What Is Lead Nurturing? | Top Priority For 74% Companies

Discover How Successful Businesses Generate 50% MORE Sales-Ready Leads at ‘33% Lesser Cost’ Using Lead Nurturing, Persuading the 80% ‘New Prospects’ ( that otherwise NEVER convert )

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a series of ‘Value Adding’ Touch-Points designed to assist your ‘New Prospects’ in their buying journey that help build your ‘Trust & Authority’, Persuading them to buy from you.

These ‘Value Adding’ Touch-Points are customized to Sync with your target markets buying behaviour helping you to build longterm relationships with your buyers.

How does lead nurturing work?

74% of companies treat lead-nurturing as their top priority (According to Hubspot)

Nurturing leads is important because 80% of new leads that enter the funnel never convert into sales

Remember, “People don’t like to be sold-but they love to buy” – (Jeffrey Gitomer)

Lead nurturing works by solving problems like:

• Having too many dormant leads in the database: Lead nurturing increases their readiness to buy by developing relationships with customers over time building their loyalty & trust towards your company.

• Longer sales cycles: Due to increased competition buyers take more time to explore their options & educate themselves before they make a purchase decision. With lead nurturing you hook your buyers with valuable information shortening your sales cycle & convert more leads into buyers.

• Having less engagement in lead nurturing: Maintaining proactive engagement with buyers is the key to an effective lead nurturing program, communication enriches their experience with your brand creating trust & impact.

• Measuring the impact of lead nurturing program: You have to establish your lead nurturing goals before you see any impact, much less measure it for eg: no. of leads you need to generate, clear call to action & your target market.

• No automation technology in place: Marketing automation is the cornerstone of navigating through longer sales cycles, lead lifecycle management, lead scoring, personalization & analytics. Helping you by substantially reducing your costs & creating a much larger impact with lesser efforts.

There are different types of leads

• Cold, Warm & Hot Leads: 

Leads whose information is with the company but have not been proactively engaged by them are called Cold Leads.

Leads that have shown interest in your product but have still not planned to make the purchase are called Warm Leads.

Hot Leads are people who have shown interest in your products plus have made the decision of buying from you in the past.

• Information Qualified Leads:

The leads that have shared their contact information with the company in exchange for some resource such as an E-book, Offer or Free Trail are known as Information Qualified Leads

• Marketing Qualified Leads:

When prospects respond to any marketing efforts by the company such as Online Advertisement, Webinar or Online Contest are called Marketing Qualified Leads

• Sales Qualified Leads:

Sales Qualified Leads are the ones who have been contacted by any sales representative from the company 

They have the highest potential of converting and should be followed up with constantly.

Understanding consumer buying stages:

Every consumer goes through these essential ‘Buying Stages’ before buying from anywhere

Because 70-90% of the buying process will happen before making the purchase

Stage 1. Problem Recognition

Stage 2. Information Gathering

Stage 3. Evaluating Solutions

Stage 4. Purchase Phase

Stage 5. Post-Purchase Evaluation

Stage 1. Problem Recognition: This is where the customer identifies a Problem (The best friend of every business)

So, you have to identify

• What incidents or scenarios push customers to look for your type of solution?
• What type of situations create demand for your offering?
• What methods will you utilize in order for your product to be chosen?

To have a clear idea of who are your ideal customers and where they are coming from

Stage 2. Information Gathering: This is the golden opportunity to put your company on your customer’s Radar when they start their research to solve their problem

The Prior-Step to Lead Nurturing, Known as Lead Generation

Depending on your research of the 1st Stage your customers might be hanging around on For eg: Facebook, Google, Amazon/Flipkart, Youtube etc., looking for their answers

Stage 2 & 3 a very closely connected, Lead Nurturing starts at the later part of this stage

Stage 3. Evaluating Solutions: 

This is the Stage where your brand beats all its competitors by not starting to sell off-the-bat but firstly educating your customer & giving them as much FREE information as possible about the solution

Also known as ‘Lead Nurturing’, Which helps build Your ‘Trust & Authority’ in the eyes of your customers persuading them to smoothly transition into the Next Stage ( majority of the businesses lose the battle over here because they start doing premature-selling )

Stage 4. Purchase Phase: 

Lead Nurturing is already been taken care of in the previous step

So, in this step, you just have to present your customers with an ‘OFFER’

Because a Good ‘No-Brainer’ Offer is better than any ‘Persuasive Writing’ technique out there

That would make your customer quickly reach out for their credit card & give you their money

Stage 5. Post-Purchase Evaluation: 

Here you have successfully ‘Nurtured Leads’ & they’ve finally become your customers

Every business survives on repeat purchases from their present customers & their referrals by improving ‘Customer Experience’

So, make sure you make them a part of your companies ‘Email list’ & keep nurturing them periodically with useful information.

However, the best practice is adding your prospects to your Email List as early as Stage 2 by offering them something FREE in return for subscribing to your Newsletters, For eg: a Free E-Book

So, your marketing team can add the ones that slipped out of your funnel into your retargeting list and continue to ‘Nurture & Sell’ them in the future.

