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SaaS lead nurturing is a game-changer in B2B sales cycles, but only when done right.
According to research, 80% of companies plan to make all their systems SaaS. As a marketer, you surely don’t want to miss this opportunity due to bad marketing strategies.
Lead nurturing programs for most businesses are all about addressing common consumer queries and helping the prospect complete their buyers’ journey.
But SaaS lead nurturing demands marketers to be more active in their lead generation and lead nurturing approach. In this blog, I will focus on lead nurturing and explore the ten major mistakes businesses make while building their lead nurturing campaigns.
I have also included how you can fix these common lead nurturing problems to produce efficient and scalable marketing workflows that will take care of all your SaaS lead nurturing worries.
Mistakes to Avoid in SaaS Lead Nurturing
The road to building an effective lead nurturing plan is hard. These are the top mistakes that industrial marketers should avoid in SaaS lead nurturing:
#1: Becoming a Spammer
How often you contact your leads through relevant content decides whether the prospect will become a buyer or not.
Sending out emails every day is a sure-shot way of getting potential customers to unsubscribe even before they reach the middle of the funnel. There is no perfect frequency or timeframe to contact leads that guarantees conversion. It varies from industry to industry.
For example, an e-commerce grocery store needs to reach out to its prospects daily to make them aware of the arrival of fresh produce. But the same is not valid for SaaS as not many changes happen in a day.
How to fix: Candence of emails always depend on your target audience. By studying past customers, marketers can analyse the best times to interact with potential customers. Keep in mind that your content needs to be relevant for acquiring a high CTR.
#2: Not Identifying Lost Leads
The golden rule of marketing says businesses must focus on prospects with high buying potential. It does not mean forgetting about lost leads and never approaching them with a different marketing strategy.
It results in two critical problems:
- A hard-to-manage extensive lead list that mainly contains inactive prospects.
- While the cost per lead stays constant or increases, ROI decreases.
Companies often consider lost leads as prospects who were never interested in their offers from the beginning. But it is not always true. There can be many reasons why a prospect stopped responding, including relocation, job change, outdated email, moving towards a competitor, etc. Marketers need to keep an eye out for such leads as they are a great source of feedback and help make your SaaS lead nurturing more precise.
How to Fix: A conscious marketing effort to regularly update the lead list and re-engage lost leads would mitigate the problem.
#3: Using a Single Nurturing Campaign
Not every lead is the same.
A target audience consists of market leaders and managers with varying business goals. The essence of lead nurturing lies in personalisation. With a single lead nurturing campaign, specifically in SaaS, a company can never make efficient conversions.
For example, a SaaS company builds an email nurturing sequence to encourage prospects to book a demo call and puts all its fresh leads in this email nurturing campaign. Some prospects book and attend the demo call.
But what about the other leads who don’t book a call?
Such leads require more nurturing through personalised content. SaaS businesses need to develop a way to engage these leads before losing them to competitors.
How to Fix: SaaS businesses should revisit their buyers’ personas. Based on these personas, marketers need to develop different lead nurturing campaigns that separately target their problems according to their stage in the sales funnel.
#4: Lack of A/B Testing
Even after extensive research and early-stage segmentation, a lead nurturing workflow might not perform well.
Most of the time, even experienced marketers might fail to develop a good lead nurturing workflow in one shot. It is so because consumer needs are constantly changing, and companies must keep up with prospect demands.
Most marketers think the last stage of developing a lead nurturing program is deploying it. But it is not so; every marketing campaign needs optimisation through A/B testing to become more accustomed to prospects’ liking.
How to Fix: In SaaS lead nurturing, businesses can use A/B testing to optimise their emails and landing pages. Marketers can change elements like subject line, CTA button, offers, fonts, layout, etc., to capture the version that produces the highest CTR.
In an email A/B test done by Hubspot, they discovered that emails with the sender’s name at the end had a 0.53% higher open rate and 0.23% higher click-through rate than the other versions that ended with the companies name.
This small change helped Hubspot gather 131 leads. Likewise, SaaS companies can also test their lead nurturing campaigns and generate better results.
#5: Pitching Services Too Early
Only 3% of the market is actively buying.
Still, marketers tend to pitch their services to fresh leads. SaaS are innovations built based on consumer pain points that startups have identified. Effectively communicating how a product or service solves consumer concerns is also crucial for a brand to succeed.
Businesses directly presenting their services to the top of the funnel prospects results in confusion and sometimes overwhelm the leads.
SaaS lead nurturing is about making potential customers aware of your software and establishing a healthy relationship with the consumers. It does not focus on selling and instead uses various methods to identify when a lead becomes sales qualified.
