Lead nurturing is all about collecting leads, nurturing them, and then converting them into sales. It’s more than just having a website or blog, though — it’s about using email marketing, social media, and other channels to get your company’s name out in front of potential clients.
There are many ways you can go about lead nurturing; in this blog, the experts at the search engine marketing agency Singapore has mentioned all you need to know about lead nurturing below, from the definition and benefits to the essential steps you need to nurture leads successfully.
So, let’s get started.
What is Lead Nurturing?
In its most fundamental sense, lead nurturing is the process of developing connections with your clients and guiding them through the buying process to make purchases.
Consider your lead nurture campaigns as a way of dropping breadcrumbs of educational content so that customers can follow the path.
Then, as they go through every crumb, they can learn more about how they can solve their issues towards the eventual purchase that helps them achieve their goals.
You should employ a lead nurturing method to communicate with your leads and respond to their questions precisely at the best moment (as the author and marketing expert Marcus Sheridan reveals in his book, They Ask, You Respond).
This ensures that the information you provide your leads is helpful and relevant to them at the time of the buying process to proceed to the next step.
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The benefits of nurturing a lead
Before you plunge down the rabbit hole searching for guidance that leads you to test different lead nurturing campaigns to see how they work, it’s beneficial to know the reasons your business needs to be using lead nurturing in the first place.
It can be a bit complicated because it involves multiple channels that need to cooperate, including well-timed calls-to-action as well as pop-up forms and emails.
Successful companies highlight leads as being among the top efficient components that make up the puzzle of inbound marketing and have observed:
- 50 percent more sales-ready leads.
- four to ten times as high a rate of email response.
- 45percent higher ROI.
- 47% higher value purchases made from lead nurtured.
If you do not nurture the leads, 79% of your leads won’t ever turn into sales. This means that nurturing your leads will yield amazing outcomes.
The people who come across you due to your amazing content marketing and SEO work will convert; however, they will never purchase from you. If leads don’t know where, when they can get there, or what they should do next, they’ll likely go elsewhere.
This is the reason why nurturing leads can pay dividends. We’ll walk you through the important things to think about when you design a lead-nurturing plan of your own to be sure that they do not.
If you want to succeed in nurturing leads, it is essential to make sure that all channels and contents work in a manner that lets your client see how you will resolve their issues and what steps to take next.
Lead nurturing channels by search engine marketing agency Singapore.
A lot of people who are aware of lead nurturing think it’s only for email marketing; however, it is possible to assist your customers in their journey to becoming buyers by using any of the options.
According to the leading best digital marketing agency Singapore below are the lead nurturing channels that are effective include:
- Social media: Connect with your potential customers via social media using surveys, as well as entertaining and educational material that could be useful to reach people who don’t know about your offerings or services or aren’t responsive to emails.
- Retargeting: This occurs when a user arrives on your website and then leaves but is then shown your ad on a different site like Facebook and other media websites.
- Content on websites: This can be blogs or landing pages, calls-to-action (CTAs), and personalization.
- Marketing via email: Emails should be automated and may include updates, news, blog articles, or other informational material that is more detailed.
- Webinars and Events: These are for those who are serious about their plans to get into the deep end.
Consider which channels are most effective for your potential customers (where do you have the most chance to get them?). Then, use that knowledge to develop your lead nurturing plan. The most important aspect is that you’re reaching them wherever they are and at the time they require you.
Essential Factors of lead nurturing:
Marketers frequently mistakenly view lead nurturing as little more than email communications.
Instead, consider lead nurturing in terms of a workflow or series of communication with every step having a clear and concise goal, whether getting people to the next level or encouraging another move.
Effective nurturing includes questions that allow you to get the necessary information to constantly improve the quality of your communication and help move buyers through the purchase process.
Establishing lasting relationships built on trust requires a thorough understanding of your prospective customers. Only then will you be able to provide them with the most relevant information, such as messaging, images, and other assets.
Nurturing pathways should be based on specific customer profiles. The best digital marketing agency in Singapore states that below mentioned are the essential factors that make up a successful nurturing process:
·     Segmenting
Segmentation lets you use titles, roles, industry, title, and sales level to account for variations in messages. This way, you can be sure that your content is resonant with your audience and decrease the number of unsubscribers.
·     Customer nurturing
This isn’t just for prospective customers. If you’re already bringing on new customers, there are many ways to build a connection and increase acceptance. There’s also an opportunity to separate your customers according to user roles.
For example, are they an “executive sponsor,” “champion, “champion,” “power user,” or “executive sponsor”?
Based on this information, you can direct clients through programs for onboarding specifically tailored to their role and make the transition seamless and smooth.
