In recent years, more of our clients have realized that inbound marketing creates warm leads, and warm leads are the ones with the biggest potential to convert. But generating these leads isn’t enough. Marketers must develop lead nurturing strategies that build relationships and brand loyalty.
Lead nurturing campaigns can have a significant impact on your ROI. Research conducted by Forrester has shown that marketers who focus on lead nurturing can see as much as a 20% increase in sales. The same research also revealed that those marketers who excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost.
With this in mind, here are 6 tips for effective lead nurturing campaigns.
- Create a Good First Impression
The first interaction your lead has with your brand should be a good one. These “welcome journeys” are specifically to make you look good in their eyes, they are not meant to sell.
Welcome journeys are typically triggered through opt-in requests, such as through a newsletter sign-up, and are short and sweet. Just one or two emails is all it takes to begin your narrative.
- Use Lifecyle Nurturing
Most of the time a prospect will not buy after just one interaction with your brand. This is why it is important to guide them through their lifecycle with your brand and use targeted content to make them “sales ready.” Your objective here is to earn a lead’s trust, interest and engagement to eventually get them to buy.
- Targeting Your Content
People are different, so it stands to reason that developing relationships with all of your prospects will require different, relevant messaging. Using targeted content (the right message, to the right people, at the right time) is one of the best ways to improve your marketing strategy.
In order to create and deliver targeted content, you must do a few things:
- Understand all of your unique buyer personas.
- Design a variety of content based on each persona’s interests, goals and marketing triggers.
- Use a marketing automation platform that will help you segment your audience and deliver relevant messaging to each segment.
- Score Your Leads
The 2013 Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study revealed that 68% of successful marketers reported lead scoring based on content and engagement was one of the most effective ways of improving their revenue from lead nurturing campaigns.
If you are wondering how to score your leads, it is a relatively simple process whereby prospects are ranked against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to your company. This value is derived by taking into consideration things like website browsing behaviors, conversion events, or even social media interactions. Once you’ve scored your leads you can decide which should be followed up with directly and which should be led further down the sales funnel.
- Use Multiple Touches
It will usually take an average of 10 touches from when a lead enters the top of your funnel until they buy. And yet, according to a 2015 Lead Nurturing Benchmark Study, 49% of marketers use less than five touches in their lead nurturing campaigns. If this sounds about right, it’s time to rethink your campaigns.
Take a look at your campaigns to see how else you can address a prospect’s common questions and concerns. In addition to email marketing, consider how you can mix media (social media, direct mail, OOH, FSI) to nurture these relationships.
6. Use Data
Of course, the above 5 can be achieved much simpler and more effectively by analyzing the mounds of data available to you. Customer data is what will help you fully understand how to interact with them. There is no longer a need, or room, to guess in marketing; data helps solidify the best tactics to be used to reach a prospect, get them to trust you, want to hear from you, and eventually buy from you.
If you need any help with leveraging these tips, contact us. We love assisting smaller businesses in taking full advantage of every resource available to outpace their competitors.
