Lead nurturing is establishing a stronger relationship with customers at every point in the buyer’s journey. Instead of focusing on getting more and more leads, you will maximize the potential profits that can be had from your current leads.

A lead nurturing program also endeavors to listen more closely to customers’ needs and align marketing messages to these needs. Lead nurturing can be carried out to attain many goals, including enhancing brand awareness and maintaining the vital connection between the business and its customers, especially in the pandemic.

Statistics show that only up to 10% of inbound leads are ready to buy at any time. This leaves the rest of your leads in a more or less passive state. It makes complete sense to use lead nurturing strategies to communicate better with the rest of your leads. While regular marketing emails and promotions might work, lead nurturing is better because you can create multiple campaigns for every buyer’s journey.

In the beginning, you must first identify your goals for lead nurturing. There are two main kinds of goals: qualitative goals and quantities goals. Quantitative goals can be tracked and measured in numbers. In contrast, qualitative goals would refer to the kind of audience you have and the interactions you are setting up to ensure that they can communicate and be aware of your business and promotions.

Both quantitative and qualitative goals have different impacts on your lead nurturing efforts. Sometimes, a qualitative goal may be too general or vague that you can’t see how you’re going to say that you’ve attained that goal. On the other hand, some quantitative goals may be too lofty that you can’t reach the goal within the budget and time that you’ve given yourself or your sales and marketing teams.

What is a Qualified Lead?

A qualified lead is a person who has become trackable because of a previous interaction with your site or any other social media platform. If you have been running lead generation ads and a lead collected from that campaign initiates contact with your site again, we can say that this user is now trackable. A user becomes a qualified lead when he first has a preconfigured buyer persona is a particular need for your product or services. He is within the target geographic area.

As you build a better understanding of what qualified leads mean to your business, it would also be a good idea to understand better what your audience might want from your business. We all have a general understanding of what they might want, but knowing the exact parameters of those needs is much better. Winding back to the idea of a buyer persona, the insights you get from different customers’ responses will help you create better buyer personas with higher accuracy and are best suited for specific marketing messages.

When you are just starting with lead nurturing, it’s perfectly fine to start small. If you have a small list, that’s not a problem. Just work to increase your leads in the future, but make sure that you maximize the leads that you have now, too.

The thing about lead nurturing (especially if you are not equipped to handle the strain of it all) is that it can be tough to interact with large numbers of people at one time. In the end, the lack of response (or timely and satisfying response) on your end might trigger diminished results, too.

When establishing customer personas and figuring out what qualified leads might mean to you, you must consider the major arcs that influence consumer behavior, such as goals, motivations, challenges, demographic details, and buying patterns. After identifying these vital factors, it’s important to adumbrate the different phases of the buyer journey in your business and understand the possible interactions within each phase. This is where other marketers usually drop off – they don’t understand the segments, so they can’t craft the right messages for each segment of each part of the marketing funnel.

Keep in mind that there are three general phases after interacting with a business: awareness, consideration, and decision. We want to nudge the customer toward the decision phase and glean a positive outcome, which is a sale. We recommend that you focus on the sales qualified leads and gauge how audiences in this segment are reacting to your content in the decision stage. As you continue working on knowing these important leads, you can then focus on creating messages, repurposing content, or creating new content that matters to these leads.

Use Strategic Content

Marketing campaigns are rarely “one size fits all.” Lead nurturing solves this problem by communicating to specific segments of your leads. While you have a general audience, lead segmentation allows you to create and distribute targeted content to deepen your relationship with specific segments.

But before you can start creating strategic content, it’s vital that you first research relevant buyer personas. Multiple segments in your list can be transformed into workable buyer personas with specific needs in terms of approach, language, and content.

It’s also a good idea to take a closer look at the marketing triggers of these personas, as well as how they have been responding to your emails in the past. Using a marketing automation platform will help you perform the segmentation and apply analytics and insights to your current/previous leads.

Also, don’t forget about repurposing content. Old content on your site doesn’t mean the content is no longer useful or relevant. Shorter content may still be improved, and the ones that are of the right length and are genuinely useful to different segments of your list can be repurposed. How does content repurposing work?

