Everyone wants to feel special, right? The same goes for your customers!
In today’s economy, more and more consumers are looking for a connection with the brands they buy from. In this blog, Chief Client Officer, Jeff Macgurn will break down why lead nurturing matters and how it could lead to some big results if you do it correctly!
What You’ll Learn:
- The Foundations of Lead Nurturing
- Tools and Services for Lead Nurturing Success
- Strategies for Franchise Lead Nurturing
- Lead Nurturing Best Practices
- Enhancing Campaigns with Lead Nurture Campaigns
- Maximizing Results with Customer Trust & Decision Support
- FAQs About Lead Nurturing
My Expert Take on Lead Nurturing Campaigns
As you gradually build trust with your audience, they will feel more comfortable doing business with you. By nurturing your leads, your brand builds brand loyalty, improves the customer experience, and develops long-term relationships that will translate into repeat sales and referrals from customers who turn into fans.
It’s important to blend automation, strategy, and personalization when designing your lead nurture strategy. Not only will automation take a lot of tedious tasks off of your plate, but it will also ensure that every customer receives the same level of care and attention.
A well-crafted leading nurturing campaign will take automation, as well as customization, into account. By aligning your messaging with your audience’s needs, behaviors, and preferences, it makes every interaction your consumer has with your brand meaningful and important.
Now, let’s talk about more specific ways a lead nurturing campaign can help to build your business.
The Foundations of Lead Nurturing
So, what is lead nurturing? In marketing, lead nurturing refers to the process of establishing lasting relationships to bring them to the end of the sales funnel.
It takes place after the lead generation phase of the marketing process, working toward converting those captured leads into delighted, long-term customers.
It’s also important to distinguish a lead nurturing strategy from drip and lifecycle marketing. Here’s a breakdown of lifecycle vs. drip vs. nurture campaigns:
- Lead Nurturing Campaigns: Through automated lead nurturing, businesses can build long-term relationships with leads using personalized content like ebooks and consultation offers.
- Drip Campaigns: Drip marketing involves sending specific marketing materials at certain points throughout a marketing strategy, possibly to supplement lead nurturing automation, often to either educate leads or maintain consistent engagement via email, though with less emphasis on personalization than a lead nurturing campaign.
- Lifecycle Marketing Campaigns: Another popular type of marketing approach is lifecycle marketing, which entails going beyond lead nurturing to maintain a lasting relationship with customers and encouraging repeat business.
Examples of effective lead nurturing strategies include:
- Customized sales sequences
- Re-engagement campaigns
- Educational campaigns about your product, company, or service
Together, these approaches create a well-rounded sales experience, driving results efficiently.
Tools and Services for Lead Nurturing Success
Lead nurturing is a high-touch strategy that will take a lot of time and effort. Luckily, there are some great tools to help you automate and personalize your outreach.
Some of the most popular lead nurturing software options include:
Hubspot
Hubspot is a great tool to help you keep track of your leads, create like-minded segments, and personalize your marketing messages to their unique needs.
Marketo
Marketo, part of the Adobe family, offers the opportunity to track and nurture your leads across channels. This helps you meet your leads exactly where they are.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that helps you keep track of your leads during every step of your sales process. It tracks all calls, emails, and customer contacts to help you capitalize on every interaction.
Relying on Lead Nurturing Tools and Outside Expertise
Lead nurturing can be a complicated process that often involves complex workflows. Tools like the ones mentioned above, as well as other lead nurturing software and experts, can help make those workflows more manageable.
Sometimes, hiring a lead nurturing agency will help you get the best out of your leads without spending hours doing it yourself. A well-rounded agency will have all of the most up-to-date tools and information at its fingertips. Their expertise and experience will help you build your business without the stress of having to figure it out yourself.
Pushing Content Based on Segmentation
In learning how to nurture a lead, segmentation into different personas is crucial, which you can achieve with the right lead nurturing software or through lead nurturing services.
When developing content for lead nurturing automation strategies, you should ensure it corresponds with the intent behind each audience segment.
Here are some examples of different audience segments and their respective content:
| Segment Type | Triggers | Lead Nurturing Campaign Focus | Content Examples |
| Behavior-Based | A lead downloads a particular piece of content, views a case study, or attends a webinar | Provides an in-depth look into the particular issue or topic that the lead wants to know more about |
|
| Product-Intent | Lead visits a product page multiple times or adds items to a shopping cart without completing the checkout process | Addresses possible barriers to purchase, providing leads with social proof and unique selling propositions |
|
| Inactivity/Re-engagement | Previously engaged lead neglect to open emails, visit your site, or otherwise interact with content within a given period | Reminding leads of your brand and the value of turning to you over competitors via high-quality and fresh content or enticing offers |
|
For each of these, set specific rules to inform your lead nurturing automation strategies at every stage. For instance, you might have a rule for intent-based segments that if someone visits a pricing or product page a set number of times, the individual moves into a “high intent” list for more prioritized targeting.
Meanwhile, for inactivity, you might send a re-engagement email after a previously engaged person neglects to visit your website within 30 to 60 days.
A lead nurturing agency with ample experience would also be able to help with segmentation and content development for each persona.
