Lead Nurturing Plan: A Complete Guide on How to Do Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the procedure of relationship building with your prospects and nurturing them through the purchase process.

So much is said about Lead Generation that people often tend to believe that sales leads are acquired alone through lead generation campaigns. The middle ground process of what happens after you generate a lead until you close the deal is overlooked.

So let’s begin by clearing out some misconceptions. It’s not like you find a lead, instantly communicate with it, pitch, and close the sale. Leads only highlight possibilities and express interest in your brand’s products or services.

If you are an entrepreneur, you know that it’s not so easy to get some leads, convert them, and voila, you bring in more sales for your business! In no way do leads guarantee a purchase.

This is where the in-between process of the sales funnel comes into the picture—lead nurturing.

Let’s look closely at the process of nurturing leads and its increasing importance as a marketing strategy—

Promoting nurture, promoting engagement: What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is an essential aspect of inbound marketing as it adds value to your leads. In other words, it adds value to your potential customers to optimize your business opportunities.

Lead nurturing evolves relationships with prospective customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey. By adopting a successful lead nurturing program, you focus on marketing and communication with quality leads. Listening to prospects’ needs and providing them with information about your brand helps you earn business—that is your primary goal—to make the non nurtured leads ready for purchase.

When you ‘nurture leads,’ you answer their queries, guide them through the sales process, and in exchange, you keep the prospects engaged, build trust, optimize your brand image, and create a long-lasting relationship with the potential customers.

In itself, the word nurture insinuates a softer and more attentive approach to the buyer’s journey. Instead of blatantly pitching your products or services and driving away qualified leads by being too aggressive with your direct mail campaign, you carefully ‘nurture’ the prospects and make them ready for purchase.

Lead nurturing campaigns help you understand how far along our leads are in the buyer’s journey. You can attract them by sending targeted and relevant content and getting them interested in your business. By doing so, you are pushing them further down the sales funnel and optimizing sales-ready leads.

Long story short, purposeful lead nurturing helps to promote client engagement.

What’s it to your business? Importance of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing has become extremely important to achieve B2B success—it directly impacts a customer’s decision through conscious efforts to engage the target audience. When you nurture leads, you offer them specific information, support them, and improve the overall consumer experience.

From kickstarting the buyer journey to achieving ultimate business success, lead nurturing optimizes the size of loyal clients to your business.

Let’s observe the many benefits of a lead nurturing program and understand why you need to make it a priority—

Generates Leads

As mentioned in the above section, leads don’t necessarily guarantee a purchase. One of the many reasons why marketing leads fail to convert into paying customers is due to the lack of product understanding and brand trust.

Furthermore, there is a greater need to qualify leads as not all the generated leads are qualified to benefit from your product or services; they either belong to the wrong business sector or size or have insufficient budget and authority for your offer.

Lead nurturing tactics optimize your inbound lead quality and nurture potential leads to understand the relevance of your product to their business. Moreover, lead nurturing campaigns to ensure that your current leads fulfill your business criteria.

As such, lead nurturing campaigns stimulate your sales funnel by bringing in high-quality leads. Your sales and marketing teams eventually get a lot of work on their hands as they need to qualify these opportunities to build long-lasting relationships with potential buyers.

In the absence of a lead nurturing strategy, your sales pipeline could harvest opportunities but will fail to offer long-term results.

Lead nurturing improves product interest, highlights your line of products or services, and improves the chances of valuable opportunities, by converting every lead into paying clients.

Boosts Average Order Value

Through lead nurturing, you take time to address every lead’s needs through an attentive and purposeful lead nurture strategy. This deliberate effort improves your brand value and image.

With the careful art of nurturing content and communications, your prospective leads will eventually realize how much return on their investment your brand is offering them. It will also help them evaluate how you can help them overcome their pain points or challenges. After all, leads will only pull out their wallets if they find value in your brand.

As a result, your leads will want to invest more in your brand. Nurtured leads will always have a higher average order value (AOV) as compared to non nurtured leads.

Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost

The more leads you generate, the more you promote AOV, and eventually, your lead nurturing strategy helps to reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Among the many benefits of lead nurturing, it also helps you expand your client base effectively without burning a hole in your pocket.

Let us make this more clear with an example, for every three clients you gain through lead nurturing, you acquire another one or two for free! As a result, lead nurturing is a cost-effective sales technique for you.

Improves authority

Well, we don’t need to tell you extra about the competition that your business is facing. You wouldn’t have found this article worth your time if you were not looking for ways to gain an advantage over your competition.

You leverage your brand authority when you weave lead nurturing carefully into your marketing, sales, and overall customer experience strategies.