Old content can be used as a reference by potential buyers in different situations. Compile your old content and create a report or free download. Old posts about previous projects can be repurposed to create interesting and impressive case studies, too.

Don’t Forget Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is essentially assigning points to customers or leads that have made contact with your business before. Lead scoring involves multiple factors that have to be considered before the scoring is made. The two major factors here would be the amount of information you have already given the lead and what type of information the lead has offered to the business. There is no single methodology that applies to all. It makes complete sense that lead scoring is done differently by different businesses. Luckily, you don’t have to invent the wheel at all. There are many lead-scoring businesses out there that can help you collect data, analyze, and score your leads. Is this software worthy of your resources in the long term? Yes, they are. These lead scoring systems will eventually help you attain that great balance in marketing your businesses to vital customer personas to generate higher ROI for your marketing efforts.

At this point, it may also be a good idea for you to start thinking of how to separate your lead generation efforts and your lead nurturing strategies because there will be some mingling with these efforts at one point, but they should be separate efforts. The purpose of separating the efforts is to measure how effective your lead nurturing efforts are and how you are automating responses to actual queries when customers start interacting with your brand.

What about unsubscribe rates?

Unsubscribe rates aren’t necessarily bad, though we’d like to keep as many of your leads inside the marketing funnel as much as possible. The primary data that we can glean from unsubscribing rates is what constitutes “too much” for different personas on your list. Careful tracking of unsubscribe rates will allow you to fine-tune and optimize how many emails you are sending. Split-testing your emails and the content you send can also help refine what works and what doesn’t. There’s no shortcut here: either you align as closely as possible with customer needs, or you don’t.

It would also be a good idea to remember that lead nurturing is almost always a drip-marketing effort. What you need to focus on is a positive and gradual improvement of your relationship with your customers.

Invest in a Multi-Channel Approach

While email is certainly a good place to start, it’s best to use other platforms to maximize your cover and to make sure that your message is available where your customers are. This can be a challenging approach, so ensure that your sales team and marketing team are aligned with each other. Of particular interest here are social media platforms, and don’t forget to improve your email efforts continually. Website content (strategic posts with rich media, especially) and retargeted ads are powerful spaces for lead nurturing. Cohesion is important when performing lead nurturing as the channel, and the message has to be aligned.

What are social networks most useful for lead nurturing? This depends on your industry. Web design and SEO agencies, the logical networks to tap would be LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn occupies a special place in lead generation strategies and leads nurturing because decision-makers are on LinkedIn, and they spend more time there than other platforms. Facebook is a good catch-all network because of the sheer volume of people who are on the network.

Focus on Increasing Touches

Customer touchpoints is an underrated concept in marketing. Statistics show that customers need an average of ten touches or interactions before they begin to warm up to a brand and become readier to buy. In the context of lead nurturing, we want to increase the number of customer touchpoints and actual interactions as we go along to help guide customers along the buyer journey.

Designing customer touchpoints is crucial and must also be strategic. It’s time to think of what kinds of touchpoints can nudge a customer further down the marketing funnel. Customer touchpoints can also help reactivate customers who have not been responding to your emails, ads, or social media posts.

Below are some ideas that may help you improve customer interactions on different platforms:

• Offer a free report or whitepaper
• Create a free calculator on your website
• Create a free app or tool that is super useful for site owners
• Provide free templates or graphic downloads
• Create a WordPress plug-in that does one thing very well
• Try direct mail if you have this information from your leads

Essentially, we want your leads to interact with your brand as frequently as possible. Create situations where they’re going to visit your site because they need something from you, and they enjoy getting that resource from your site. Customers will eventually reciprocate, and the more they familiarize yourself with your brand, the more open they will be to hiring you or your agency.

Automate Responses and Follow-up Fast

Customer queries should be answered as quickly as possible. If you can communicate within 5 minutes of a query, that would be great. Automated responses that recognize that the queries have been received will ensure customer satisfaction and build trust, too. Actual phone calls and follow-up emails are still the best ways to communicate with leads. It is at this point that qualified leads can be transformed into sales opportunities. The reason for this is simple: when responding quickly to a lead, the chances of a sale rises exponentially.