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Highly popular B2B lead nurturing tactics center around building strong relations with soon-to-be customers. Marketers often forget that lead nurturing can also be used to re-engage churned customers.
Businesses always focus on getting prospects to the bottom of the funnel. Once our leads become customers, we engage with them less. It can lead to inactive customers. According to research, businesses have a 60% to 70% chance of making a sale to an existing customer, compared to just a 5% to 20% chance with a new prospect.
Learning how to re-engage past customers and build higher customer retention doesn’t have to start from scratch. We can utilize some B2B lead nurturing tactics to ensure that our past clients stay in the loop, become repeat buyers, or try out new products or services.
This blog explores the top lead nurturing tactics for boosting client engagement and creating a loyal customer community.
But first, let’s answer an important question.
Why Established Customers Become Inactive
Your B2B lead nurturing tactics will fail if you don’t know why a particular customer has lost interest in your services. There can be many reasons behind such behaviour, but some of the common ones are:
All these scenarios occur due to a lack of communication between the company and the customer.
It will leave the clients disappointed, whether it is due to a time crunch, an overload of new leads, or any other lapses in your marketing system. But all these problems have a single solution: an effective lead nurturing campaign.
Importance of Lead Nurturing in Customer Retention
To turn customers into repeat buyers, marketers must establish and maintain a healthy relationships with their clients. Beyond solving consumer queries, companies need to invest in additional outreach programs that target only former or current clients.
Lead nurturing can help businesses develop highly personalized marketing campaigns. It is a process that aims to connect with customers proactively to generate credibility and a high brand recall rate.
Most B2B lead nurturing tactics used to generate qualified leads, like email nurturing sequences, lead scoring, automation, etc., are also effective for re-engaging clients.
Integrating customer retention with lead nurturing pushes for a balanced approach toward efficient marketing under budget. Research claims that an increase of 2% in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%.
So lead nurturing helps you generate high ROI and a loyal customer base with simple nurturing techniques.
B2B Lead Nurturing Tactics To Re-Engage Old Clients
Implementing B2B lead nurturing tactics for past clients is different from those used for potential clients. Content marketing and email promoting still play a crucial role in connecting with clients.
But what should you share with a client who already knows about your brand and has bought services?
To answer this question, you need to ask two questions:
- From your customers: What they didn’t get?
- From your team: What more do we have to offer?
And you will be ready with a load of answers that can get you started preparing a lead nurturing strategy that focuses on re-engaging past customers. Now, let’s understand how you can employ those ideas correctly.
1. Sharing Roadmaps
Building a business is a never-ending process. Developer needs to update their services or products regularly to meet the ever-changing demands of consumers. By taking feedback from paying customers, companies can build a roadmap of future features they will add to their services.
A roadmap will help align a brand’s goals with customer requirements and stay on track. It showcases your interest in consumer opinion and establishes you as a trustworthy brand.
For example, I am a paid member of Appsumo’s comprehensive writing tool Blogely. I have received a couple of emails from the Blogely team asking for feedback and discussing the tool’s roadmap. The email copy utilises the feedback page’s link and encourages the receiver to share their response.
2. Branded Nurturing
When you push former clients back into your sales pipeline, they do not start from the top of the funnel. Instead, they enter as marketing qualified leads (MQL).
And according to lead nurturing rules, an MQL turns sales-ready when nurtured with content that presents a brand’s services as a great solution to their problems. Employing this process becomes easier to engage past clients as the required data for curating such content is already present via feedback and surveys.
Understand the problems that your inactive and active clients face with your current services. Build checklists, how-to blogs, short videos, etc., that explain a step-by-step method to eliminate common queries that stop customers from utilising your services to their full potential.
3. Build a Community
Communities bring like-minded people on the same platform. How about you do the same with your customers?
Most of your paying consumers face the same challenges and have the same goals. Creating a supportive community where you and your customers can share tips & tricks or recent breakthroughs achieved with the help of your services can work as a great way of keeping the clients busy and collecting social proof.
Such communities establish an emotional bond between customers and companies, which results in higher brand loyalty. According to research, the emotionally connected customer can stay with the brand for 5.1 years.
Marketers have also picked up on this trend and have created dedicated platforms like Circle, Tribe, etc., where brands can easily create a separate space for their clients.
