The best way to nurture leads changes over time.
A method that worked two years ago might not work today because algorithms change and people learn to ignore certain channels.
It’s important to stay current with the most effective lead nurturing tactics.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing involves engaging with potential customers, providing them with supportive content and information, and building meaningful relationships with them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
However, not all of the leads your marketing team generates are sales-ready. They may be interested in your product or service, but they typically have questions and concerns that need to be answered before they can move from the awareness stage to the decision stage. That’s where lead nurturing comes in.
5 Reasons Why Lead Nurturing Is Important
A majority of marketers (65 percent) do not have a lead nurturing strategy in place, according to a new report. If you are having second thoughts, here are the 5 most important benefits of lead nurturing:
- Generate higher-quality leads
- Increase average order value (AOV)
- Reduce CAC
- Create more loyal customers
- Establish authority in your industry
Furthermore, here are some lead nurturing statistics to back the above benefits of having a solid lead nurturing plan:
- Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-nurtured leads
- Lead nurturing emails have 4-10 times better response rate than stand-alone blast emails
- Companies with successful lead generation programs generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost
- 51% of email marketers say email segmentation is the most effective way to deliver a personalized lead nurturing experience
Many of the qualified leads are not ready to buy according to the latest survey.
How to Nurture Leads and Turn them into Paying Customers
When you receive a new lead, either from someone calling or from a web form, you need to have a nurturing process in place. This is true whether they seem ready to buy now, or if they’re just subscribing to your list.
We asked 31 marketers to share the methods they’re currently using to nurture and reengage leads in order to find out what lead nurturing tactics are most effective in 2021.
In total, they recommended six lead nurturing tactics.
6 Email Nurturing Best Practices and Examples
1. Implement an Intake Process for Hot Leads
If you want to improve your business, you should focus on your hot leads. These are the people who are already interested in your product or service and are trying to get in touch with you. You should make it a priority to talk to these people and figure out what they need. However, many small businesses don’t have a good system for dealing with these leads, so they end up missing out on potential customers.
Sometimes the First Is the Best
The phrase “the early bird gets the worm” means that if you act quickly, you will be successful. In this context, it means that if you follow up with web and phone leads quickly, you are more likely to be successful.
While someone I know of was working with one large silicon valley start-up, he did an analysis, modeling the outcomes of thousands of web and phone leads, measuring their value based on several factors including follow-up time and which percentage was reached, engaged, and eventually became customers. You’ll be astounded by the conclusions of the study:
- Phone leads must be answered in real-time via a live person answering the phone who is trained to qualify the lead and schedule an appointment.
- Web leads should be contacted via phone and email within four hours of receipt (immediately is ideal).
- Leads that aren’t immediately followed up with lose 50 percent of their value after four hours and 80 percent of their value after twenty-four hours.
You need to make sure that your company knows how important it is to follow up on and keep track of inbound leads. If you can’t answer calls or greet walk-ins right away, have someone else on staff do it or hire someone from the outside. Whoever answers the phone should be trained on how to greet people, screen calls, and get information from callers. The same goes for if you have a store or restaurant.
Lead Intake Process Best Practices
- Document the lead intake process for your business. This should include how phone and web leads are routed, who follows up, and in what time frame. Also, include how inbound leads are tracked. Create a simple lead intake process and train your staff.
- Never let leads get answered by a machine or voicemail. While I understand that many businesses are stretched thin in terms of staff, it’s critical to have your phone leads answered by a real person. If you can’t dedicate staff, use a service like AnswerConnect. For around $150 per month, you can have professional staff answer your calls and capture and email your leads.
- Respond to web leads within hours. Web leads begin depreciating the minute your prospects hit “send” on your web form. Make it a priority to respond immediately, preferably via phone, as doing so is much more personal than email.
- Develop a script for inbound leads. You don’t need to turn your staff into telemarketers, but ensure that you train them on the main talking points and questions for converting leads into appointments, in-store visits, or whatever the next step in your sales funnel is. Also, train them to capture the prospect’s contact info right off the bat.
- Always add phone leads to your nurture campaigns. Since many prospects will call rather than fill out a web form, your staff must be trained to add these contacts to your lead nurturing database (after receiving their permission). This way, even those prospects who don’t buy right away will hear from you regularly.
- Share the results with your staff. Make a point of discussing inbound lead metrics with your employees regularly. This will not only help foster friendly competition, but it will also help you identify best practices and weak links in your lead intake process.
- Establish your “hot leads” intake process as soon as you can. You can always expand on this as you get more feedback and identify new best practices.