·     Give to receive
At two different points of the buying process, there are two prime times to learn more about the person you are talking to when they come into your company and when they decide to sign up as a customer (or do transactions with your company). In these instances, you can boost the frequency and quantity of contacts.
·     Customer focus
Make sure to personalize your communications whenever feasible, such as calling the client by name or using the business’s name.
Include relevant resources to the client’s field and ensure that each communication is tailored to the customer’s needs at the moment. Every communication must be created to address a specific need.
The messaging will probably not be helpful in your nurturing plan if you can’t answer the question, “What’s worth it to the customer?”
·     Progressive profiling
Registration requirements in exchange for an offer known as “gating. Since lead nurturing usually applies to contacts already in your database, it’s not necessary to include forms as part of each offer.
There are, however, gaps in the contact database. Progressive profiling — which gradually asks contacts for additional details–can help create a comprehensive and actionable database of every prospective customer.
Progressive profiling ensures that each time a prospective customer clicks upon an offering, your system will ask for only one or two details. For instance, an effective nurturing program starts by providing the highest-quality thought-leadership content that is free of registration.
It then offers an example in exchange for details. It also directs users to a demonstration that can be accessed without having to sign up.
Five steps to nurture success
The experts offering digital marketing services Singapore says before you can establish your lead nurturing plan first, you must start by laying the foundation. By doing this, you’ll get valuable information and increase your profit potential.
1.    Learn to understand your customer
Prospects move through different stages. It is important to know these stages and determine which content assets are most appropriate for each stage.
Talk to your customers – as well as those who have not purchased from you- to identify your perfect customer profile. Create buyer personas.
What are your customer’s biggest pain areas? What is the process they follow? What are the reasons they should be attracted to your product?
Decide what messaging is most appropriate for every stage of the purchasing cycle and who is accountable for delivering each message. An alignment between marketing and sales will ensure consistent branding, voice, message, and overall ex.
2.    Determine what is motivating your customers
Examine your previous marketing campaigns and evaluate the extent to which they contributed to your revenue.
Examine the percentage of response to your campaign and examine how many leads went through the various stages and the message and content provided throughout each stage.
According to a Dec. 2015 Ascend2 study, 59 percent of B2B firms say that the creation of relevant content is the biggest problem in ensuring that leads are nurtured successfully.
3.    Whiteboard is the ultimate user experience
Develop an effective lead nurturing plan that is most akin to your buying strategy, and then examine the areas where it is difficult to implement.
You might want to consider personalizing the experience based on the information you know about the potential buyer.
Modify your communication flow according to their behaviour experience and interaction with your message. Begin by having the ultimate objective in mind, and then create the blueprint.
Design a framework that is the most sensible for your company and attempt to anticipate any obstacles to implement and then make adjustments.
Once you have your plan locked down, record it to be able to communicate it to others and be reminded of the reason you took certain actions.
  4.  Create your lead nurturing plan
Define the goal of the campaign as well as the message flow Content offers, communication channels, and the overall cadence from previous interactions. This helps determine the timing of an automated application.
Make sure you think about all scenarios. If your goal is to send out six emails and make three phone calls in eight weeks, what happens if you do not receive the response you want?
What happens when someone is removed from a nurture program? How can you keep the person interested, and who is responsible for the relationship?
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Automated communications
An automated welcome message is an excellent way to begin. Create automated messages to greet people who join your database.
Then, you can begin to provide informative information. Are there three essential aspects you’d like your database users to know? And what else do you wish to learn about them?
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Best Practices of Lead Nurturing
- If you’re looking to join the top industry players and begin a lead-building plan, improve your odds of success by implementing the most effective techniques.
- Start by focusing on a particular segment of your database using an easy call to action (CTA). Next, examine how you are performing against your targets and make any necessary adjustments.
- After this is done, you can gradually introduce paths based on the customer personas or sales stages and then personalize your content as you discover what works and doesn’t work. The main thing that is important to everything is a concentration on small steps.
- For instance, a welcome program for new leads could be a quick one-two-three-touch program that provides new leads with relevant information regarding the issues your product or service can solve as well as the kind of businesses you assist and the best places you can find more details (for instance, directing at your top downloaded downloads).
- Since you don’t likely know anything about the person, you’re inviting you’re contacting, make your messages generic in the beginning. For instance, you can send the exact three pieces of information to all of your contacts.
- As they consume your content and stay on your website, most B2B marketers believe that using marketing technology is vital for the performance of lead nurturing strategies. Include online body language (online behavior that signals intended for businesses) to customize future communication.
- Contacts are more likely to divulge details about themselves in the first thirty days they’ve communicated with you.
- If you are able, automate touchpoints and utilize a layered form or progressive profiling (a method of gathering information about prospects slowly and unobtrusively) –to gather data.
