After a long tiring day of cold calling, your employee probably expects a surge of new leads for your business. But you don’t have the heart to tell them that that’s just the first step! So, let me be the bearer of bad news this time while imparting valuable advice along the way.
Generating leads from various sources and calling them in the first stage of your sales process. You’ll probably send them a couple more emails. But is that all? It would help if you did more than that. The best thing you can do for your business is to incorporate a lead nurturing strategy!
What is Lead Nurturing? Why is it Important?
Lead nurturing is the process of engaging prospects who are interested in your product or services by providing them with strategic information that is relevant to their business. From conducting surveys to following up on leads after the purchase, lead nurturing strategies ensure that you are targeting the right audience through the most appropriate channels.
Many organizations have now found the secret ingredients to generate more leads. While some use clever hacks and others take help from third parties, lead nurturing becomes imperative as a significant portion of these leads need to be convinced before they are ready to buy.
According to Market2Lead, nurtured leads experience a 23% shorter sales cycle. It is quintessential to consistently connect with your leads using content specific to their buying stage. This approach improves rapport building and acts as a much-needed thrust to get them closer to placing an order. If done right, lead nurturing can help you identify cross-selling opportunities and promote inbound marketing.
But how do you do it right? You use various strategies to engage and sustain customers.
6 Effective Lead Nurturing Strategies to Implement in 2023
Now that we have established the importance of lead nurturing, let me share a few strategies you can replicate.
1. Customized Content
On the face of it, this might seem obvious, but countless marketers still need to grasp the essence of customized content. The need for preliminary analysis makes content personalization increasingly tricky. You must understand your buyer’s needs, mentality, purchasing stage, and much more.
Then, you’ll have to segment these buyers based on items like profile or industry to give yourself a chance to create reusable buckets of ideas.
After that, you’ll have to sit down and create highly relevant content & shoot them to the right person at the right time. While this might seem like a lot of effort, the results of a well-implemented personalized content system are second to none. Marketing Automation software like LeadSquared, HubSpot, or Zoho, can help you personalize content using the historical data of your lead’s activities.
2. Email Nurturing
Nurturing prospects over email is still one of the most effective methods. In fact, according to Ascend2, 54% of email marketers say increasing their engagement rate is their number one priority.
As a marketer, this process gives you multiple options concerning when you want to reach them, the frequency of attempts, frameworks for content presentation, and of course, the degree of personalization. A well-rounded marketing automation system can ease your workload to a great extent in this area and boost your revenue significantly.
Among other things, it’ll help you identify lead actions like opening an email/clicking on links/downloading e-books, and many more. Based on these actions, you can schedule highly targeted emails that resonate with your leads and gently guide them into the next stage.
Here’s an example of how an EdTech business can design a lead nurturing email and share relevant resources with students to boost the admissions process.
Subject: Align your goals with our courses and start upskilling
Hi {@leadname}
I noticed you showed interest in our {@course-name} course during your recent visit to our website. We, at {@organization-name}, know how vital it is for students to be guided by the right teachers and learning materials. To simplify this process, I am sharing some resources with you that will give you a clear picture of what the course entails:
- {resource-1}
- {resource-2}
If you need clarification on any other topics, please feel free to contact {@lead-owner} at {@lead-owner’s-email-ID}.
We hope you will find the resources helpful and give us the chance to be your learning buddy!
Cheers,
{@account-manager}
3. Multichannel Approach
The one who places all your eggs in one basket is following a recipe for disaster. While emails still work, you can sometimes hit a roadblock by relying solely on them.
Multichannel lead nurturing is a vast umbrella with the potential for much-needed exploration. Authentic website content, tapping into social media, and paid retargeting are just a few avenues that have seen a sharp spike. Even phone calls and tracking on-site visits can boost lead generation.
At the heart of it, these approaches give you a better chance of making the lead sales-ready by creating a more thorough attempt at qualifying them. The key here is not just consistency, but also respect for the lead’s privacy. So, be mindful that you don’t overwhelm them by spamming their emails or bombarding them with phone calls!
4. Lead Scoring
An exciting feature in most marketing automation systems is lead scoring, which allows you to rank the importance of each lead. This efficient marker, in turn, helps your sales team understand which leads the sales team can contact immediately and which ones need to be nurtured further. The metrics assigned to lead scoring can vary from one company to another.
You can score higher for activities like viewing details on the pricing page instead of more generic ones like opening an email. It also allows you to create a threshold score and notify your sales folks about the red-hot lead as soon as they go past it. Thus, this feature can play an essential role in everything from understanding engagement levels to faster closures.
5. Timely Follow-ups
According to Salesmate, about 44% of sales representatives abandon after one follow-up. Even though people overlook it sometimes, a follow-up at the right time considerably boosts your chances of moving the prospect down the sales funnel.