2. Select an Email Marketing Tool
If you’re just starting to market your business online, you may not think lead nurturing is a priority. While that may be true for most businesses, it’s still a good idea to start building a subscriber/nurture list right away. All you need to do is choose an email marketing/list building service and put an opt-in form on your site.
Basic Email Marketing Software
For most small businesses, email marketing software that has basic features will be sufficient. Any of the following four providers will work just fine:
- Aweber
- MailChimp
- Constant Contact
- Vertical Response
Complete Marketing Automation Systems
If you want to do more than simple email nurture campaigns, such as accept payments online, monitor your prospects’ web activity, and integrate direct mail and other “offline marketing” into your nurture programs, I recommend the following two providers:
- Infusionsoft
- Office Autopilot
If you’re new to lead nurturing or are on a tight budget, the four basic services listed above will suffice. I know many people who use InfusionSoft and highly recommend it to anyone who is more advanced in lead nurturing or needs a more powerful solution.
Email Nurturing
Email nurturing was said to be the best way to re-engage leads by nearly two-thirds of respondents to a survey.
Jonathan Aufray, a growth hacker, believes that email marketing is the most effective way to nurture leads. Advertising is more expensive, and email marketing can be automated.
What tools do our respondents use most often to send and automate marketing email? HubSpot, Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign, and Drip were the most popular choices.
Aufray recommends sending nurturing emails regularly, preferably one per week with relevant content that leads might be interested in. Too many emails can be off-putting, so try to limit yourself to no more than two per week.
About 45% of respondents agree that one email per week is ideal.
The respondents also shared ideas for best practices in email nurturing, as well as examples of how to carry out those practices.
3. Send Relevant Content
The key to email nurturing is providing content that is relevant and practical to your leads on a regular basis, says Nathan Reiche of Content Chemistry.
Reiche states that by remaining in contact with past customers, you keep your business at the forefront of their minds, make it more likely they will do business with you again in the future, and have an opportunity to explain how your product or service can help them with their current needs.
The best way to help your leads progress through the buying journey according to Lydie Deborne of Agence Nile, is to send them content that will help them find solutions. This content can be in the form of an ebook, blog post, or any other type of content you have available.
The goal is not just to sell your leads something, but to provide them with content that is appropriate and helpful.
4. Combine Email and Video Marketing
Using a combination of email and video marketing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to nurture leads in 2021, says Richard Owens of First Five Eight.
If you use email and video marketing together, you can create better quality video content using tools like Wistia and Vidyard. This content will be easier for potential customers to digest.
Owens says that you can use data from your marketing automation software and CRM to track how long leads spend watching your videos, and use that information to set up triggers that notify your sales team about the most nurtured leads.
5. Segment Your Email List
Developing a strong relationship with potential customers is the key to lead nurturing says Sadi Khan of RunRepeat. Listening to customers is essential to this process.
To be successful, you need to send emails that will interest your leads. Segment your email list so that you can send personalized emails that are relevant to each person.
RunRepeat separates their lists based on what the customer was interested in when they signed up. For example, someone who was interested in road-running shoes will only get emails related to road-running shoes.
Khan believes that this will result in a better engagement rate, more clicks, and more conversions.
Leads that respond positively to emails should be marketed to differently than those who do not, says Teodora Pirciu of Impressa Solutions. By tracking how leads interact with emails, marketers can more easily understand where the leads stand and adapt their messages accordingly.
See how many people open your emails and click on the links you included, then create different messages for each group based on how they interact with your content, recommends Pirciu.
6. Set Up Automated Email Sequences
The best way to nurture leads is to send drip emails using a marketing automation tool like Pardot, according to RKD’s Bryan Coles. This is especially effective in the SaaS space.
A company can use a custom Pardot integration to automatically drive leads from the research phase into the buying process, according to Coles.
“Autoresponders are still the best way for us to go. We start with someone entering their email address on our site to get a free report. Then we have a 90-day autoresponder series that keep them engaged with our content.”
Accelity Marketing’s Cass Polzin recommends a similar process:
When we start a new campaign, we create a system that sends relevant content offers to people who download the new offer. This way, they can keep getting information about things they’re interested in, and they’ll get points for reading emails and clicking on links.
Polzin explains that they frequently make lists of potential customers based on their lead score, and then send them personalized emails regarding offers they have downloaded. They eventually encourage these customers to set up a demonstration call.
Summary
The success of marketing is judged by whether or not it brings in money, in other words, it is a pass or fail system. Having a defined process for hot leads and nurturing campaigns for leads and customers will allow your marketing to become self-sustaining and produce new referrals, reviews, and renewals.