Ensuring your marketing and sales teams are aligned can increase your revenue by 34%, and nurturing your leads can lead to a 47% higher average order value (AOV). Implementing a successful lead nurturing strategy can have a huge impact on your company sales, customer retention, customer loyalty, and more.
Why is a lead nurturing strategy important?
Traditionally, the main brunt of marketing required you to ‘sell’ to your customers.
These days, customers have more control, using the internet to research and evaluate their options before contacting any company. Buyers want to be heard and more importantly, buyers want to be listened to.
Lead nurturing helps your buyers to understand your business and how you can help them solve their problem. It also enables you to educate your customers, building trust and allowing you to inform them about their problem. If a lead isn’t ready to buy and your sales team is too eager, they are less likely to do business with you.
Lead Nurturing Tactics
Despite the obvious benefits of lead nurturing, marketers can struggle to build a strategy that works for them, leading to less impressive results.
Although there are many lead nurturing strategies out there, we’ve put together 5 of the most effective regardless of the type of business you work for.
1- Use Multi-Channel techniques
Back in the day, setting up a lead nurturing strategy meant sending out generic emails to a list of prospective leads and hoping for the best.
Today, marketers are looking for new tactics to entice their leads to buy their product/service. Using marketing automation platforms, marketers can now execute multi-channel lead nurturing strategies with little effort. Usually, an effective multi-channel lead nurturing strategy involves a combination of email marketing, dynamic website content, social media, paid retargeting and direct sales outreach.
2- Follow up leads quickly
Immediately following up on a lead seems like common sense, but most organisations still take a while to make contact.
Ensuring you follow up with an email or phone call is often the best way to convert an inbound lead to a qualified sales lead. When you make the effort to respond with a timely, well-planned call, your leads are much more likely to do business with you than with a company that uses a generic cold call as their method of contact.
If you pay attention to their recent browsing behaviour, you’ll know exactly what they are researching, and you’ll have enough information about the prospect to do some initial research about the company they work for and their role within it.
3- Personalize your emails
Email marketing is a highly effective tactic for lead nurturing, and personalizing those emails tends to make them even more effective.
A study found that 41% of consumers switched businesses due to a lack of personalisation.
There are a load of ways to personalise emails to improve your strategy. You can send triggered emails when a visitor clicks a link in your email, visits certain pages on your website or downloads your gated content.
If you combine personalised marketing with behavioural triggers, you can ensure that you will deliver the right message, at the perfect time.
4- Align your sales and marketing strategies
Sales and marketing teams have a shared responsibility to attract and convert leads into paying customers. Ensuring that your sales and marketing strategies are aligned will increase your customer retention rates, and make your lead nurturing strategy more successful.
To ensure both teams work together in harmony, consider a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA) that outlines the expectations, responsibilities and goals for collaboration. This will help the teams hold each other accountable for their roles.
5- Leverage Targeted Content
No two leads are the same, so why wouldn’t you nurture each lead with strategically targeted content based on the persona that represents them best?
If you don’t have buyer personas yet, don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with our blog on what a buyer persona looks like in 2021. Once you have your buyer personas, create a set of targeted content designed to nurture each persona based on their goals, interests and objectives.
About Inflowing
Inflowing is a B2B marketing agency. We help B2B organisations do meaningful things with marketing – whether that’s getting more leads, more visibility, or supporting their sales teams.
We’re an experienced team of marketers with an incredibly strong background in B2B. To learn more about B2B and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch.
