategies.
Remember, sometimes the leads just aren’t meant to be converted, otherwise, for every other time, you can execute effective strategies to convert your prospects into sales deals.
Valasys Media is a well-renowned name in providing the B2B customers with hyper-tailored services to optimize their revenue goals and other core bottom-line endeavors. Our services including Event Marketing, Content Syndication, Lead Generation, Contact Discovery, Account-Based Marketing, Lead Nurturing & Appointment Setting help you make the right marketing moves at the right time and analytically assess and optimize your marketing endeavors to bring them to maximum fruition.