4. Leverage Remarketing
Encouraging former clients to get upgrades for the bought services or investing in a new product requires companies to revamp their marketing strategy entirely.
Remarketing refers to reconnecting with past customers via different channels. Businesses have a robust database of all their active or inactive clients. With the help of this data, marketers segment customers into groups and create remarketing campaigns according to their needs.
For example, if a former SaaS customer mainly communicated via emails, they get put under the remarketing channel of email nurturing. Such email sequences can start with emails like “how you have been” and expand to telling customers how they can avail of offers and access new software features.
All in all, remarketing is an efficient way of tapping into lost connections and making them aware they are a part of your brand.
5. Smart Promotions
When all re-engagement strategies fail, smart promotions can always help.
Smart promotions are time-bound offers that capture customer attention and motivate them to interact with your content. Companies use discount offers, extended warranties, additional benefits, events, etc., to trigger an action from the consumer by keeping the offers available for a limited time.
For example, birthday emails have a 179% higher click-through rate than simple emails. If a former client's birthday is approaching, mail them birthday wishes and a discount code that is only valid for that month.
6. Build A Loyalty Program
Rewarding customers with some loyalty discounts and offers is a technique that will definitely help re-engage past customers. There is nothing wrong with giving special treatment to your past customers. They have already shown trust in your brand, and this is your way of showing gratitude and engaging them further.
For example, TRW, an auto parts company, faced stiff competition. To tackle this, they created a customer loyalty program linking workshops across Europe, where workshops earned and redeemed points for rewards. This customized program enhanced communication and helped TRW build lasting customer loyalty.
Your loyalty program must offer clients something relevant that will enhance their experience of using your products or services.
7. Utilize Cross-Selling
Cross-selling can effectively re-engage past customers who have stopped interacting with your brand due to budget constraints. By analyzing their previous needs and understanding their primary concerns, you can offer tailored solutions that fit their current budget while addressing their key problems.
Such an approach not only keeps them connected to your brand but also shows that you’re attentive to their financial situation and needs.
When their budget allows for an upgrade, they’ll likely choose your brand over competitors, thanks to the flexible programs and personalized support you provide. A proactive and thoughtful cross-selling strategy helps maintain customer loyalty and positions your brand as their preferred choice when they're ready to invest more.
How To Implement B2B Lead Nurturing Tactics
With all the above B2B lead nurturing tactics, re-engaging past clients might seem hectic. Marketers prevent such situations by automating the lead nurturing workflow.
B2B marketing automation makes it easier to segment and create highly personalised lead nurturing campaigns for re-engaging former clients. Tools like ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, Plezi, etc., allow you to create automated marketing sequences that can include all your engagement efforts on one platform.
For more details, you can check out this blog:
You should also pay attention to your churn rate and customer lifetime value (CLV), which help you determine whether your B2B lead nurturing tactics are working.
What is the Churn Rate metric?
It is the percentage of clients that have stopped doing business with you over a certain amount of time. According to reports, SaaS companies’ annual churn rate must be 5-7%. If it is higher, the brand must evaluate its lead nurturing programs for active and inactive customers.
What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that estimates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship. It helps businesses understand how valuable a customer is over the long term, rather than just their initial purchase.
If a customer spends $100 per purchase, makes a purchase twice a year, and stays with the business for 5 years, the CLV would be:
CLV=100 (Average Purchase Value)×2 (Frequency)×5 (Lifespan)=$1,000
Suggestion: Don't miss out on the opportunity to enhance your lead generation and conversion rates with this downloadable PDF resource. It presents a wide range of effective lead nurturing ideas that you can implement in your marketing campaigns.
Re-Engage Churned Customers With B2B Lead Nurturing
One persistent reason businesses lose paying clients is a lack of timely engagement with the client. B2B lead nurturing tactics help companies solve these problems in an organized manner and further strengthen the bond between a brand and a customer.
I highly suggest you read the Ultimate Guide to B2B Lead Nurturing to clear your concepts and fully embrace business growth possibilities. It will help you efficiently balance prospects and clients in the same marketing system.
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Lead Nurturing Tips For Startups To Accelerate Business Growth
Top 9 Mistakes in SaaS Lead Nurturing and How To Fix Them
Optimizing Lead Nurturing for Higher Qualified Leads
13 Lead Nurturing Email Examples That Drive Action
