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As companies use inbound marketing to generate more leads, having an effective lead nurturing program becomes increasingly important. Only a small fraction of your inbound leads will be ready to buy immediately, leaving most of your prospects at the top of your sales funnel.
By publishing and sharing valuable content that answers your audiences’ inquiries and relates to their needs, an effective lead nurturing campaign can help you secure and push those top-of-the-funnel leads further down the sales cycle. It leads to increased revenue and the development of long-term client connections.
In this article, I’ll go over the foundations of lead nurturing so you can improve your fundamentals and construct stronger sales funnels. You’ve come to the perfect place if you’re new to marketing or need help with lead nurturing.
Let’s start by answering a very common question.
What is a Lead Nurturing Program?
Lead nurturing is a sales process that allows you to develop and sustain relationships with customers at every stage of the sales cycle through effective content sharing and producing marketing efforts that better understand the prospects' needs.
It helps provide the information and solutions necessary to improve brand awareness, increase credibility, and establish a bond with prospects before they are ready to convert into quality leads.
Lead nurturing programs work for most types of B2B or B2C businesses because they take new prospects on a tailored tour of a brand and the solutions it provides. It enables marketers to firmly establish themselves as experts and engage potential clients with the content that motivates them to work with their company.
An effective lead nurturing program will help you maintain the balance between leads and existing customers by engaging them on a timely basis. Such nurturing strategies allow you to actively interact with your client base and remind them that they are also part of the brand’s journey.
Now that we know what a lead nurturing program is, let’s define its purpose so you know when and for whom you should create your lead nurturing campaigns.
Important Suggestion: Download the PDF for valuable insights and actionable ideas for optimizing your lead nurturing strategies. It offers a comprehensive compendium of effective techniques to engage and convert prospects, including personalized email and targeted content.
What Are The Objectives Of a Lead Nurturing Program?
Most marketers have only two objectives when setting up a lead nurturing program. Understanding the primary and secondary goals of nurturing is highly crucial as they will help you build a better buyer journey for the prospects.
Primary Objective: Engaging leads with personalized content toward a specific action
Many prospects will not enter the buying cycle when they land on your website. They must first be educated about your brand, services, and all your company can do for them.
Lead nurturing comes into play once a prospect has shown interest in your services; for example, they have downloaded one of your lead magnets. You can use the exchanged personal information to educate them about your services and their benefits.
By understanding your buyer persona and pain points through authentic and rigorous research, you can send your prospects educational and informative content related to your industry.
This content can be informative, educational, helpful, and so on. Your leads will be qualified to do business with you when they respond highly to your shared blog content.
Secondary Objective: Building stronger relationships with existing customers for retention
Turning a client into a consumer is not the end of the sales funnel. Marketing beginners often ignore the importance of customer retention in the last sale cycle stage.
Providing remarkable consumer services is the most obvious lead nurture strategy to boost client retention. It's usually easier to sell to old clients than find new ones. However, you must regularly keep in touch with your existing customers for this to happen.
A lead nurturing program allows you to re-engage your consumers regularly with offers, discounts, upgrades, or sometimes even a “How is everything going?” email. Timely nurturing can assist you in responding quickly to client issues and feedback that can work wonders for your brand reputation and nourish a healthy company-consumer relationship.
You can deduce how lead nurturing campaigns are one of the most effective lead converting methods from the objectives above. We should discuss some of the benefits of a lead nurturing program that can help you understand what all this single digital marketing technique offers you.
What Are The Main Benefits Of a Lead Nurturing Program?
1. Makes Upselling and Cross-Selling Easier
Cross-selling and upselling are methods specifically built for engaging existing customers.
What is upselling?
Upselling is the method of encouraging the client to buy an upgrade for their current services. For example, if the client uses an old version of your software services, you should nurture them to upsell the latest version.
What is cross-selling?
Cross-selling motivates the customer to purchase products or services that will enhance the user experience of their existing services. It helps educate the clients about your other services and products, which can double their benefits with the current purchase.