Examples of lead nurturing

Two of the ‘Simplest, Cost-Effective & Time-Proven’ ways of Lead Nurturing that even a ‘Beginning-Level’ marketer can undertake to 3X Your Conversions, are:

1. Email Marketing
2. Blogs

Why? Let’s look at some quick stats

1. Email Marketing: The best part about emails is that they are ‘Private’ ( No Social Media Noise ) & they can be ‘Highly Personalized’ ( helps in building long-term relationships with your customers )

• Emails help generate $42 for every $1 spent, churning out an ROI of 4,200%, making it the ‘Go-To Lead Nurturing Medium’ for every business – (Hubspot)

• 99% of email users check their inbox every day, with some checking 20 times a day. Of those people, 58% of consumers check their email first thing in the morning. (OptinMonster, 2020)

• More than 8 out of 10 people will open a welcome email, generating 4x as many opens and 10x as many clicks as other email types. (GetResponse, 2020)

• 31% of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)

• 87% of B2B marketers say email is one of their top free organic distribution channels. (Content Marketing Institute, 2020)

• 4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing. (Litmus, 2020)

2. Blogs: You can provide a lot of FREE Value by writing informative blogs & directing your new leads to them ( building your Trust & Authority ) & use small sections from it to make Facebooks, Instagram, Linkedin or Twitter posts to nurture & drive qualified traffic from your social media handles.

• Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts. (Optin Monster)

• 57% of marketers say they’ve gained customers specifically through blogging. (Optin Monster)

• 53% of marketers say blogging is their top content marketing priority. (Optin Monster)

• On average, companies who blog produce 67% more leads per month. (Semrush)

• 46% of people take recommendations from bloggers/vloggers into account. (Semrush)

• 34% of buyers will make an unplanned purchase after reading quality content. (Semrush)

• Blogging is so scalable and affordable that it’s the 3rd most common content marketing strategy for businesses. (Optin Monster)

Just make sure that your messaging is targeted towards a specific niche otherwise if you try to cater to everyone your message won’t speak to anyone.

 Improving Lead Nurturing

First of all, Congratulations for making this far into this article which shows your ‘Determination & Commitment’ towards taking your business to the next level.

You have discovered:

1. What is lead nurturing & Why is it important?
2. How does lead nurturing work
3. Time-Proven lead nurturing methods ( with statistical proofs )

So, now is the perfect timing to discuss the ‘Primary Elements’ of Lead Nurturing

There is so much marketing information & softwares out there that it is easy to get tempted, wanting to take a bite out of everything which can lead your marketing efforts astray 

Resulting in an unnecessary waste of money, time & energy 

Plus, resulting in confused leads with all the uncoordinated & mixed messaging

That is why it is very important to, first of all, define your Buyers Persona ( a mock-representation of your ideal buyer ) 

by understanding their characteristics such as their demographics, interests, challenges, lifestyle habits, goals, pain-points & buying pattern

Structuring your content marketing strategy based on it, knowing where your ideal buyers are present for eg: Facebook, Google, Instagram, Linkedin, Quora, Youtube, Tiktok etc.

Next important element in line is Marketing Analytics, thou you are focusing your content marketing efforts around your ideal buyers persona, 

However, in order to further Increase your ROI from those marketing efforts you need to start managing & studying data that will further polish your understanding of the Ideal Customer & their buying patterns

Helping make the journey from potential buyer to present buyer Smoother, benefiting both you & the customer.

Always make sure that the Economic Buyer (the person with the buying authority) is present when your sales representative is having conversation with prospects because that will increase conversions helping you to achieve company annual revenue targets on time.

Hmm… What else did we miss?

Right! ‘Revenue Acceleration’

Remember how you started your journey alone & eventually scaled your work to a point where you were required to register a company or will need to in future…

This means every department in your company ( Marketing, Sales & Production ) is handling the same activities on a larger scale which you were doing on your own when you started out 

& what was the main reason for your initial success? That’s right! ‘Coordination’ between all these activities

A company can reach it’s true potential only when all the departments are in complete sync with each other by sharing data, identifying & closing any leaks in the ‘Sales Funnel’

How does marketing automation help with lead nurturing?

Once you have figured out your buyer’s persona, marketing platforms & your messaging

Then by using ‘Marketing Automation Softwares’ you can automate & even personalize repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting & ad campaigns

Email Marketing Automation helps you ‘Automate & Personalize’ repetitive tasks at the same time.

