The term lead nurturing refers to a set of strategies and actions aimed at pushing forward a lead along the purchasing process.
To put it simpler, lead nurturing means sending valuable, relevant information to those leads who have left their contact details in order to persuade them into fulfilling a purchase or simply to keep on building a trust bond with your brand.
Lead nurturing is one of the key elements of Inbound Marketing and is usually performed through e-mail marketing, along with the Buyers Journey and the sales funnel.
See more in: What is Inbound Marketing?
How to attract leads in Inbound Marketing
The first requirement for lead nurturing is actually to have leads, and the basic rule for attracting leads in digital marketing is: I’ll give you something that you want, and in exchange you’ll give me your contact details and your permission to contact you in the future for commercial purposes.
This deal can take different forms. Most probable you already know many of them as you may have left your contact details on endless websites yourself to get access to:
- Downloading some piece of content
- Subscribing to an e-commerce
- Registering with a social network or debate forum
- Subscribing to a Newsletter
- Playing an on-line game
- Asking for advice
Whenever you do this, you become lead, and you’ll probably start getting newsletters with extra information. In order to start with Lead Nurturing you’ll need to do the same: generate a database of contacts. Let’s see some strategies “to nurture” your leads.
You might also be interested in: Types of newsletters that will help you with branding, sales and loyalty building
How is Lead Nurturing done?
The key requirements for a good Lead Nurturing are the following:
1.- Doing Lead Scoring
It means knowing in which stage of the purchasing process or of the sales funnel is each lead. This is important because it is useless to send information about the discovery stage to a lead who is just about to close an operation. Likewise, it is useless to send information about the decision-making stage to a lead who is at the discovery stage.
Lead Scoring is usually done automatically, appointing certain criteria to each of our Lead Magnets. In this way, the information sent to a user who downloaded a comparative e-book will not be the same as the information sent to someone who has just subscribed to our discount newsletter.
2.- Creating sequential content for each stage of the sales funnel
The whole idea about Lead Nurturing is to provide help to leads, from the moment they get to our website to the moment they finally make a purchase. So it is necessary to create a “content track” designed to motivate users to keep moving along the sales funnel.
Each piece of content has to meet two objectives:
- Giving the reader all the information required, and
- Taking them to the next stage, but always keeping them within your sales funnel, that is, avoiding them to get into some other site’s funnel.
For example, imagine you’re in the hardware IT business. A piece of useful content for the comparative stage where you display the advantages of your products over other brands, for instance, should be complete enough so that the lead does not need to search for additional information anywhere else. Besides, it should take them to the next stage –the purchase. This can be achieved by motivating the lead through some discount or special benefit.
This article can be helpful: What is Content Marketing?
3.- Measuring your results
As it happens with any other aspect of Inbound Marketing, it needs to be measured and assessed in order to improve and reach optimization. Make A/B tests whenever possible, so as to decide which type of content, design and promotions work best for the conversion.
4.- Building customer loyalty
Once the lead has made a purchase, it doesn’t mean that Lead Nurturing comes to an end. At that moment, they become part of a client database we need to keep nurturing, but now with other customized content, especially designed to fulfill their needs and build loyalty.
This is how we make sure that we’ll always remain close to them and will be their first choice when they need something that we offer.
Learn more about Lead Nurturing
Being one of the key elements of inbound, lead nurturing is a wide, complex universe. You can learn more about the topic with the following learning tools we’ve selected for you:
- Lead Nurturing: The Definitive Guide (2020) – by Albacross
- The 5 Stages of Lead-Nurturing: A Comprehensive Series – By Mission Suite
- Lead nurturing: The ultimate guide for digital marketers [Process and resources] – By Impact
- 4 step lead generation analysis to optimize sales conversion – By B2B Lead blog
- The Ultimate Guide to B2B Lead Generation in 2020 – by Lead Generation Institute
- Lead Nurturing Statistics 2020 – By 99 Firms
Do you need help with Lead Nurturing?
You may have noticed already that Lead Nurturing must be inserted into a comprehensive inbound context. if you need help to develop the content for your sales funnel and e-mail marketing, take a look at the many freelancers with expertise in marketing strategies you’ll find at Workana.
What is Workana?
We invite you to know Workana, the leading freelance marketplace. We’ve been working since 2012 to keep connecting companies and entrepreneurs with remote workers of the most diverse specialty areas.