Giving special attention to every lead and guiding it carefully towards a sale deal develops a trusting and informative relationship with the consumers. In return, this improves the way consumers perceive your brand.

Your lead nurturing program will help you boost your reputation in the industry and push inbound leads further down the sales funnel, thanks to your personal touch and targeted services.

Lead nurturing is a reciprocal process; the more you nurture your leads, the more they’ll nurture your market authority.

Builds customer loyalty

If you are in the entrepreneurial business, you are aware that it is not enough only to drive sales but equally important to retain the business with past, present, and new clients. This is mainly because you will struggle to keep up with your business targets if the new clients abandon you.

A lead nurturing plan offers new leads an exclusive customer lifetime value. Nurtured leads not only bring in more sales but also maximize their purchase. Thanks to your effective nurturing strategy, your refined lead marketing strategy helps to—

• Build trust
• Create personalized lead nurturing and customer experience strategies
• Explain the value of relevant products or service offerings clearly
• Highlight your organization’s brand story effectively.

This highly targeted content retention and marketing referrals boost your business revenue to create new business opportunities. And before you know it, you have made your own army of loyal brand advocates and happy clients who will recommend your products or service offerings to others.

Unlocking effective lead nurturing tactics to optimize your business

You will come across various lead nurturing strategies to take your lead nurturing strategy a notch higher than your competitors. However, it is a challenge to keep up with consumers today as they are incredibly savvy and intelligent. The mass availability of information has made it possible to do extensive research at the tip of your fingers. As such, consumers today are vastly knowledgeable about purchases before making them.

Many marketers struggle to build the right lead nurturing strategy for their business amidst fierce competition. Below are a few must-have tactics that are useful in boosting your lead scoring system, regardless of your business type—

Leverage your content

Highly relevant and practical content adds value to your leads. To ensure a successful lead nurturing campaign, you cannot have one-size-fits-all content. Nurturing leads through valuable and targeted content converts warm leads into paying customers.

To achieve this, you need to closely monitor your leads’ progress in every stage of the buyer’s journey. Create content tailored according to every lead’s unique buyer persona based on their objectives, goals, interest, and other such marketing triggers.

Your content should address your ideal client’s pain spots by offering a solution and describing how your offerings may help them.

With the help of a marketing automation platform, your content can be a blog post, social media posts, email, eBook, or any other media format.

Score your leads

Lead scoring is an effective method used to qualify prospective leads on a scale that measures the perceived value of each lead for your business.

Marketing automation is incomplete without a lead scoring system. With lead scoring, you set a numeric value to website and social media user behaviors, conversion rates, etc.

Based on the resulting score, you can get your sales and marketing team involved in following up with leads that need more nurturing.

Retarget your lead nurturing campaign

Retargeting is one of the most powerful methods to transfer sales-ready leads into buying customers. Nurturing leads through a method of retargeting across multiple platforms helps your brand to stay at the top.

Here are a few ways you can add a retargeting campaign to your marketing efforts—

Social media retargeting

Many businesses are using social media retargeting to nurture leads. A more systematic social media retargeting depends on the age demographics of the customer segment.

For instance, for a younger target audience below the age of 34, Instagram and YouTube ads are more engaging. Video marketing is usually preferred to connect with this segment on a personal level.

To connect with a more mature target audience, savvy marketers usually prefer Facebook and Twitter.

Email Marketing

Several B2B lead nurturing strategies include email marketing campaigns. You can begin by segmenting your email lists based on your leads’ interests to send personalized and highly targeted emails.

Furthermore, your email marketing efforts may also track the leads’ interaction with your emails. This will help you to create messages based on every user’s response. You may want to create different messages for each customer segment.

To sum up, monitor the effectiveness of your email campaigns by tracking:

• Open Rate: Follow the overall email open rate by maintaining a daily line graph. This will help you to identify any highs or lows associated with specific campaigns.
• Click Rate: Track the number of recipients who click on CTAs mentioned in your emails.
• New Subscribers: Monitor the number of daily email subscribers you gain.
• Email Pipeline: Track the response rates to your email marketing messages at different stages?

Several CRM and software offer funnel visualization to locate the stage at which leads become cold. We have discussed this in our next section on best lead nurturing tools.

Finally, to optimize your email retargeting efforts, you can combine email and video marketing. High-quality content videos have better chances of open rates.

You may take your lead nurturing strategy a step further by integrating email marketing with marketing automation software and CRM. This helps you to keep track of how much time your prospects spend watching your videos. Your sales team can further use this data to create nurtured leads.

Today, you can choose from an array of advanced marketing automation platforms that promote lead nurturing strategies through multi-channel media formats. You may also want to explore other options, such as a combination of marketing automation, social media, email marketing, paid retargeting, and dynamic website content.

