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Outbound Sales

Lead Nurturing: Strategies and Best Practices

Your lead generation activities have been a success. There’s a long list of people who shared their details with you because they’re interested in what you do, but they aren’t ready to buy yet. How many of them can you expect to convert? Figures vary from source to source, but a conversion rate of around 20 percent appears to be reasonable to expect provided you’ve generated relevant leads. Naturally, you would like to turn as many of them as you can into customers, and that’s exactly what lead nurturing strives to do. 

Think about what you do when you’re gardening. You sow seeds and they sprout. You nurture them, and they grow into full-sized plants. In lead generation, you sowed the seeds of success. Now, it’s time to grow leads into customers. But what is lead nurturing? Your garden plants have very straightforward needs, but to nurture potential customers, you have to do something far more complex: you have to build relationships

When you were generating leads, you were talking to everyone who might be interested in your products. But now, you’re dealing with individuals. They expect you to recognise them and target any information you share with them to their needs. By expressing interest, they’ve embarked on a journey that may end in a purchase. In lead nurturing, your task is to guide them through it. Here’s the process you’ll follow. 

Know Your Customer Journeys

The first step toward lead nurturing involves understanding your leads. Your customer journey mapping helps you to understand the different stages your customers pass through before reaching a buying decision. This process forms the basis of your lead nurturing strategy which consists of a series of campaigns.

Lead nurturing campaigns will offer targeted content that addresses people’s needs at each stage of the customer journey. Use them to keep leads interested, hold their attention, and to address obstacles to progression through the sales funnel by providing relevant information and resources.

Segment, Score and Personalise

Your business likely caters to several market segments. To win leads over and move them through your sales funnel, it helps to know where they fit into your market. Demographic information is the most obvious criterion for lead segmentation, but behavioural information and knowing what interests them are important too. 

For example, online behaviour may indicate that some of your leads have viewed several pages on your website, a surer sign of interest when compared to a lead that just shared contact details. By dividing your leads into market segments, you’re better able to deliver targeted, tailored information. 

Lead scoring is a related activity. This analytical process helps you to identify leads that match your ideal customer profiles. Enriched with behavioural data, your analysis can even determine whether they’ve already begun to move through your sales funnel and how close they currently are to making a purchase. High scoring leads are of immediate importance to you and should receive even more personalised attention than the others. 

There are several levels of personalisation to consider. For example, it’s fairly standard to target lead nurturing email campaigns to market segments, personalising when possible by using behavioural data. Although your outreach will be automated, it needs to “feel” personal. You would address leads by name and offer them information that’s relevant to them. If you’ve determined their interests correctly, they’re left with the impression that your business understands their needs. 

However, high scoring leads may be deserving of even greater focus and personalisation than an email campaign ordinarily offers. If you’re already receiving strong buying signals from their behavioural data, in-person communication could be all that’s needed to gain a customer. Some of your top leads won’t begin to stand out until they’ve engaged with your lead nurturing content, so keep on reviewing scores to spot potential customers deserving of greater focus. 

Lead Nurturing Content at Each Stage of the Customer Journey

Awareness

By participating in your lead generation campaigns, people have already indicated some level of awareness of what you do. Begin by heightening awareness through educational content, interesting infographics and social media posts that highlight the value of your brand and contribute to awareness-building. 

Consideration

As leads move on to the consideration phase, they’re ready for higher-level, more in-depth information. Now’s the time to help them by offering ebooks and whitepapers, telling customer stories through case studies and testimonials, or inviting them to attend a webinar. Live or recorded demos showing how your product works and what it’s capable of are also compelling forms of content at this stage. 

Decision

As we near the bottom of the funnel, it’s time to help leads with information that will move them towards that all-important buying decision. If you haven’t offered a demo yet, this is a good time to do so. 

Realistically, your leads are likely to be checking out your competitors, so comparative guides showing the unique advantages you can offer may tip the balance of opinion in favour of your business. If you’re relatively sure your leads are at this stage, it may be worth talking to them in person, preparing and setting up online, telephonic, or in-person meetings.

Purchase

At purchase, leads become customers, but nurturing them is still hugely important. After all, having gained a customer, you’d like them to continue to buy from your business in future. Offer onboarding materials, motivate them with incentives, and ensure that support resources, including in-person support, are available. Following purchases, conduct surveys, offer exclusive content, and engage customers in any loyalty programmes or customer communities you’ve formed.

Implement Ongoing Reviews of Lead Nurturing Activities 

You may have worked hard on developing lead nurturing campaigns, but the proof of whether they work lies with your leads. 

Email campaigns have the advantage of being especially easy to review. You can see the open rate to determine whether your subject lines and content stimulate interest. Try to beat the average open rate of around 20 percent. Click-through rates allow you to see whether people are looking at the linked content you wanted to show them. The average to beat is around 2.4 percent. However, these figures vary widely between industries. 

Conversion rates indicate whether readers took a desired action. This could be making a purchase or taking another form of action. For example, if the purpose of your mail was to prompt readers to download content or fill out a survey, downloads and completed surveys indicate conversion in this context. 

Since it’s best practice to undertake ongoing lead scoring, you’ll be able to see whether your lead nurturing is successful by looking at changes in lead scores. At the same time, you won’t win them all. Watch your unsubscribe rates. If they’re high, your content isn’t having the desired effect. Of course, you will lose unqualified leads – people who were never going to buy in the first place, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If your average unsubscribe rate is below 0.5%, you’re doing relatively well.

Other metrics to look at include customer acquisition costs, time to conversion, revenue generated, and lead retention rate. 

Be Present

We’ve already covered several lead nurturing best practices, but one of the most important elements of lead nurturing lies in its definition. Your lead nurturing activities are there to build relationships, and relationships are two-way streets. You absolutely should automate lead nurturing activities wherever possible, but if your leads reach out, be it something as simple as a comment on social media, be there for them. 

Just as you reach out to leads using a variety of channels, ensure that you’re able to offer omnichannel interaction on demand. Whether they mail you, call you, comment, or message, be present. As leads move closer towards becoming customers, this becomes increasingly important, and having the right people on hand to guide them towards a purchase will be crucial. 

If you’re providing clear information, many of your leads will convert without reaching out, but the few who do present an opportunity for you to demonstrate your customer service excellence in action. If they’re met with “inaction” instead, you will lose leads who could very easily have become customers.

Whether you’re considering giving high-scoring leads a call or just want to be sure that informed personnel are ready to deal with sales-related or lead nurturing interactions across channels, RSVP can help. Outsourcing your inbound or outbound sales service to us ensures that you’re able to offer exceptional sales service around the clock. Technology and automation are incredibly useful, but there are still times when the human touch matters most. Contact us to find out more about the services we offer.

 

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