Competition within the online marketplace continues to increase and customers’ buying behaviour is constantly changing. These two together mean that it’s not enough to simply generate leads anymore. You must have an effective lead nurturing strategy to take them through each stage of your marketing funnel.
Targeted content
Just like clothing, lead nurturing is not a one size fits all. When it comes to lead nurturing, understanding each of your remarkable purchaser personas is vital and deliberately sustaining your leads with focused substance can altogether improve results.
Once you’ve began a discovery of your potential customers, it’s time to make focused content that is intended to support every one of your personas, dependent on their attributes like interests, objectives, destinations, and advertising triggers.
There are many marketing tools and platforms that can help you to identify and segment your data so that you can achieve the best results possible when nurturing your database.
Use a behaviour-based email marketing campaign
As its name suggest, behaviour-based email marketing is where you automatically send emails when customers take a specific action on your website on top of opting into your content offers.
Behaviour-based marketing helps you re-engage with your leads when they don’t complete an option form or a purchase. When you send a reminder within 24 hours, they’re more likely to finish their initial action.
Use multi-channel lead nurturing
In the past, most lead nurturing strategies involved setting up a basic email drip campaign that would send out generic emails to a list of prospects. Nowadays it’s important to use as many tools as possible so that you can be ahead of your competitors. Effective multi-channel lead nurturing most commonly involves a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach.
Using a few or all of these channels throughout your lead nurturing journey, will help feed leads through your funnel and turn them into loyal customers.
Personalised emails
Email marketing continues to be a highly effective tactic for lead nurturing and the personalisation of those emails tends to produce better results. Studies show that “74% of marketers say targeted personalisation increases customer engagement, and they see an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalised experiences.”
However, personalising emails is more than just using your lead’s name in your emails. You need to make sure that the content you send is personalised too. There are many ways in which you can personalise the content of your emails – from behaviour related emails as mentioned above to location dependent emails, gender specific emails more. Creating sign-up forms which gather this information is a great way to start the personalisation from the get go.
Lead Scoring
If you’ve got the leads but can’t seem to convert them into customers, it’s possible that your leads just aren’t qualified yet. Lead scoring will help you with this.
Lead scoring is the process of ranking the sales-readiness of a lead using a predetermined methodology. A lead scoring system allows you to take the subjectivity out of the process and truly understand which leads have the best chance of converting.
Lead scoring criteria can be broken up into two main categories – demographic information and behavioural information – it’s up to your team to determine which touch points are most important and relevant to you and assign them point values.
Once you assign each data point a score, you total all points amassed by a single lead and that’s their final score.
All of this will help you determine which leads are ready for the rest of your lead nurturing, which is vital so that you’re not wasting resources on those leads that aren’t interested in moving towards a purchase.
Do not spam your leads
There’s no general consensus in the marketing world about how often you should email your leads, however, once a week is typically accepted as a reasonable interval between emails.
Being sure to send enough emails to ensure you’re at the forefront of their mind is important but ensuring those emails are timed perfectly will also help lessen the need for more emails – saving you time and resources to put into to other avenues.
Timely follow ups
Acting immediately on inbound leads is one of the most important steps in converting your data. All of the above points are important in maintaining and nurturing your leads once they are in your funnel but ensuring they have been contacted immediately will build the foundation of your customer relationship.
Once you create a lead nurturing strategy and implement some or all of these tactics, you’ll begin to see changes in the way your customers behave and ultimately will be able to drive them towards that all important sale.