- Then, when prospects engage with you and go farther along the road, it is possible to adjust the strategy.
- Do not over-design your emails. For example, a simple text-based email with an appropriate Signature (perhaps the CEO in the first email or the sales rep on the subsequent emails) is just as effective as an extravagant HTML email.
- Explore opportunities to automatize. Find a trigger for a particular behavior (such as warm welcomes, cart abandonment and the renewal of a contract) and add contacts to an automated sequence, where an action or date stamp initiates the process.
- Automated processes allow you to nurture prospects according to stages. It is simple to put prospects onto nurturing pathways according to shifts in lead stages.
- With CRM integration, sales reps will be able to determine which prospects are on the journey of nurturing.
- Next, create and send a sequence of messages that guide prospects from awareness to confirmation. Contacts at the stage of interest must be directed towards a system that warms leads, and data should be gathered in each communication to ensure the relevancy of the text messages.
- If prospects are ready to consider their options, they must be put in a nurturing plan with a focus on education.
- When you spend time on your website and consume your information, they should be placed in the “accelerator program” designed to help them get to the next step in the buying process.
- If they haven’t contacted your company in a long time and haven’t been in contact with you for a while, put them in the Re-engagement program to decide if they should stay on your list. Be aware of when leads leave and enter the program.
- Since you’re in contact with leads that aren’t currently in the sales cycle, decide what you’ll do to keep them out of nurture once they reach the decision phase.
- In contrast, if they’re in the market to buy, you need to figure out the best way to bring them back into your nurturing program.
- When prospects are further along the funnel, be sure to manage the exclusions. Don’t send out automated emails that double your sales reps’ efforts. In the next step, you must determine the degree of efficiency.
- After you’ve implemented your nurture program, be sure to check its effectiveness of it by comparing your objectives to the most appropriate indicators. Once you’ve defined the goal of your program, then you’ll know what important metrics (KPIs) you should monitor.
- The best place to begin is to evaluate engagement, for example, email open or click-through rates. If the numbers aren’t high, modify your message time, frequency, and timing until you can see improvements.
- If your goal is to transfer leads between different stages, monitor and track the number of leads making the leap and the time it takes to complete the jump. If the objective is to speed up progress across the sales pipeline, track the time taken to complete each stage of the selling cycle.
- Continuously review and modify your plan to reflect shifts in market conditions, customer behavior, and even the organization itself. When you create content that aligns with these stages, you’re back in the same place as the buyer is at the moment in their minds.
- They’re aligned with their requirements and questions to guide them into the next phase smoothly and easily. This is an instance of a flawlessly planned lead nurturing campaign that is perfectly timed to buyers’ journeys:
- Imagine you’re selling handcrafted top-quality gardening tools, and there’s a newbie gardener on the internet looking for the fastest and easiest method to build a gardening bed.
- The gardener reads your blog post “Best ways to make your garden bed for the new season,” where they learn that tools that are sharper help in clearing the bed easier and faster. However, they’re now conscious that they’re in a dilemma and don’t have the sharp tools to complete the task!
- A link that is to the right will lead them to an article that explains what these tools could be, and even ones like yours.
- So, they’re aware of what their alternatives are and are in the phase of consideration stage; they’re reading on to, learning more about these tools, comparing their options, and determining what is most suitable for the task at hand.
- They’re aware that they have an issue, they know that their products solve them, and they’re enthralled, but they’re not quite ready to buy now.
- Your website has been extremely useful, but they sign up for your newsletter using a pop-up form and then leave your website.
- After a couple of days after a day, you will send an email with more information on gardening tools. This will keep them interested in your posts and remind them of your offers if they want to find out more useful tips.
- They’ve looked for alternatives and are now in the process of-making phase. They’ve got a few options they’re contemplating, but no one of your competitors has offered all of this useful information, so they look through your reviews about your business and decide to buy the tools you have.
- If your content is in alignment with the buyer’s journey stages, you can help buyers purchase. Every outreach scan easy reminder that you and your services and products are able to help.
- There are likely to be a variety of ways to connect with various products on your website, depending on your visitors’ requirements and what they’re searching for.
- The trick is figuring out who needs what and when. This makes lead nurturing somewhat difficult, but that’s also the reason it’s so effective.
Conclusion
We hope this blog helped you to automate your marketing to increase your revenue. If you want to learn more on such topics, check out our blog on marketing automation: improve marketing efficiency to increase revenue generation.
Networking and building relationships is the first step of lead generation. Insightful content.
Thanks a lot for such useful insight. Perfectly covered the area of lead generation and building relationships which is a huge part of marketing.
Hello Sana, We are pleased to know you found the blog useful Do check out our recent blog: What is PPC Marketing & 7 benefits of Pay-Per-Click?