The whole process of cross-selling and upselling is made more accessible with the help of lead nurturing.
According to numerous studies, getting a new client is five to twenty-five times more expensive than keeping an existing one. By sustaining your current clients with an email or a minute update now and then, a lead nurturing program ensures that your customer buyer does not venture out of your business ecosystem.
And when the right time comes, you can start pitching your cross-selling and upselling offers to your clients. It becomes evident from these benefits that lead nurturing helps maximize profits and reduce customer acquisition costs.
2. Maintains and Increases Engagement
Delivering the right message at the right time is extremely important in marketing. Lead nurturing programs help you stay connected with your leads and potential customers by communicating with them on time.
Prompt consumer engagement and quality content can establish you as an expert among the audience and make your brand rank higher in the prospect’s consideration list.
‘Personalisation' is the golden keyword to remember while creating lead nurturing content as it helps catch the lead’s attention and make them look forward to more content from you.
3. Reduces Sales Cycle
Lead nurturing provides your sales team with an untapped pool of sales-ready leads with no new investment. Getting prospects to the top of your sales funnel is generally a costly activity that requires many marketing efforts and a significant investment of time, money, and resources.
Lead nurturing works through all your marketing investments and filters out the most profitable prospects for you. Using methods like lead segmentation and lead scoring, the prospects get grouped in various lists, making it easier to identify which lead is more likely to buy.
It can help you understand where you can put minimum effort and get maximum results, thus reducing the period of your sales cycle.
4. Allows Automation
These days there are many lead nurturing software tools available in the market that saves your time and eliminate most of the manual work related to nurturing campaigns.
The only work you have to do is set up the automation tool according to your preferences. The lead nurturing system keeps track of what the lead is interested in, generates thorough reports, and keeps nurturing them without you having to do anything.
Marketing automation is a powerful tool to help marketing teams build scalable, responsive communications by developing a compelling lead nurturing plan. Some famous lead nurturing automation tools are Hubspot, Alico, ActiveCampaign, and Plezi, which I will discuss in-depth in my upcoming blog posts.
5. Builds Brand Reputation
Marketing managers understand the importance of lead nurturing programs in brand awareness. All the relevant content you share with prospective customers under a lead nurturing strategy adds value to your cause of converting them into a sale and showcases how actively you interact with your target audience.
Your brand will get recognition when your lead nurturing strategy includes personalization, robust lead scoring and segmentation, and an efficient marketing automation tool.
You can use prospects as a good source of listing out the most asked questions about your services, and loyal customers can help you make your brand better by giving you feedback.
By listening to the problems that your consumers have specifically with your brand, you can take prompt action and establish your credibility. Such client interactions and data acquisition can only happen through an effective lead nurturing program.
6. Delivers Personalized Content
Every campaign is an opportunity to learn more about your prospects and strengthen your brand’s credibility. The more you understand about your leads, the better information you’ll be able to deliver via your marketing efforts.
Lead nurturing boils down to instilling confidence in your prospects about their decision of doing business with your company.
Lead nurturing is a never-ending cycle that works through all your multichannel initiatives, from drip emailing that entices leads about your services to social media posts that share your content. The more your leads interact with your content, the more your nurturing campaign becomes personalized.
But you always have to remember that creating information with authority and impact builds trust. Your content marketing should position your brand as the ultimate source of trustworthy, valuable information for your clients.
Conclusion
You don't have to wait for new leads to start your lead nurturing program; you can start testing it with your current clients. With ever-changing marketing trends and the increasing cost of securing fresh leads. Lead nurturing helps you make the most out of the leads already interested in your services.
Whether the aim is to boost ROI, enhance recall rates, or establish brand dominance in a specific industry, a lead nurturing program is an indispensable component of any marketing strategy.
Its ability to guide leads from the cold stage to becoming warm leads and, ultimately, hot leads highlights its effectiveness in increasing revenue and fostering enduring client relationships.
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