Designing a Lead Nurture Strategy
When putting together a lead nurturing strategy, there are some specific steps you’ll need to take to streamline the process and maximize effectiveness.
These steps involve:
Setting Goals and KPIs
To start off your lead nurture strategy the right way, you want to set specific, actionable goals that are realistic and measurable.
For instance, you might have the goal of achieving a 15% surge in webinar registrations for leads toward the beginning of their journey by the end of the current quarter.
You may also want to shorten the length of time it takes to turn marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads (SQLs) by a set number of days.
Once you have your goals in place, you can identify the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track that can help you measure your progress after launching your lead nurturing campaigns.
Some examples of KPIs and metrics to measure to track lead nurturing efforts include:
- Email open rates, click-through rates, and downloads
- MQL to SQL conversion rate
- Lead to customer conversion rate
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Average deal size
- Customer lifetime value (CLTV)
- Churn rate
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS)
A reliable lead nurturing agency would be able to help you identify the right goals and connected KPIs to inform lead nurturing services.
Researching Your Audience and Developing Personas
After establishing your goals and ways to track them, learning how to nurture a lead will also require a good understanding of your audience and the development of related audience personas.
The personas you develop should be based on the kind of intent backing them, whether they have displayed certain behaviors on your site to indicate interest, engaged with specific products, or failed to engage.
Personas should also correspond to different demographics, interests, behavioral habits, and other characteristics that are unique to each potential customer.
The personas you develop could then guide you in your lead nurturing tactics, indicating how to approach lead generation vs. lead nurturing.
Mapping Content to Each Persona
You can then map the content to each of the intent-based personas you develop.
For example, you might set up an email drip campaign for lead nurturing automation strategies that connect with audiences in the behavior-based phase of the lead nurturing journey, while abandoned cart reminder emails and SMS texts could help you connect with audiences who have visited specific product pages a number of times.
You can then put together this content in a comprehensive and well-organized content strategy.
Determining Timing and Cadence
With your content ready to go, the next step is to figure out the right timing and flow for your messaging.
Pinpoint the times when your audiences are most active to send emails and other content, but try to avoid potentially annoying your audiences by sending content too frequently.
To help with this, establish rules for your content strategy, such as only sending a re-engagement email after a potential customer has been inactive for about a month or longer.
In drip campaigns, you should also decide on the right time to send each email for effective lead nurturing automation.
Identifying Triggers and Establishing Behavioral Rules
Also, consider the triggers that will initiate your lead nurturing campaign, such as when a prospect attends a webinar or views one or multiple products on your site.
Based on these triggers, you can then set the rules for engagement that effectively move people along the customer journey toward a sale and repeat business.
To help you with determining the right content, timing, triggers, and rules, always conduct A/B tests that help with experimentation. For instance, you might run two emails with subject lines or another element changed to see which drives the most engagement. Regarding timing, you might send a reminder email after 30 days of inactivity and another after 60 days to see which brings people back most.
Eventually, you will be able to perfect your campaigns as you determine what works and what needs improvement.
Strategies for Franchise Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is crucial for both stand-alone businesses and franchises, but franchises face unique challenges that require a tailored approach.
Franchise markets tend to have longer decision-making cycles. This means that your lead nurturing campaigns have to be tailored to that longer process. Patience and consistent engagement are key to keeping potential franchisees interested and informed throughout their journey.
You also need to consider how to maintain brand consistency across the entire franchise. This can be difficult when attempting to develop a campaign that speaks specifically to a local market.
For franchisees to be successful, franchisors need to work with them collaboratively. The franchisor knows their brand the best, but the franchisees probably know their own markets better. Together, you can develop a lead nurturing strategy that stays true to your brand but is unique to your market.
Ultimately, you should figure out what kinds of content and messaging will speak to franchisees in each target location, helping personalize the journey for each prospective franchise owner to bring them to a sale.
When nurturing franchisee leads, try a three-step email sequence, which could entail:
- Introducing your franchise to interested franchisees, providing an overview of your brand, including your brand story, along with details about the next steps to take and what to expect.
- Value and validation emails that go into details about your franchise opportunity, such as testimonials from other franchisees, content discussing the specific benefits of becoming a franchisee, and educational content about what goes into franchise ownership.
- The final email could go to qualified franchisees who are ready to commit, with a single clear call-to-action that closes a deal.
Lead Nurturing Best Practices
As you start to think about which lead nurturing strategies you want to use, keep some of these best practices in mind:
- Develop buying personas that accurately represent your leads’ needs, interests, and behaviors.
- Segment your leads based on specific criteria, such as behavior, demographic information, or stage in the sales process.
- Create a robust content strategy consisting of blog posts, eBooks, webinars, emails, social media posts, and other forms of media to improve your chances of meeting your consumers where they are.
- Always align your content with each specific buying persona.
- Set up automated drip campaigns that move your leads through your sales funnel at an appropriate speed.
- Test your content and optimize it based on the results.
- Stay consistent with your branding and messaging to build a strong and recognizable brand.
- Analyze your consumer data frequently to make sure your content is truly delivering what your audience wants to see.
