5 Lead Nurturing Strategies That Supercharge Customer Conversion

The buyer's journey is nearly two-thirds complete before a buyer reaches out to sales. It takes an average of 10 attempts before you get a response from a buyer you don't know. Voice Mails. Decisions by committee. It's why lead nurturing strategies are an essential element to effectively marketing your products today.

Lead Nurturing Strategies

But not just any lead nurturing strategy. A well planned and constructed strategy. One that answers questions as your audience develops a need or crafts a purchasing decision. For a program that connects with prospects and generates additional revenue, use these five lead nurturing strategies.

Segment Your Prospects

How often do you receive emails that are company focused, not customer focused? Or, provides general information that isn't specific to your needs or pain points?

Effective lead nurturing builds relationships with prospects as they interact with you. By listening and communicating meaningful information, you educate and provide the answers your audience needs, through each step of the buying journey. These answers aren't generic, they address specific needs. These needs may vary depending upon:

Segmenting your audience is the only effective way to address their differing needs.

If you don't have this type of information currently, expand your data set. Because an effective nurturing program relies on providing personalized and relevant information, a comprehensive contact file is an essential step.

Develop Compelling Content For Each Segment

We dined out recently at a new restaurant. The warm greeting from the maitre d' immediately made us feel welcome. Her passion for the restaurant was evident. Our mouths watered as she described the chef's creations. As we walked to our table, there was a noticeable buzz from the patrons. The dining room decor was striking.

But as we started to order, we found that they didn't serve food.

Impossible - you don't open a restaurant without food on the menu.

So, don't start a nurturing campaign without content!

Just like food in a restaurant, it's the crucial element for any nurturing campaign.

What kind of content connects?

Regardless of the type, your content answers questions. Because it educates and builds a prospect's understanding, it can ultimately demonstrate how your services fit their needs.

But building content takes time. So, if you have multiple target segments, minimize development time by starting with just one or two. You'll learn from your initial efforts and improve when executing additional segments.

Learn how to build content that connects with your audience and encourages interactions.

Download the Content Tool Set!

Develop Campaigns

'If you build it, they will come' may have worked in Field of Dreams but your nurturing campaign needs more than James Earl Jones' pronouncement!

Use the content along with inbound and outbound tactics to target your audience segments.

Inbound tactics bring your ideal customer to you, primarily through their preferred channels including:

Optimizing and distributing the content will place you front and center with interested prospects as they proceed through their discovery process.

Outbound tactics target prospects once you know them. They may have signed up for a white paper, stopped by your booth at a trade show or connected with you in some other way. But, they aren't ready to buy yet. An outbound campaign that's personalized, relevant and uses the content you've built to answer their questions helps deepen relationships. This type of meaningful follow up has proven to convert more prospects into buyers.

Automate The Process

Effective lead nurturing is all about understanding how your audience interacts with you.

Marketing automation allows you to track these interactions and respond with timely, personalized and relevant information. The fact is, when you respond in that manner, you increase the odds of connecting with your prospects.

Plus, through these interactions, you can start to gauge interest. By attaching a value on the:

You can better understand where they are in the buyer's journey. This further improves your ability to communicate effectively.

Twenty years ago, a sales rep was the primary source of industry, competitor and company information. Today, online channels allow prospects to obtain information where and when they need it. Marketing automation identifies these interactions and allows you to deliver the information they indicate is important.

When you engage your prospects with personalized, timely and relevant information that answers their questions, they are far more likely to engage with you. And most importantly, it increases the odds they will become a paying customer.

Team With Sales

When executing lead nurturing strategies, marketing does the heavy lifting. And, you'll become the sales team's best friend when you deliver sales-ready leads. But lead nurturing strategies work best when sales is an active part of the process.

As prospects interact with your content, visit your website or attend a webinar, there are certain touch points where sales' outreach is important.

Determine a spot or two where a phone call can benefit the nurturing process. Then work with sales to make it happen.

Report/Analyze/Test/Revise/Improve

How do you define the ultimate payoff for a nurturing campaign? By the number of leads that convert into customers. However, by measuring other details you'll get to the payoff more quickly.

Just like any email-based campaign, testing subject lines, layouts, calls to action, colors and send times will lead to improved outcomes. With those improvements in place, focus next on increasing engagement. Then start to measure:
These metrics will provide specific insights into your program and the contribution they are making to your bottom line.

Like most digital marketing, effective lead nurturing strategies take planning and execution. But, when executed effectively:

It's well worth the effort!