Have you been facing the problem of having too many dormant leads in your database or having a sales cycle that is too long? Are you not seeing good engagement with your prospective customers? To solve these problems you must put a lead nurturing program in place to give you a leg up in converting customers and building brand loyalty.

What is lead nurturing?

The process of developing, reinforcing, and nurturing relationships with your prospects and customers at every stage of their buying journey by sending strategically planned personalized and relevant content is considered as lead nurturing. It is an important process because it helps you quickly qualify opportunities while giving you access to the highest quality leads.

In a successful lead nurturing program, marketing and communication efforts are focused on listening to the needs of the prospective customer rather than develop a one size fits all plan. This is followed up by providing information to these customers with the plan to build trust, increase brand awareness and maintain a connection until they are ready to make a purchase. Relationships nurtured through a strategic lead scoring system as well as lengthening the sales funnel aids in conversion to sales.

Here are a few tips to develop flexible, adaptive lead nurturing campaigns that guide your leads and encourage more conversions.

#1 Plan and create campaigns for each stage of the funnel

It is important to plan and strategize your lead nurturing campaign for every stage before the campaign goes live. Start with identifying your target audience, then define them through buyer personas. Since the interests and needs of your prospective customers will vary at every stage of the journey it is important to plan and create content for each of the stages.

Awareness stage

 As they enter the funnel, your customers will be in the awareness stage. At this point, offer them educational content to provide insight into the problem that they are trying to solve. Blog posts, assessments, infographics, and videos will be helpful.

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, customers will want to identify possible solutions to their problems. Content needs to be relevant and should include ebooks, webinars, or case studies

Decision stage

In the decision stage, your content should give them a boost of encouragement to go through with the purchase. This can be done through free trials and product and service demos.

#2 Create A Content Map And Set Goals

Before you start sending content out to your prospective customers, set goals for your campaigns. Goals and content together form the foundation of your lead nurturing strategy.

The goals and benchmarks that you set will allow you to measure the success of the campaign and strategically adjust schedules, content, and methods being used. Do not start sending content until you have all of your proposed content ready. Plan ahead about the timing as it also plays a vital role. A content map will help you get organized before you start distributing content.

#3 Ensure one clear call-to-action

To avoid confusion ensure that your lead nurturing emails or any other touchpoints should have only one specific call-to-action. When each email focuses on just one subject, it is more likely that your prospects or leads will take action. Your call-to-action should focus on the primary action that you want your prospects to take as well as correspond with the stage of the buyer’s journey that they are in.

#4 Be Conversational

People prefer to interact with humans rather than companies. Get your emails to be written by a member of your sales or marketing team. Use conversational language and try to personalize the emails in different ways. Don’t use slang or be completely informal but rather make it sound like you are talking to them. The boring, automated or computer-like language will probably get your email deleted as it will not resonate with your audience. 

#5 Use Lead Scoring

Set up a lead scoring system in your marketing automation software to help you know where someone is in the client journey. Lead scoring is the process where you can assign point values to different actions that a prospective customer may take and then rank them accordingly against a scale of the value that each lead represents. For example, downloading an eBook may receive more points than visiting a certain page on your website. This score informs you where the prospective customers are in the sales funnel as well as how they are moving along the buyer journey in order to send them the appropriate content.

Lead nurturing must eventually lead to selling, so it is important to ask those who have almost made a decision for their business. If you have researched your prospective audience and developed buyer personas you will be aware of the different buyer journey timespans. Nurturing leads is an important step in conversion and maximizing profit. It motivates larger purchases. According to Marketo, companies that have excellent lead nurturing campaigns generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.

If you have not yet included lead nurturing in your sales and marketing strategies, now is the time to upgrade your business processes. Digitally partnered with Kilowott, we can help you with bespoke nurturing journeys to your valuable leads, an instant follow-up to new business opportunities, and tailored communication to align with your customers’ online behavior.