Follow-up with your leads

To convert warm leads into hot leads, or even to convert marketing leads into sales-ready leads—you need to act fast! Here are some tips to strike the lead when it’s hot if you know what we mean.

One of the ways to follow-up is through automated lead nurturing. It enables you to stay in touch with a substantial number of the most qualified leads. A follow-up email or a call sent at the right time increases the chance of converting leads and boosting sales.

Follow-up with inbound leads has more chances of conversion than cold-calling and mass emails. This is mainly because you are already aware of what the leads are looking for based on their browsing history. Moreover, you also have some information about the potential lead—the organization’s name, the role they are working in, etc.

Having one-on-one interactions with your leads is also integrally woven into the lead nurturing process. You can do this by meeting the leads in person, connecting with the leads on social media, or through effective lead nurturing by your sales team.

Optimize customer relationship management

Lead nurturing efforts are more likely to succeed when your sales and marketing align. This further improves customer retention rates.

Both sales and marketing should contribute to your lead nurturing program. Use their expertise to identify leads in a specific stage in the buyer’s journey, monitor the website through user behavior data, pre-qualify leads, and create separate nurturing journeys for every lead.

When the sales and marketing team jointly work towards a common goal, they convert more leads and optimize your lead nurturing campaign.

Best lead nurturing tools to improve lead nurturing

Lead nurturing requires assistance. With various choices available in the market, it is confusing to zero in on the perfect marketing tool or CRM that offers unique and personalized lead nurturing features to generate leads for your business. Let’s consider some lead nurturing software tools in 2022 in no particular order of preference—

Pipedrive

This software is best known for its highly visual sales pipeline that creates visual customer journeys by showing sales deals through every stage in the sales funnel.

Best key features include—

• Easy to use
• Simplifies the lead tracking
• Provides visual and intuitive workflows
• Offers easy drop-and-drag options for the sales pipeline.

LeadSquared

Taking hints from its name, this cloud-based sales CRM software is mainly sought for its easy lead nurturing and distribution.

Best key features include—

• Provides a Mobile CRM for field sales
• Is especially useful for drip marketing campaigns
• Offers user-friendly features
• Builds auto-assign leads based on lead location/industry, product type, and salesperson performance
• Considered the best option for businesses that wish to automate lead distribution for better lead nurturing.

HubSpot

This CRM is chiefly in demand for lead scoring and for demand generation of qualifying inbound leads.

Best key features include—

• Offers robust contact management software
• It comes in with a powerful automation system
• Qualifies leads through calls, live chat, chatbots, and email
• The chatbot feature automatically communicates with website visitors into qualified prospects.

Pardot and Salesforce

Pardot is a Salesforce B2B marketing automation platform with one of the most effective leads management CRMs on the market.

Best key features include—

• Builds any type of CRM report to make actionable decisions.
• Especially preferred for its custom and advanced reporting features.
• Offers visual point-and-click workflow editor interface.
• Provides mobile sync with CRM.
• Features AI-powered insights along with customizable elements.

Marketo

This is a popular player in the B2B sales and marketing strategies.

Best key features include—

• Provides a vast database of educational tools to create a lead nurturing strategy.
• Customer behavior is being used to deliver automated emails.
• Notifies you of any consumer website interactions that need to be followed upon.

Here are some more lead nurturing software to consider—

• Zoho CRM: Popular for its omnichannel lead nurturing.
• Freshsales: Sought for its robust lead nurturing automation.
• Insightly: Best known for its lead nurturing software for project management.
• Bitrix24: Offers the best robust free plan.
• Keap: It is recommended for its email marketing campaigns.
• SharpSpring: It’s well-known for its marketing automation technology, which uses on-site activities, email automation, form responses, and customized content to engage leads.

In closing, we would like to use an analogy. If you reflect deeply, you will realize parenting is a lot like B2B lead nurturing. You use similar tactics and strategies in both cases. Of course, you don’t send emails to your kids or ask them to fill out a form.

However, give a kid an activity that is too advanced for her age, and nothing will come out of it; or give the kid a toy meant for a much younger kid, and she will be too bored to play with it. Similarly, if you get too intrusive with a qualified lead at the beginning itself, you run the risk of losing them; or you provide them with less information when they want more, you lose out on precious time in the buying stage.

Both kids and prospects develop and mature at their own pace. Accordingly, your strategies also need to change to provide the right information at the right stages of development. This is exactly what you need to boost their level of engagement.

As such, there is a lot in common between the several strategies and skills that we use to evolve our kids into becoming respectable citizens and the tactics we apply in marketing to nurture our prospects into becoming loyal customers.

So, are you ready to make the transition from being a parent to becoming a nurturer?