Have you heard the saying there’s no harvest without the water? It’s a good reminder that in order to grow, we have to tend to our seeds first. When it comes to business, it can be easy to focus on the big goals - more conversions! Record sales! Global expansion! The list goes on. But what’s the first step to achieving all this? It’s getting customers. Going one step further, it’s piquing customers’ interest in your product and then supporting them on their way to purchase. How do we do that? Lead nurturing.

Lead nurture brings business back to a one-on-one forum. It’s the process of forming and maintaining meaningful relationships with prospective customers at each stage of their journey. Executed through timely marketing and communication, lead nurturing makes customers feel personally connected to your brand. Thrill people with your attention to detail, captivate them with your content and focus on finding solutions by listening first. Perfect this cycle and earn yourself loyal, advocating clients.

Jump in as we explore the latest in lead nurturing and take you through the steps of implementing a successful strategy. Let’s go!

The latest in lead nurture

Lead nurture, like everything, is best approached with an open mind. People change. Algorithms change. And so too should your lead nurturing tactics. As a dynamic and ever-evolving marketing technique, it’s important to consistently keep up with what’s working right now. In most cases, only about 10% of leads will make an immediate purchase. With that in mind, let’s dive into the latest and greatest ways to capture the majority.

Personalization

The modern consumer wants to feel like the only person in the world. That’s why personalization has become a major component of lead nurturing. Personalization is exactly what it sounds like - tailoring content and communication for each individual. It’s shown to produce impressive results with 91% of consumers preferring to shop with brands that remember them.

Multi-channel marketing

Multi-channel marketing refers to the creation of multiple consumer touch points across a range of communication channels. For example:

  • Website
  • Email
  • Social media
  • Advertisements
  • Radio

Multi-channel marketing goes hand-in-hand with lead nurture. If we think about the customer journey, each stage requires a different approach. A customer who has an offhand interest in your brand may want to browse your Instagram. Whereas a customer on the fence about buying may want to read online reviews to make sure they’re making the best decision. Plus, multi-channel customers are shown to spend two to five times more than single channel consumers! Now that’s something we can get behind.

Marketing automation

Automation helps you nurture at each stage of the buyer journey - without having to lift a finger. It’s efficient, timely and consistent. Automated software is programmed to send a message when triggered by a behavior such as a new subscriber, cart abandonment or contract renewal. Build a progression of messages that subtly guides the prospect through the customer journey and encourages them to take action.

Tools and platforms to enhance lead nurture

Lead Nurture: What Is This and How to Start Doing It Within Your Agency

With a plethora of ways to connect with prospective clients, it’s easier than ever to start planning your lead nurture strategy. Let’s have a look at the most effective tools and platforms to turn your strategy into success.

Top 5 platforms to include in your lead nurture strategy

Drip

Land long-term loyalty with Drip. An ecommerce marketing automation platform passionate about putting customers first, Drip will help you build the authentic relationships necessary to convert leads.The platform lets you build a ‘drive first purchase’ strategy to capture potential customers through personalized experiences.

Zapier

Zapier is an all-round automation tool allowing you to create detailed workflows with just a single trigger. The customizable if this/then that logic makes it easy to connect with prospective customers throughout their entire journey. Further personalize the lead nurturing experience by adding segmentation to your triggers. For example, sending a different welcome email depending on location. Zapier features filters and scheduling to make sure you meet leads in the right place, at the right time.

Constant Contact

For ready to go email and digital marketing strategies, try Constant Contact. With a ton of resources for email, SMS and social media marketing, Constant Contact is ahead of the pack with design and content. They help you show up and nurture leads from the most important audiences.

Hubspot

Creating a seamless cycle between incoming data, your teams and prospective customers is easy with Hubspot. The CRM platform offers software and integrations to cover your marketing, sales, content management and customer service efforts. The best part? Hubspot offers free courses and resources to help you develop an outstanding lead nurture strategy.

LeadOwl

Never miss a lead with LeadOwl. Before you begin to nurture a lead, you need to know it’s there. LeadOwl alerts you every time you receive a new lead to ensure you have a fast response and provide the attention required for conversion. The app also tracks ‘not converted’ leads for you to move to a lead nurturing flux such as a drip marketing campaign or email newsletter.

Strategies for successful lead nurture

Now we’ve established just how important nurturing leads is for your business, let’s jump into the best ways to build your strategy.

Creating effective campaigns

Establishing a lead nurturing campaign helps to effectively communicate with your prospects. By understanding what potential customers are looking for, you can be prepared with relevant information and support. Utilize these tips when creating your lead nurture campaign:

  • Personalize emails: use segmentation data to construct email lists dependent on interests and behaviors. Try to integrate as much information as possible to further tailor your efforts. Using data from location, age, gender, work or a specific interest will help nurture leads. For further personalization, try sending emails from an employee’s name rather than a sale-sy domain.
  • Use drip marketing tactics: set up automated emails to respond to a lead’s interests. For example, if there’s a specific page or product someone looks at repeatedly, send them an email with more information. Connecting to consumers with relevant information will encourage them to keep exploring. Combining drip marketing with personalized content is a great way to keep your leads engaged.
  • Remember the customer journey: when deciding what to send to a lead, consider the stage of the journey they’re in. Providing information that meets their expectation of your brand will help to convert them. The three stages are:
    • Awareness: send articles and blog posts relevant to their interests.
    • Consideration: connect them with practical advice such as a how-to or demo.
    • Decision: let them know what others think through reviews and testimonials.
  • Make your campaign timely: avoid the spam! Nurturing isn’t about pressure, it’s about guidance.Timing your lead nurturing well is a balance between staying front of mind and letting the person think. Focus on the customer by asking for feedback or opinions, motivate with offers and use punchy lines to intrigue.