How to Fix: Lead scoring is a prominent strategy in the lead nurturing that can help understand all about prospects buying potential. It analyses users’ online behaviour, attributes, etc., to decide at what stage of the sales funnel a prospect is present and how to reach out to them.
#6. Ignoring Established Customers
Research highlights that only 18% of businesses focus on customer retention.
These statistics point out a vast misconception among marketers that once a lead converts, their work is over.
Most SaaS are subscription-based, which means that existing customers pay every month and regularly contribute to a company’s growth. Established clients have already used your brand and understand its value. It becomes easier to upsell and cross-sell new updates or tools to paying clients and cutting short the sales cycle.
Instead, marketers focus on acquiring new leads and turning them into customers, usually taking a longer time to convert. Ignoring existing customers sometimes also results in losing them to competitors.
How to Fix: Invest in lead nurturing campaigns that specifically target established clients. SaaS companies can share insider tips and tricks with existing customers and keep them busy with the help of an online.
#7: Relying on a Single Channel to Communicate
Not all potential buyers will be a fan of emails. Some might prefer social media, push notifications, or SMS.
For marketing beginners, it is good to use a single channel to interact with the target audience. But for advanced lead nurturing, employing multiple channels becomes a must.
A single channel approach to nurturing the prospect’s results in limited marketing opportunities. And what if a prospect leaks out from the standalone nurturing sequence? There will be no other point of contact to re-capture such leads.
Also, using a single medium to connect with prospects can bind advertising creativity and restrict marketers from promoting a brand to its full potential.
How to Fix: Using multiple channels like emails, targeted ads, SaaS website, mobile, SEO, and social media will help stay connected with the prospects and reduce leakage in the sales funnel. Choose two-three marketing channels according to your target audience’s preference and prepare well-planned nurturing strategies for them.
#8: Resisting Marketing Automation
Efficiently handling multiple lead nurturing campaigns through different channels is not an easy job.
Some crucial lead nurturing tasks include:
- Regularly updating lead lists
- Renewing content and offers in all the nurturing email sequences
- Constantly checking lead scores to filter out sales-qualified leads
- Moving leads through various nurturing campaigns to ensure they are on the right track
- Doing A/B testing now and then
- Data-driven research about potential buyers
It is impossible to perform all these tasks accurately unless you are superhuman. Another option is to hire a team dedicated to lead nurturing processes, but that will not be cost-effective.
How to Fix: B2B marketing automation has proven an economical and effective way to handle lead nurturing processes and gives businesses the accuracy required to produce higher conversion rates. Automation tools like Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Plezi, etc., are worth checking out.
#9: Underutilising Lead Segmentation
Lead segmentation is the process of dividing leads into groups based on attributes, online behaviour, etc.
SaaS businesses involved in lead nurturing understand the importance of lead segmentation and use it as a prerequisite to lead nurturing.
But companies forget that prospects’ attributes like job profile, budget, company, business goals, etc., are constantly changing. Such changes, when ignored, result in quality leads being in the wrong lead nurturing workflow.
For example, one of your high potential lead finally converts into a paying client. Yet they are still receiving emails meant for potential prospects, urging them to try out the SaaS or sign-up for a demo. It sends out highly unprofessional vibes from your end and can also annoy the client.
How to Fix: Progressive segmentation can help marketers solve this problem. It updates the prospects’ profiles as they progress in their buying journey. Any marketing trigger or behavioural change gets highlighted. Companies should then shift such leads to the appropriate lead nurturing campaigns. Automation software is also capable of performing such tasks.
Conclusion
Understanding your prospects is the first step towards building a quality SaaS lead nurturing workflow. It helps create marketing campaigns that target leads based on their behaviour and support potential customers throughout their sales cycle. Knowing what works for your clients assists in customer retention as well.
Lead scoring, email nurturing campaigns, and progressive segmentation are strategies that can take your marketing efforts to the next level and save up a lot of time when used with automation.
Lead nurturing in SaaS can be overwhelming initially, but it can become your biggest marketing asset if you go step by step. If you are looking to learn lead nurturing from the very basic to advanced level, check out: B2B Lead Nurturing: The Ultimate Guide.
Related Articles:
B2B SaaS Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work
9 Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns to Drive Growth
5 Lead Nurturing KPIs To Measure for Better User Experience
5 Steps to Build a B2B Lead Qualification Checklist
Lead Nurturing Tips For Startups To Accelerate Business Growth
Lead Nurturing Email Examples From My Personal Account
B2B SaaS Marketing Benchmarks
