ShivaniToday, companies rely on inbound marketing to generate more leads; thus, it has become imperative to have a strong lead nurturing strategy. However, as per the statistics, only a small percentage of your inbound leads make an instant purchase, going upwards of 90% of your inbound leads on the board.
Therefore, the implementation of effective lead nurturing strategies can make a difference and have a tremendous impact on your inbound marketing strategy outcomes, customer retention, customer loyalty revenue, and much more.
So, today in this guide, we’ll discuss some of the powerful lead nurturing strategies you can perform at your company.
Before we move ahead, it is important to understand how to nurture leads, therefore learning them first and then moving to the strategies.
How You Can Nurture Leads
The process behind nurturing leads includes:
- Deliberately involving your target audience by providing useful information.
- Assisting them in any way they require.
- Having a sense of joy throughout every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Nurturing leads is crucial for your business’s success because these techniques have a direct impact on a customer’s decision about whether or not they need to translate into paying customers. There are several ways through which you can nurture leads. These ways involve targeted content, personalization, multiple touches, multi-channel nurturing, and timely follow-ups.
As we can clearly see the benefits of lead nurturing, thus marketers are striving to make the right strategy around it. But, unfortunately, as per the 2019 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey, 60% of respondents presented their nurture programs with a failing grade.
Therefore, savvy marketers have a tremendous opportunity to execute effective lead nurturing strategies and get an advantage over their competition.
So, now move forward and look at some of the compelling lead nurturing tactics.
Some of the Compelling Lead Nurturing strategies are
Though there are many lead nurturing strategies out there, here are some of the most powerful, no matter what sort of business you own.
1. Employ multi-channel lead nurturing techniques
Earlier, most lead nurturing strategies involved simply using email drip campaigns to share general emails to prospects. But today, ways of lead nurturing are evolving and let marketers look for more unique and useful tactics and technologies that not just embrace but also go beyond email nurturing. If you find it difficult, then considering persuasive marketing automation platforms is a great option as savvy marketers are now implementing multi-channel lead nurturing strategies to generate desired results.
Powerful multi-channel lead nurturing usually includes a combination of marketing automation, social media, email marketing, paid retargeting, sales outreach tool, and dynamic website content. Due to the involvement of different tactics, it becomes crucial to administer this properly. Therefore, you have to make sure that your sales and marketing teams are well adjusted and operating cohesively.
2. Focus on many touches.
While the journey of a buyer for every product and service can differ, research has suggested that, on average, prospects get 10 marketing touches from the time they learn about your company until the time they turn into customers.
As you can now see that the most strong lead nurturing strategies produce content that encourages prospects to go through the buyer’s journey by addressing basic questions and concerns. In addition to email tactics, think about how you can utilize a mix of content types like social media, whitepapers, blog posts, interactive calculators, or even direct mail to nurture your prospects into customers.
3. Leverage targeted content.
Whenever we talk about lead nurturing, we should keep in mind that one size certainly does not suit at all. But, as the research shows, nurturing your leads with targeted content can lead to improving results. Start by knowing each of your unique buyer personas. Then, build an assortment of targeted content created to nurture each persona based on their features like concerns, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers.
You should even consider a helpful marketing automation platform that can help you identify, segment, and target your unique buyer personas as you scale your strategy.
4. Follow up with leads promptly.
The advantages of quick follow-up calls seem quite useful, but still, most organizations aren’t working promptly. Automated lead nurturing can let you reach large groups of prospects. However, a timely follow-up email or a phone call is usually the best way to turn inbound leads into qualified sales opportunities. That’s because the odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion.
Whenever you make a timely, well-planned call to an inbound lead, it becomes powerful more than any kind of cold calling. First, you understand what exactly the prospect is researching based on their current browsing behavior. Also, you have adequate information about the prospect as they have done some initial research about the organization they work for and their role within the company.
5. Apply lead scoring tactics.
For people who are new to the idea of lead scoring, this methodology is utilized to rank prospects on a scale that shows the noted value every lead represents to the organization.
Lead scoring can be employed in most marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values to particular website browsing behaviors, social media interactions, or even conversion events.
The resulting score is then used to decide which leads should be followed up with straight by a sales representative and which leads require to be nurtured more.
6. Send personalized emails.
Email marketing is a highly effective tactic for lead nurturing. Also, the personalization of those emails leads to produce better results. Research by Accenture discovered that 41% of consumers changed businesses due to a lack of personalization.
There are several ways to personalize emails to grow your lead nurturing strategy. For example, you can send triggered emails when a visitor acts like downloads your gated content, clicks on links in your emails, visits specific pages on your website, or shows a high level of engagement.
When you connect the power of marketing personalization with behaviorally triggered emails, you can utter the right marketing messages to the right people at exactly the right times.
7. Align your sales and marketing strategies.
When sales and marketing align, lead nurturing strategies are more strong, and customer retention rates increase. For both sales and marketing to contribute to lead nurturing, recognize the precise points in the buyer’s journey that prospects should be transitioned between teams — to do so, think different triggers like lead scoring, workflow enrollment, and conversion events.
The given expectations, responsibilities, and goals for this cross-team collaboration should be described in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Building an SLA will help the two teams operate each other accountable for turning leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers.
8. Launch a Referral program
The referral program has become a trendy lead nurturing tactic as it helps businesses to attract new leads. Not only does it attract new customers, but it also nurtures them through rewards. Today, every customer loves to get something they like; thus, to make them your loyal customer’s referral program is one of the compelling tactics.
InviteReferrals is a great referral program software that allows businesses to capture leads as they want as its referral programs are fully customizable and catchy templates.
Wrapping it up
After reading this brief guide on lead nurturing, you may now get an idea of what to do if you want to engage and retain your leads. Therefore read it carefully to implement them in a better way
