The nurturing of relationships with individuals who are not presently ready to buy from you but can be ideal customers in the future is called Lead Nurturing. The purpose is to educate the prospective consumers, enhance their awareness regarding your organization and its products, build trust, in the hope that they will choose your offerings when the time to purchase will come. Although, far too many businesses are short-sighted and don’t know how to play the long-game while learning the trade of high-calibre clients takes time.
It isn’t easy to impress the modern-day consumers; they’ve seen every creative presentation, from flashy web designs to a good social media presence and have even heard every clever line out there. But they expect those things, it’s the only bare minimum, and they’re looking for substance. They keep their guard up to prevent themselves from wasting their time or getting scammed. Before being committed to any brand, consumers need to know that their best interests are being kept in mind; they need assurance that you can continually provide value. The relationship is based on trust and needs to be nurtured. Most organizations place so much emphasis on generating leads that they neglect the essential process of following up, but lead nurturing can fill that gap. It can help them move through the buyer’s journey towards becoming a customer.
Having a lead nurture strategy isn’t always enough; you need to keep optimizing it to keep up with the ever-changing demands and evolving consumer landscape. Here are four ways in which you can energize your nurture strategy:
1. Improving and Automating your Lead Nurture Email Efforts
Email marketing is one of the most effective lead nurturing tactics. Lead nurturing emails are the second most widely used email by B2B marketers for content marketing. However, there always lies some scope for improvement to churn even better results out of the nurturing efforts. Ensure that you automate your lead nurture emails if you aren’t doing it already. These emails include –
- Welcome emails triggered by subscriptions and signups.
- Thank you emails triggered by donations, purchases and downloads.
- On-boarding emails for educating leads about products or services.
- Emails containing discounts, exclusive offers, company/industry updates or newsletters.
- Emails for re-engaging inactive leads and many more.
Try testing different behavioral triggers and hypotheses to see which one works best for you, and then optimize your nurture strategy accordingly.
2. Hosting Educational Webinars and Follow-Ups
Many leads look for more information and guidance before they actually decide to purchase. Educate and engage them with all the valuable information that might convince them to convert. But it isn’t always feasible to participate in these events, as they don’t happen year-round. You can start hosting webinars or encouraging leads to engage with the business and nurturing them to convert eventually.
3. Adopting a Multi-channel Lead Nurture Strategy
If you’re optimizing your lead nurture efforts, you cannot merely focus on one or two channels that have worked out for you in the past. It would be best if you diversified the outreach efforts by adopting multiple platforms and channels that would help reach and engage more leads. Email marketing may have helped you nurture half of your leads, but that leaves out the other halves that aren’t responsive to your lead nurture emails. In cases like these, it is best to use retargeted social media promotions and ads to re-engage the remaining leads. The combined result is still a lot more than the leads you nurtured through email alone, even if you manage to engage half of them. The lead nurture strategy must consider each channel that the target audience uses to engage with your business. It should consider every stage of the sales funnel and every touchpoint.
Depending on their location in the customer life cycle, preferred channel, and behavior, neatly segment your leads, to deliver the most appropriate nurture content for each lead through the most relevant.
These are some of the essential steps for energizing your nurture strategy. It’s crucial that you optimize your content across various touchpoints and channels to improve the effectiveness and relevance of your efforts for each lead. Energizing your nurture strategy can enhance customer experience with your business and get a good response from the audiences ahead. Nurturing leads through customer support, marketing, and direct & dedicated communication is vital to maintain the trust and reliability amongst customers for your business.