Infact the best result you can generate with your marketing efforts is by building your customers ‘email lists’ & using them in your email marketing campaigns

These are a series of individual email messages that are pre-planned to deliver to your ‘selected email lists’ across a period of time 

they usually start from a ‘Welcome Email’ ( sent immediately, the first time someone subscribes to your newsletters ) with a series of other emails delivered to their inboxes at set dates & time building relationships with your prospects

( They can be a series of 4-5, 6-9 or a complete series spread over 12 months…depending on your requirements & testing )

With the objective of ‘Nurturing & Selling’ to your Subscribers

Important ‘Welcome Email’ Facts: 

• 76% of people expect to receive a welcome email immediately after subscribing to your list. (Invesp)

• Users who receive a welcome email show 33% more engagement with the brand. (Invesp)

• Welcome emails have a 91.43% open rate. (Hive.co)

• Welcome emails have on average 4x the open rate and 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign. (InboxArmy)

• Welcome emails with offers can boost revenue by 30% per email, compared to welcome emails without offers. (Invesp)

Your goal consistently should be to keep on quickly increasing touchpoints with your new prospects ( who already have a purchase intent ) while nurturing them to make the purchase decision.

Creation of effective lead nurturing strategy

Purchase Funnel ( also known as Marketing Funnel ) helps you analyze your customer acquisition process through the breakdown of their buying journey

Allowing you to better understand your target audience & the channels through which they entered your funnel 

Source: skyword

It is a continuous process of analysing your funnel data & refining your lead nurturing tactics in order to achieve better conversions

• Targeted Content: That is tailored for your target audience to be captivating, entertaining & educating so you can filter the most qualified leads

• Multiple-Channel Lead Nurturing: Position & nurture your content where they are using multiple channels rather than relying on just 1

• Multiple Touchpoints: It takes about 5-7 touchpoints for a lead to convert into a customer make sure you complete these as fast as possible eg: asking them to follow you on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc. in exchange for valuable information

• Personalized Emails: Best part about emails is that they can be automated & personalized at the same time, plus you have their full attention ( try to personalize via other channels whenever possible )

• Timely Follow Ups: People buy from companies that are quick to respond to their queries & also make sure to do periodical follow-ups to keep your brand on the top of their mind.

• Lead Scoring: Analyse and categorise your leads from the least to highest priority, ranking leads helps you focus on them based on the perceived value they represent to your organization

• Aligning Sales & Marketing: Align your sales & marketing teams for better coordination resulting in improved data analysis, lead nurturing tactics & customer retention.

Fact: Nurtured leads make ‘47% Larger Purchases’ than non-nurtured leads – (The Annuitas Group)

Difference between lead nurturing and lead generation

Lead Generation: Is the first touchpoint in your sales process comprising a mix of marketing strategies ( like Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Pay-Per-Click ) used to engage your target market & find new leads for your business

Lead Nurturing: Is a marketing tactic used to build strong relationships with your buyers by providing consistent value with a focus on enriching new leads experience with your brand with the intent of turning them into loyal, repeat, paying customers

Converting sales funnels are built around the company’s buyer’s persona which helps them understand their target markets buying process helping them to improve their messaging & provide their prospects with a personalized experience

That helps companies move their customers deeper down into the buying cycle

FAQ

Answer the following section with 1 paragraph. Each answer should be an H3. 

• What is lead nurturing?

A process of building relationships with your customers by focusing marketing efforts on listening to the needs of prospects providing them with valuable information gradually building the Trust & Authority which eventually converts them into your buyers.

• How does lead nurturing work?

It works by having clearly defined qualitative goals & then quantifying them. With the main objective of accelerating your buyer’s journey ( through their buying cycle ) by engaging & collecting more information from inbound leads to optimize & shorten your sales funnel improving the percentage at which raw leads convert to qualified prospects & then to closed sales.

• What is lead nurturing example?

Email marketing & blogging are the top two methods used for lead nurturing, with email marketing you can send personalized messages using targeted content spread over a series of emails programmed to be delivered on set days & time providing value to nurture & sell. Likewise, blogs also contain valuable & actionable information that helps prospects turning them into paying customers.

• How can lead nurturing be improved?

Improvements are made by creating planned content for each part of the buyer’s journey, constantly engage & collect information from new leads, implement lead scoring, use automation & personalisation, writing in a conversational manner, utilize multiple channels, have a clear call to action & repeatedly keep tracking, testing & adjusting your lead nurturing strategies

• How marketing automation helps with lead nurturing?

Marketing automation plays a key role in engaging large segments of your target audiences based on the platform (social media posts, automated email campaigns, AI content writing, scheduling & meeting softwares etc.)  doing tasks that are not humanly/financially possible saving precious time, money & energy. 

• How to create an effective lead nurturing strategy?

Firstly you need to decide the purpose of your campaign for eg: generating sales leads, revival of inactive leads or subscription renewal reminders, then tailor your content based on the nature of that campaign, lastly segment your audience ( based on their product interest, location, engagement level etc. ) which allows lead nurturing campaigns to be highly targeted, effective & measurable.

• What is the difference between lead generation and lead nurturing?

Lead generation focuses on finding new leads but 80% of the fresh leads are not ready to buy, so, lead nurturing is the next step in the process that actually builds relationships with individual prospects with the focus of turning them into loyal, paying, repeat customers.

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