4 Ways to Energize Your Nurture Strategy
In an attempt to stay ahead of its competitors in their respective industries, organizations are adopting inbound marketing to generate more leads. But little do they realize that just generating leads is not enough for successful marketing. Marketers need to effectively nurture both the prospective leads to convert them into buyers and scored leads to retain them for longer. By implementing an effective lead nurturing strategy, you can not only bring a huge difference in the percentage of scored leads but also increase customer loyalty to gain more business revenue.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is all about engaging your target audience by offering relevant information and offers, understanding and supporting their needs, creating a personal bonding, and entertaining them throughout their buyer’s journey. The way you nurture your leads directly impacts their buying decisions in this digitally driven marketing era. There are several ways to nurture leads, but the most impactful ones are:
To leverage targeted content
Gone are the days where creating one size content would fit for all your customers. Lead nurturing these days needs specific creation of content based on collected customer data. It is important to understand each of your unique buyer personas and curate targeted content designed to address their customer lifecycle stage. You need to analyze their interest, problem areas, and needs and frame content around them. To best create targeted content, you need to segment your audience first based on their buyer personas and then create content according to the segment labels.
Personalized emails are the best way of creating targeted content. “Email marketing continues to be a highly-effective tactic for lead nurturing — and the personalization of those emails tends to produce better results. A study by Accenture found that 41% of consumers switched businesses due to a lack of personalization,” states HubSpot.
Also, since modern technology gives you real-time information about your web visitor movement, you can take note of any action taken by a prospective lead, and send triggered emails. To maintain and increase interest within those who download your gated content, click on specific links, and visit certain pages on your website, you need to draft email content that will successfully push them towards the next stage of their customer journey. Behavioral triggered emails created with personalized content helps you deliver the right marketing messages to the right people at the right time.
To use multi-channel lead nurturing techniques
In the traditional form of marketing, sending out mass emails to a list of prospects worked just fine for your marketing objective and lead nurturing. But with the rising competition within brands, marketers look for new tactics and technologies beyond email marketing to nurture leads. Organizations are investing in multi-channel marketing platforms and with the introduction of marketing automation, multi-channel targeting has become quite convenient.
By making your sales and marketing teams work cohesively on different marketing platforms, your brand will reach out to a larger audience and also retarget existing ones through various platforms. “While the buyers’ journey for every product and service can be quite different, research has suggested that on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they become aware of your company until the time they convert into customers,” adds HubSpot. Thus, besides sending emails, adopt social media marketing, add a potential website and blog content, organize paid retargeting, and direct sales outreach to nurture your leads.
To follow up with leads at the right time
To convert inbound leads into qualified sales opportunities, you need to send timely follow-up emails or make phone calls. With so many promotional messages flowing into your prospective lead’s inbox every day, there is a high possibility of them getting distracted and inclined towards your competing brand. Thus, it is necessary to show your leads how much you care for them. When a lead is contacted immediately and at timely intervals following their action, they constantly get reminded of your brand and stay engaged.
Send out periodic announcements, newsletters, product update emails to keep your customers fully informed about the changes happening around their interest. Also, if you are making any change keeping in mind the unique customer needs, let them know about it. At the same time, if you are offering upgrade options and promotional discounts based on the actions taken by them, highlight it in your messages.
To use lead scoring tactics
To nurture your leads in the best possible way, you need to first understand the position of individual leads in terms of the customer lifecycle. Based on their present stage, you can decide if the lead needs further nurturing or can be transported directly to the sales rep. You can use marketing automation tools to decide the lead score by assigning numeric values to website browsing behaviors, conversion events, social media interactions, and more. It is important to identify the exact points in the buyer’s journey when a prospect can be transitioned between teams.
Besides following the above-mentioned strategies, you also need to make sure that your sales and marketing are aligned. With the growing digital technologies and social media platforms, consumers now make more informed purchase decisions. Irrespective of designing an integrated strategy with the marketing tactics and generating qualified leads, you might fail to engage leads, gain customer trust, and translate them into sales. If you want your lead nurturing strategies to be successful and increase customer retention rates, you need to go beyond the traditional method of nurturing leads. After all, your marketing efforts aim to drive leads that have a high chance of turning into buyers.
Still confused about how to nurture leads? We at Marrina Decisions have gathered expert knowledge in lead nurturing to assist you through the entire phase of the customer lifecycle. So, if you are willing to gain high ROI with better customer relationships, drop us a line at experts@marrinadecisions.com. Or if you are more comfortable on social media now, then you can simply DM us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.