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Get free accessStrong sales teams are always iterating their lead nurturing process. It’s not enough to just create a strategy and hope for the best—it only works if you continue to improve and tweak it based on what’s working and what’s not. That’s why we collaborated with Teamleader to gather the latest tips and best practices for how to approach lead nurturing today.
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Understanding Lead Nurturing
In the most basic sense, lead nurturing features three main steps:
You collect data from potential customers
Present them with your service or product
Close the sales deal
That might sound simple, but in practice, it rarely is. One conversation or email is hardly enough to convince a prospect to convert. There’s a lot more to it. It’s all a part of the human aspect of sales.
Lead nurturing is an overarching term for how sales professionals inform prospects, answer questions, offer solutions, and guide them through the sales process over time.
The Difference Between Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
Lead generation and lead nurturing are two concepts with the same purpose: to generate new customers.
Yet there is a clear difference. In lead generation, you cast your net as wide as possible to get in touch with new prospects. Lead nurturing only comes in when you actually have prospects to communicate with.
Driving Sales Through Lead Nurturing
According to Marketo, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads.
Even if you take these figures with a pinch of salt, it’s quite clear that lead nurturing pays off.
Beyond that, effective lead nurturing can also impact long-term customer relationships, boosting customer loyalty and increasing the percentage of repeat customers.
What Does a Good Lead Nurturing Campaign Look Like?
When you’re building a lead nurturing campaign, there are a few elements to keep in mind.
Set Clear Goals
To start building a lead nurturing program that drives sales, it all comes down to setting clear, actionable goals.
“Having a clear goal for your lead nurture program, as well as the personas it’s serving, is mission-critical,” says Daniel Dawson, Field Marketing Manager at Aircall. “Is the nurture segmented by industry, persona, language, or geography? There may be multiple CTAs depending on the nurture content, but keep your end-goal in mind or the action you want leads to take that would result in the best outcome for your business.”
Understand Your Buyer Personas
You can’t create a winning lead nurture strategy without deeply understanding your buyer personas. Once you understand who your solution is for, then you can create targeted messaging that directly applies to them.
“To build a world-class nurturing program, start by understanding your buyer personas. You can then nurture each unique buyer by creating or leveraging targeted content, based on their objectives and pain points,” says Sarra Ouaili, Field Marketing Manager for FIME, Iberia & Latin America at Aircall
Segmentation
Lead nurturing starts with the segmentation of your leads: Where are they in the sales process, which service or type of products are they interested in?
Based on that info, you offer them relevant content: emails that present an answer to certain questions, video tutorials, interviews with other customers, etc. In short, information that is useful and brings your leads one step closer to a purchase decision.
“When nurturing your leads, it’s important to segment the audience and to offer personalized content that makes sense for a specific lead’s situation. However, choosing the different paths and criteria to personalize these nurture tracks often ends in complicated flows and a lot of setup and maintenance,” says Lieselot Huysman, Marketing Lead at Leap Forward & Marketing Automation Expert at Teamleader.
Create Multi-Touch Campaigns
When it comes to engaging with prospects, think beyond just sending emails.
“Setting up a lead nurture campaign should go beyond just sending the right audience emails,” says Elizabeth Kern, Field Marketing Manager at Aircall. “Inboxes can be messy, so make sure your message is getting seen with multi-touch campaigns.”
Turn to Automation
The advantage of creating an email campaign is that you can automate it, so you save time and never forget to follow up on leads. Which doesn’t mean you’ll never have to look at your nurturing content again.
Check and review your nurturing campaigns regularly and update or replace them with new relevant content such as webinars, e-books, or whitepapers. Elizabeth also recommends incorporating other communication channels too.
“While enrolled to receive nurture emails, look for other opportunities to get the message out there. That might mean having remarketing ads run while they’re in between emails to keep you top of mind or adding a chatbot to boost engagement,” Elizabeth says.
This blog post was created in collaboration with Teamleader.
Published on February 9, 2022.