Like most other digital marketing, lead nurturing is a work in progress. You need to constantly refine it to best fit your audience and their goals.
Enhancing Campaigns with Lead Nurture Campaigns
At the beginning of this blog, I mentioned combining lead nurture campaigns with drip marketing. Let’s dive a little deeper into this idea.
An email marketing drip campaign’s main objectives are to:
- Encourage engagement
- Educate and inform leads of helpful or valuable information
Examples of drip campaigns include:
- Automated sequences, such as welcome sequences
- Abandoned cart recovery sequences
- Product or service onboarding
These campaigns are less targeted and speak more generally about your brand or business overall. However, when tailored with more customized campaigns, it reaches your audience at every level.
Here’s an even more concrete example of how a successful drip email campaign can work to connect with audiences.
Mattress company Leesa starts its lead nurturing campaigns with a strong offer, such as this email advertising its Black Friday in July deal:
If customers don’t take action soon enough before the deals end, the lead nurturing automation then sends another more urgent email indicating how much time is left:
Finally, if shoppers still don’t take advantage of these deals, the company sends another email once the sales period ends, advertising that the period has been extended.
….
It’s important to time each campaign appropriately to avoid overwhelming your audience. This is where analyzing your lead’s behavioral data comes into play. Some of your leads will welcome hearing from you every day. Others would prefer once or twice a week. You can’t send out a blanket campaign to both of these segments of people. You have to tailor it to their preferences.
Maximizing Results with Customer Trust & Decision Support
Most of the time, sales come down to one thing: Trust. Can the decision-maker trust you?
For your lead nurturing campaign to be successful, you have to do it in a way that builds trust with your customers.
Welcome Your New Leads
Simply acknowledging your new lead is a great way to start building a relationship with them. Send them a welcome email with some relevant information that they may find beneficial to show them that you’re happy to have them on your list.
The email from the makeup store Sephora does a great job of welcoming the new lead and sharing some resources specific to the brand that the reader may find helpful.
Send Information Relevant to Your Audience
Show your audience that you’re not just another brand competing for their sale. Demonstrate why they need you and how you’re different from your competitors in ways that speak to them.
For example, if you are a pet supply store, send dog-specific information to your customers who buy dog products but leave them off the list of cat-specific emails.
Take this example from the pet brand, Chewy. They wouldn’t send this email to a customer who only purchases cat treats, but it’s a great email to send to a puppy lover.
Celebrate Customer Loyalty
The key goal of lead nurturing is to maintain long-lasting relationships. Customers will show more loyalty to brands that show loyalty to them.
Send out anniversary emails with special offers or personalized information about your users. One brand that is especially good at this is Grammarly.
The AI brand will send out monthly emails with their users’ statistics listed, as well as anniversary emails to celebrate each year their consumers use their platform. 
This shows their consumers that they’re paying attention to those who have supported their business for a long period of time. Honoring long-time customers can go a long way to building brand loyalty.
Request Reviews After Purchases
People love to share their opinions! Sending out campaigns requesting their opinions after purchases will show them that you value their purchase and opinion. It’s also a great way to get solid first-party data for marketing purposes!
This email from Yappy shows an excellent example of a personalized email that thanks the customer for their purchase and inspires them to share their thoughts.
FAQs About Lead Nurturing
1. What is lead nurturing, and why is it important?
Lead nurturing is the process of establishing trust and building a relationship between your brand and your audience. It is important because the more a consumer trusts your brand, the more likely they are to make a purchase from you.
2. How does lead generation differ from lead nurturing?
Lead generation vs lead nurturing is a very specific difference that is important to understand. Lead generation is the process of acquiring the leads. It focuses on attracting and capturing the information of consumers likely to enjoy your product or service. Lead nurturing is what comes next. It’s the next step in the sales process.
3. What is an email marketing drip campaign?
An email marketing drip campaign is a series of automated emails sent at specific times or in response to specific triggers. These campaigns typically aim to keep consumers engaged with your brand until they are ready to buy.
4. What tools can I use for lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is a complex workflow. To make it easier on you, you can automate it through lead nurturing software, such as Hubspot, Marketo, or Pipedrive. You can also outsource your it entirely to an agency that knows exactly how to run a successful campaign in your particular industry.
5. What would a CTA be in a lead nurture email?
Your CTA will vary, depending on what step you want your reader to take next. Regardless, it should always be clear, concise, and eye-catching. Some examples include:
- Download Now!
- Buy Today!
- Share Your Thoughts
- Start Your Free Trial
- Explore the Latest Features
- Claim Your Member’s Only Discount
- Let’s Get Started!
Get More Leads with Ignite Visibility
Whether you’re looking to nurture leads for your local HVAC company, boost business at your gym, or grow your franchise business, Ignite Visibility has the expertise you need!
Hundreds of local and national companies rely on our digital marketing experts to support and grow their businesses.
Ignite Visibility can help you:
- Write emails your audience will love to read
- Develop a content strategy to educate and inform your audience
- Establish a life cycle marketing strategy that will connect with your consumers across their entire customer journey
- And more!
Ready to get started? Request a free consultation today!
