We’ve been hitting hard on marketing automation this month, and I wanted to dig a little deeper beneath the surface to discuss lead nurturing. This is an integral part of marketing automation that helps build those strong relationships with your potential customers.
So What is Lead Nurturing?
In a recent blog post, I discussed creating automation campaigns based on a consumer’s actions on your site. Lead nurturing is the strategy of creating automated marketing campaigns based on a consumer’s actions or location in your marketing funnel.
Lead nurturing is meant to target those visitors to your site who aren’t quite ready to buy yet and need a little nudge. The key to successful lead nurturing is delivering content that is valuable and relevant enough to keep the consumer engaged and moving in the right direction.
How Do You Know What Content to Deliver?
Again, this goes back to the consumer’s actions or where they are located in your marketing funnel. Your content must be relevant, so if a visitor is looking at a specific product or downloaded a resource about that specific product, you’ll want to set a trigger to send out an email with more information about that specific product or other relevant info.
Perhaps a visitor hasn’t even entered your buy cycle yet. Maybe they’re just scratching the surface of your site and getting acquainted with your brand. If this is the case, then you’ll want to further educate that consumer on your brand to build trust and positive brand awareness.
Another important step to keep in mind is to ask for permission to stay in contact. Otherwise, this person might mark your emails as spam or simply unsubscribe.
Once you’ve established a connection, it’s time to start nurturing that lead. The idea with lead nurturing is to establish a sense of trust through providing relevant, helpful content to your possible buyers, all while moving them along the buyer’s journey.
Using Lead Nurturing Workflows
A lead nurturing workflow has the goal of converting leads into qualified, or hot, leads and moving them down the sales cycle. So say someone downloads a white paper. Downloading that white paper should trigger your workflow, where a series of emails are sent to the visitor on a timeline. So for example, the first email is sent out 2 days after the download, maybe an offer that relates to their download. You follow up with another email with another offer and continue. It’s important to not overload the person’s inbox, and to keep the emails relevant based on the visitor’s actions.
You can also set up workflows for cold leads as well. Sometimes visitors forget they viewed your website, so a string of emails can be sent to get that visitor back on track and moving in the right direction.
In The End
They’ve shown interest, but haven’t moved any further down your marketing funnel. It’s time for you to step in and nudge them along and make them feel safe with your brand. By paying attention to their every step of their buying journey, you will be able to automate campaigns and set triggers to stay in contact with visitors to keep them engaged and interested. In the end, you’ll improve your conversion rates drastically by nurturing every lead that enters your marketing funnel, from start to end.
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