You’re familiar with the term “lead nurturing,” but you’re wondering…
What exactly is lead nurturing?
The term “lead nurturing” comes from the English verb “to nurture.” It means to nourish, care for, or foster. In short, the goal of lead nurturing is to generate or develop leads that are ready to be handed off to the sales team. But what does the path to that point look like?
The term generally refers to all the steps within a lead management process that a company takes to reach prospects at the right time with the information that is relevant to them.
Specifically, this means that you use lead nurturing campaigns to further develop your potential buyers who were generated through inbound marketing. For this process to take place, you and your marketing colleagues need more details about the lead.
To obtain this information, you can take a targeted approach. For example, you can offer a valuable white paper that the lead will only receive if they disclose their job title and the company they work for. Through effective, GDPR-compliant e-tracking and the use of appropriate CRM or marketing automation systems—such as HubSpot—you can also analyze behavioral data such as email opens, article clicks, or website visits. This makes it possible to consistently provide your lead with information that interests them at just the right moment.
What are the benefits of a lead nurturing campaign?
Many companies receive customer inquiries that are not yet ready to be handled by the sales team at that point. For example, just because a potential customer downloads a white paper doesn’t mean that this “lead” should be handed over to the sales team—even if more than one email address is provided. This would only lead to rejection by the sales team, which shouldn’t be dealing with leads at this stage anyway. Even if a customer inquiry comes in via the website, a pre-qualification process should determine whether the lead should be handed over to sales as a sales opportunity or continued to be nurtured by marketing through lead nurturing. In lead nurturing, awareness of the company is maintained or expanded by providing informative content relevant to the persona’s pain points until the lead reaches out on their own or is ready for the sales team to contact them.
To make the lead generation process as successful as possible overall, it’s especially important that the timing of your outreach and the information you provide are tailored to the current stage of the customer journey. However, before you can set up your own lead nurturing campaigns, you’ll need a strategy tailored to your target persona—just like with any other marketing campaign.
Checklist for the 5 Most Important Elements of a Lead Nurturing Strategy
1. Define one or more personas that you want to reach or further develop through lead nurturing.
2. Analyze the buyer’s journey for these personas.
The “buyer’s journey” refers to the customer’s path toward making a purchase. Along the way, they go through various stages. Lead nurturing is about how you guide your potential buyers through these stages. Depending on the phase, you do this by providing information and expertise about your industry, key technologies, and the unique selling points of your company and products. Be sure to strategically include calls to action as well. This is how you ultimately guide them through the sales funnel.
You can make the purchase easier for them by tailoring your content precisely to each stage of the buyer’s journey. Every interaction should serve as a gentle reminder that you can help with your products and services. The trick is knowing who needs what information and when. That’s what makes lead nurturing a bit complex, but it’s also exactly why it can be so effective.
Imagine an ideal buyer’s journey based on this example: You sell high-quality, handcrafted kitchen knives. Here’s what a potential customer’s path to purchase might look like, step by step:
Awareness Phase
A novice cook searches online for the quickest and easiest way to make a fruit salad. He finds your blog, “The Best Ways to Prepare a Fruit Salad.” There, he learns that extra-sharp knives make cutting easier. Now they realize they have a problem: they don’t have any sharp knives!
Consideration Phase
The customer knows they are facing a challenge, but also knows that they can overcome it with your product. At this stage, they are curious but not yet ready to make a purchase.
A link in the blog post takes him to another article. There, he learns about the different knives available. He gathers more details so he can compare his options.
Using a pop-up form, he signs up for your newsletter. Only then does he leave your homepage. That means your homepage was useful enough.
After a few days, send him an initial email with more information about your knives—the lead nurturing journey has begun. Every X days, the lead is sent information that may be relevant to him. He also looks online for alternative solutions.
Decision Phase
However, none of your competitors provide as much helpful information as you do. Eventually, the customer clicks on a link in one of your lead nurturing emails, reads reviews of your company on your website, and decides to buy your knives.
3. Setting up lead nurturing journeys for each persona in your marketing automation system:
Specialized CRM and marketing automation software, such as HubSpot, is used for this purpose. These tools combine contact management for marketing, sales, and service with other key features such as email marketing, workflow management, lead and opportunity management, etc.
4. Update your database:
A clean database is essential for the success of your lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns. Check for things like whether the records are up to date, contact persons, personal email addresses, newsletter opt-ins, GDPR compliance, etc., and assign the correct persona whenever possible. A high-quality database can be an invaluable asset for you if you want to improve your customer experience.
5. Ongoing assignment of leads to personas:
Newly generated leads (such as white paper downloads, lead forms, trade show visitors, phone calls, etc.) are pre-qualified and assigned to a specific persona. If the lead is relevant but not yet ready to be handed off to sales, the lead nurturing process begins.
But what do such exemplary cases look like in practice?
4 Tips for Lead Nurturing
Use the following 4 tips to implement effective lead nurturing:
How can you apply our tips in practice? We’ve summarized four examples for each tip in the table below:
Thought Leadership
Position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. If you’re consistently visible online with news on general topics related to innovation and new technologies (and rank well on Google), your customers’ awareness of your company and your products will increase. This also increases the likelihood that a potential customer will visit your website when they begin a new purchasing process.
Insights with Added Value & Best Practices
Provide valuable insights and various best-practice examples of how your products can be used, tailored to your personas. For example, you could calculate how much another customer in the same industry has saved by using your products, or how much more they could sell as a result.
Personalization
With marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can also deliver personalized content tailored to your target audience’s interests. This appeals to their emotions and builds trust. In addition to tailored products, you can send each of your customers personalized emails that are tailored to their specific purchasing behavior. When your leads feel understood, they’ll be more likely to reach out and make purchases.
Videos – Animations – Infographics
Videos or animations that are strategically used and tailored to the interests of the personas are an effective way to attract more attention. Moving content often achieves higher click-through rates, whether in email campaigns, ads, or on social media channels. But informative infographics can also be an effective way to capture the personas’ attention.
If you’re setting up a lead nurturing campaign and using marketing automation to do so, you want it to be successful. You’re probably wondering …
How to Calculate the ROI for Your Marketing Automation
You’re already familiar with how to design a lead nurturing campaign—but what about the budget if you want to implement marketing automation? Do you want to convince your superiors, clients, or colleagues that your marketing strategy is worth the effort?
Here you’ll find an ROI calculator that you can use to calculate your return on investment from marketing automation:
https://lead-engine.com/roi-kalkulieren/
Calculate the ROI for your marketing automation using a specialized tool so you can determine how profitable this automation is. You can also use it to identify how much room for improvement your marketing strategy has. Are you wondering how to get started? Simply enter the values that apply to your business into the fields. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to run your calculation. By providing your email address, you can download the complete ROI report.
We hope you enjoy trying it out, and if you need any help, please feel free to contact us —your HubSpot partner— at any time!
