What is Lead Nurturing? Significance and Best Tools

Lead nurturing is the process of reaching out to leads and providing them with appropriate information about your products and services in order to generate business from them.

For lead nurturing, you have to listen to your leads really very well and understand and analyze their needs, problems, and concerns. Then provide them with appropriate information. To get businesses from leads you need to show them that your products and services are best available in the market. By elevating your business’s image in the eyes of leads you can convert them into customers.

Significance of leads nurturing

• Need for less traditional marketing strategies- When the leads and customers are nurtured better then their chances of buying increase and the need of going for traditional marketing strategies reduces to a greater extent. This reduces a lot of expenditure as traditional marketing strategies require a lot of expenditure. All this contributes to a boost in ROIs.

• Analyze their energies and efforts better- Through lead nurturing businesses can figure out which lead is more interested and what are the specific needs of a business. This way they can build their strategies accordingly. This also prevents them from wasting their time on the most disinterested people.

• Brand Awareness- Lead nurturing leads to an increase in brand awareness. Brands also provide useful educational content to the people who subscribed to them for messages. Brands have to constantly educate their audience about their services.

• Best way to get disconnected customers back- Many customers don’t get involved in your business after some time, it’s called customer churn. This can be due to many reasons like they might have been involved with other businesses, found better offers, or simply weren’t satisfied with your services. You can approach your previous customers and ask them for feedback or suggestions and areas of improvement. This way their issues get resolved and you can improve your products and services. 

Process of Lead Nurturing

• Identify your target audience – Study the leads data and analyze them based on their interests. This is the initial stage of the sales cycle. The interests of the leads are influenced by their geographical locations, demographics, and their personal interests. So it’s important to study all in order to understand the interests of your audience. Also, you must see their past purchases to provide them with recommended suggestions.

• Give extra attention to the ideal buyers – Customers and leads are of different types so it’s important to focus on them according to that. Many customers and leads are interested in your products and services to a certain extent so it’s an intelligent step to focus on them more. Giving appropriate attention to segments of customers and leads is required not giving equal attention to all.

• Then run a lead nurturing campaign – After knowing your target audience you have to understand how to provide them with the best content and how to approach them in the best way possible. You can send them drip messages, do social media promotions, conduct webinars, etc.

• Evaluate your campaign – Evaluation is very important as it will help you to assess the effectiveness of your campaign. Accordingly, you can make changes if something is not working out or even use that assessment to improve in the future. The parameters that have to be measured here are the engagement of users, opening and click-through rates, the time taken to convert a lead into customers,  and the number of leads who actually converted to customers. Then you have to analyze the results.

Strategies for Lead Nurturing

• Create targeted content.

In order to incline the audience towards your brand and have an excellent image of your brand you need to frame appropriate and targeted content. For that, you must first understand different audience segments and frame appropriate content for each segment based on their requirements and preferences. You can take help from a marketing automation platform in order to understand, segment, and scale your leads and customers.

• Multi-channel lead nurturing techniques.

Earlier only email drip campaigns for nurturing leads were used but now there are many channels available for nurturing leads and companies don’t just stick to only one channel. Multi-channel lead nurturing involves marketing automation, email marketing, social media, website content, paid-to-retarget, direct sales outreach, etc. To have an effective outreach of your brand use all these channels.

• Follow up on your leads from time to time.

There are many competitors of your in the market hence you need to track each and every activity of your leads and customers and nurture them according to that. You have to timely send them drip emails triggered by their actions. When a lead is contacted immediately then their chances of buying from your company increase a lot. 

• Send personalized emails.

Maximum people prefer buying from companies that give special attention hence its advisable for companies to send them personalized messages in order to make them feel nurtured and they buy more. Based on customer’s actions personalize and customize messages for them.

Lead Nurturing Campaign

In lead nurturing campaigns companies have to build relationships with buyers at different stages of the sales funnel. It increases your brand awareness among the masses. Some of the ways of lead nurturing are-

• Emails and SMSs– Through emails, you can make subscription forms, place them on their website, and collect subscribers. You can also create professional-looking marketing email templates. Steps for creating an email marketing campaign. You can even send bulk SMS to your customers and leads.

The steps for creating email and bulk SMS messages are:

1. Prepare a list of the customers.

2. Create a preferred email or SMS template

3. Send emails or SMSs

• Web push notifications- Web push notifications offer easy personalization options, and one can also segment subscribers based on specific criteria and then set up web push automation.

• Email marketing automation- Marketing automation is a way of reducing repetitive tasks while making their execution more effective.

• CRM-  With a CRM system, you can keep track of the success of your lead nurturing campaign. CRM system manages as well as automates many sales processes as well as communication with the audience. You can connect to the audience at any stage of the sales funnel. It stores clients’ database, their past purchases, transaction details, etc. You can also send email and SMS campaigns through it.

Conclusion

Leads and customers can make or break a business hence it’s very important to keep them satisfied and make them retain to your business only. To do that you need to nurture them and cater to them well. Your brand awareness can only be increased if you have loyal customers. And loyal customers come from nurturing.