Using lead scoring

Lead scoring helps you prioritize your leads. It helps streamline your conversion efforts by ranking prospects from ready to purchase to unqualified. To start lead scoring, you need to choose specific criteria for your business and assign it a value from 1-100. The higher a lead’s score, the closer they are to conversion. Scaling your leads like this will help you find a ‘conversion point threshold’. When a lead reaches this number of points, they become qualified and are likely to buy. Implementing a lead-scoring system will help lead nurture through advanced targeting and improved segmentation. If you’re not sure where to begin, start with these four criteria:

  • Budget
  • Authority
  • Need
  • Timeline

Executing personalization through the sales funnel

So we’ve talked about why you need to connect with leads at each stage of the sales funnel, but _how _do you make it personal? With automated CRM and marketing tools, customizing a leads journey is easy. Let’s look at some of the ways you can try it:

  • Landing pages: landing pages are pretty important. They’re the first thing a prospect sees when they click an ad, download a resource or sign up for a course. A basic landing page will clearly present your brand offering, your point of difference and a form to collect basic info. These days there’s plenty of tools that allow you to create several landing pages depending on where a prospect came from. The option to immediately segment prospective customers will help begin the lead nurture journey.
  • Create value: if there’s one thing that a lead loves - it’s free stuff. Offering an ebook or guide in exchange for a lead’s details on your landing page can be a great way to learn more about their interests.
  • Use a welcome series: everyone knows first impressions are key and once you have a lead’s email, they want to hear from you. Set up an automated welcome email series with two to three emails. These include:
    • The initial hello!
    • A bit more about your business.
    • An invitation to explore and connect.
  • Incentivise: if a lead keeps getting to the buying phase but cancels at the last minute - consider sending them a discount. Offering well-timed incentives can help nudge leads back onto the purchasing train. It doesn’t have to be a discount - other options could be an extended trial period, free resource or surprise gift.

Success in lead nurture

Lead Nurture: What Is This and How to Start Doing It Within Your Agency

It’s important to remember that your lead nurture strategy doesn’t always need to be promotional. Think of it as a subtle tap on your customer’s shoulder every now and then to say hello. Framebridge does this particularly well. As an online custom picture framing service, Framebridge has cracked the code to nurture emails through education. They realized that a lot of prospects might not feel comfortable hanging pictures in their home. So, they designed a how-to email. By upskilling their audience, Framebridge is providing value before they ask the recipient for further information. The email uses a simple CTA - ‘Educate me’. Including this CTA helped increase their click through rate by 371%.

How to measure and optimize your lead nurture

Once you have a lead nurture strategy in place, it’s important to track what’s working and what’s not. After all, smart marketing isn’t based on feelings - it’s backed by data. Gather figures from your company, industry averages and the campaign goals to compare to.

4 metrics to measure your lead nurturing success:

  • Click-Through Rate (CTR): this is the number of people who clicked on the link in an email. By sending out segmented and personalized emails, this metric will show areas where you haven’t aligned your offering with the recipient.
  • Conversion Rates: lead nurture is all about increasing conversion rates. This metric will show the percentage of prospects that followed a link and completed the desired action.
  • Time to Customer Conversion: this metric shows the time it takes for a lead to become a purchasing customer. Efficiency is everything in business and lead nurturing is no different.
  • Cost per customer: track how much your lead nurture strategy costs to ensure it’s sustainable. As you refine your sales funnel, the cost per customer should decrease - but there’s no point blowing the budget in the meantime!

Optimizing campaigns for better results

The best part about tracking a campaign’s performance is finding ways to make it better. Like most campaigns, your lead nurture campaign should undergo constant optimization to ensure its consistently achieving better results. Optimizing might look like:

  • Analyzing what worked in your past campaigns. For example, which call-to-actions (CTAs) resulted in the highest click-through-rates? Use that to guide what CTAs you use in the future.
  • Using A/B testing to trial campaign variations. Randomly present two versions of an element in a campaign - such as the landing page - to a similar sized audience. Track responsiveness and conversion rates to see which one is more successful.
  • Trying multivariate testing by trialing a heap of variables at once. Different from A/B testing, multivariate will show you what combination of elements works best to drive conversions.

In essence, optimizing your lead nurturing campaign boils down to segmentation. Having an innate knowledge of each buyer persona will allow you to deliver the right message, in the right place, at the right time.

Nurture your leads with LeadOwl

With LeadOwl’s automated lead tracking, you can call, text or email your leads in seconds. Crafted for busy professionals, this mobile marketing tool integrates with websites in a flash. Close deals in confidence with access to industry standard data security and 24/7 support.

Get started with LeadOwl for free and discover the power of adding a top digital marketing tool to your business.