Let’s take a simple example: John has opened an email you sent and is currently looking at various pages on your website.
Now, it would serve you better if you quickly researched John’s organization, his role there, and the information he was looking at to immediately shoot another email that captures his interest further. This proactive approach will give you more qualified opportunities instead of waiting for days before getting back to leads who have mostly moved on by then.
With hundreds of leads to track and no reminders to save you by the bell, it’s quite natural for a salesperson to forget about following up on clients on time. However, a CRM can help you bid farewell to all these challenges by automating the process and notifying you of relevant information related to the lead.
6. Content Marketing using Social Media
Social media platforms are known for connecting like-minded people and building solid relations. You can effectively capture, and nurture leads with LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Instagram.
The chances of finding interested people and getting a response are higher as compared to email campaigns. A study by IMPACT says that 31% of B2B professionals believe social selling helps create deeper customer relationships.
How to Evaluate and Improve your Lead Nurturing Strategy?
Once you adopt these strategies, you might want to learn about some metrics to evaluate and improve them!
1. Average Sales Cycle Length
Every sales rep dreams of converting a lead into a paying client instantly, without hassle or delay. A shorter average sales cycle indicates better sales and lead nurturing strategies.
2. Conversion Rate
A conversion rate KPI is best suited to determine the effectiveness of a marketing and lead nurturing strategy. It measures the percentage of leads that completed an action like clicking on an email, downloading a resource, submitting a form, or purchasing a product. If the conversion rate is high, it implies that your methods of nurturing leads have been successful.
3. List Growth Rate
List Growth Rate is an email-specific metric determining how fast your mailing list grows. When the leads are comfortable in giving you their email IDs, it is an indication that your relationship-building activities are heading in the right direction.
4. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
When you give your leads adequate information and attention at the right time, it creates a satisfactory experience which they would want their close circle to experience. Net Promoter Score measures the probability that a customer will refer your product or service as a solution to others who encounter similar challenges.
You can conduct a survey to ask people if they would suggest your business to their friends, family, or colleagues on a scale of 1 to 10, where one is absolutely not, and ten is highly likely, then NPS is calculated as:
5. Cost per Acquisition (CPA)
The quicker you are able to convert a potential lead into a paying customer, the lower will be the overall cost. Cost per Acquisition is a financial metric that determines the money spent on the successful conversion of leads during a particular marketing campaign. The satisfactory score of CPA varies for different businesses , but provides a good measure of a strategy’s effectiveness in all sectors.
Boost Lead Nurturing Strategies using CRM
Does all of this seem overwhelming to you—the customization, emailing, following up, and utilizing numerous channels for different purposes? The feeling is entirely justifiable. However, what if you get an assistant that takes away half of your workload? That’s precisely what a CRM can do for you!
LeadSquared CRM helps you achieve your lead-nurturing goals in the following ways:
1. Instant Engagement
With the help of CRM, you can greet your leads with automated emails and SMSs from the moment they interact with you. Personalized responses, along with complete analytics, make your service the first choice every time. It also tells you which messages and timings suit your customers the best.
2. Marketing Automation Campaigns
From designing journey workflows to automating communication across channels, a CRM can do everything all at once. You can always involve interested leads by running campaigns across all relevant channels.
3. Responsive Email Templates
You don’t have to be a coder to create unique emails using creative templates, with drag-and-drop editors, to resonate with your brand style. A touch of personalization can sprout higher opens and clicks. You can save the previously designed emails as templates and reuse them using the content library.
4. List Segmentation
CRM can segment your prospects depending on their locations, demographics, engagement level, and, most importantly, interests. This attribute eases sending out relevant messages, a crucial point of lead nurturing.
5. Lead Scoring
You don’t have to count and assign scores to each lead with CRM. It tracks your leads to observe their interactions with your website and other marketing activities. Be it web page visits, emails clicked, or e-books downloaded, it can track and score everything accordingly.
6. Lead Reports
A CRM offers a detailed report containing the total lead volume, conversion rates, average sales value, the revenue generated by respective leads, and much more. This information enables sales teams to analyse their progress, get a bird’s-eye view of the ROI and identify scope of improvement.
In conclusion
A solid nurturing strategy can thus make a considerable difference in the number of leads ready to buy. In order to maximize the results, there should be a good level of synchronization between your marketing & sales teams, as both will be involved in the nurturing cycle. Hence, a proper outline of who gets involved and when is necessary to maximize results from this process.
To apply all these lead nurturing strategies, you first need a good tool. It should help you segment your leads and send you intelligent signals about the content you should be mailing your leads. If you are on the lookout for such a tool, why don’t you consider LeadSquared? You can get in touch with our team to know more about the platform.
