Getting Started with Lead Nurturing and Driving Conversions
by Sumona Marketing 15 November 2022
They say half your prospects in the sales pipeline are not ready to complete a purchase. That’s where lead nurturing starts the ball rolling and lends a helping hand to brands. With nurturing leads, you can turn more undecided shoppers into paying and even loyal ones.
How do lead nurturing activities help you cultivate deeper relationships with prospective clients? How to build a strategy that resonates well with the leads? Which tactics drive conversions the most?
This article covers the basics behind lead nurturing and how businesses can use it to plummet conversion rates, sales, and customer retention.
Let’s dive right into it.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing can be compared to growing a plant. If you place a seed in send and don’t water it, the chances are close to zero that a fruit-bearing tree will grow out of it. However, if you choose soil of the right acidity and nutrient-rich, batten, and take good care of your seed, you’ll reap the fruit of your labor.
Your prospective customers are no exception.
| Simply put: Sales nurturing is the process of developing contacts with new clients on purpose in order to move them down the sales funnel toward completing a targeted action. |
Why does lead nurturing matter?
Not all site visitors are ready to complete a purchase immediately.
Moreover, half of the shoppers are not ready to complete the checkout flow the first time they visit a website.
Another study by Forrester Research proves that brands that excel in lead nurturing manage to generate 50% more sales-ready leads and decrease lead generation costs per lead by 33%.
| What does it mean for your company? Developing relationships with prospective buyers not only drive conversions but also helps you learn what hurts your brand’s credibility and disengages your potential sales. That’s a major win-win. |
What lead nurturing tactics are the most used?
We’ve compiled a list of the top five approaches that will assist you in making the first steps in crafting your lead nurturing strategy.
1. Lead quality scoring
This is the model for evaluating leads. Following a variety of specified by you (your brand) different factors, prospects receive specific scoring.
For example, you can choose to score your prospects on a 1 to 10 scale, where users that are the most interested in your product or service get 10, and the lowest-level leads get 1.
| How does it help you? You can quickly identify leads that are the ripest for a potential sale and construct your outreach flow accordingly. Conversely, leads that score the lowest would require you to take a different, much longer path before they are ready to complete a targeted action. |
2. Automation tools
A quality lead nurturing automation tool can become an ace up your sleeve.
It allows automating such repetitive tasks as emails, post engagements, commenting, post liking, and, importantly, research and data scraping.
Say LinkedIn is one of your primary channels of lead generation. That’s where your ideal prospects hang out.
Manual research would zap much of your staff resources and doubtfully be as effective as an automation tool.
Linked Helper is a great example of a safe means to employ automation in your nurturing strategy. Built to comply with the LinkedIn algorithms, the solution automates the LinkedIn sales funnel by letting you:
- Invite up to 700 prospects weekly
- Scrape emails for your outreach messages
- Auto-invite and auto-follow leads
- Craft customizable email templates with custom variables
- Track campaign performance using handy dashboards
3. Content marketing
Videos, graphs, and image personalization can influence your leads, but content can still break or make a sale.
When crafting your prospecting campaigns, make sure to generate as many contents flow as possible and orchestrate them based on your knowledge about the ideal leads and their scoring.
To get your sales prospects to pay attention to your outreach messages, intertwining coaching and valuable insights shared into your campaigns will make it a win-win.
4. Email drip campaigns
Drip and nurture email campaigns have different natures.
Drip campaigns are a series of emails that get sent to the target audience that has taken a specific action.
Nurture campaigns are more complex and can include triggering an email after a prospect fills out an online form to receive an e-book. The following email with an offer to join your free educational course may get sent after the user visits your site once again, and so on.
Nonetheless, drip campaigns are indispensable when it comes to sales nurturing, customer onboarding, and driving conversions.
5. Remarketing
Engaging with people who have already shown interest in your offerings is what remarketing is.
Now that you have a lead pool, it’s a must to take full advantage of it.
For example, if you are doing B2B sales, the sales cycle can be long and take from 3 to 10 months, sometimes longer.
Thus, you’ll need to remarket your leads using other channels. Emails and paid ads (display, search, and video) have proven themselves to be the most successful.
Even so, whatever remarketing campaign you launch, it should be relevant to the audience’s place in the purchase funnel.
In a nutshell
Following up with leads, answering their questions, sharing valuable content, and ensuring friendly and insightful communication that helps guide the shoppers’ purchase decisions are essential parts of the lead nurturing process.
Now that you know what lead nurturing is and how to use it to convert more prospects into sales, it’s time to put your knowledge into action and grow a fruit-bearing tree that yields all year round.
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