Lead nurturing is part of a successful sales cycle. It’s how we guide potential customers (leads) along their buyer’s journey. We learn to understand and even anticipate their needs. We help them find the products or services we offer that are most useful to them. Then, we make it easy for them when they’re ready to buy from us.
Luckily, technology offers us several options for doing all of this digitally. We have seemingly endless opportunities to find leads, learn more about them, build customer relationships, then nurture them each step of their way through the sales funnel.
So, let’s dive into the options available to us when creating our digital lead nurturing strategy.
Table of Contents
Email Marketing
Email remains one of the strongest tools you can use in your lead nurturing campaigns. Through email, you can easily provide leads with relevant content they need to move from one step of the journey to the next. Because many companies offer tools that help with automation, email campaigns are a common digital marketing option. Using these tools and software, you can customize what emails get sent, who they get sent to, and what conditions trigger a specific email delivery. This can help you create a campaign that builds relationships and connections with your leads.
There are two basic types of email campaigns to choose from:
- Drip campaigns deliver emails to customers at regular intervals or on a set schedule. Customers usually receive these emails regardless of their level of interaction with your business, though there can be some exceptions. These campaigns help keep your business top of mind for customers as they progress through their journey or to win back the customer after a successful interaction.
- Nurture campaigns deliver targeted emails based on information gathered from customer interaction. For instance, by tracking articles read, products purchased, and webinars attended, you can more accurately pinpoint how close the customer is to a purchase and deliver an email designed to nudge them one step closer.
The type of campaign you use and the parameters you set for it are up to you. I suggest searching for an automation tool that works for you and experimenting with the customization and settings to familiarize yourself with the options available to you.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is the process we use to determine which leads are most likely to convert. We determine a set of criteria for each step of the journey, assign values to those criteria, and “score” leads according to which criteria they meet. Lead scoring software is an important tool in accurate lead generation.
Through the digital tools available, you can set your own scores for specific criteria or let the software automatically score leads based on your company’s goals. Either way, the software can help you find and focus on the leads most likely to make a purchase.
Digital lead scoring has many SaaS options, some of which offer limited capabilities for little or no cost.
Multiple Touches from Different Channels
Right now, the average person uses about 3 digital devices regularly. Each household has an average of nearly 16 digital devices. That may sound like a lot, but having access to so many digital devices has a massive benefit for us: they can connect, share information, and combine it together. For a business, this is incredibly invaluable. Not only does it give us multiple sources of information about our leads, it gives us multiple touchpoints to reach potential customers during the lead nurturing process.
This is important because it can take 8-10 touches to complete a sale. That may be more than we’d prefer, but it helps us out in two very important ways:
- We can nurture the lead’s journey across multiple touchpoints. Because we know how many touches it can take to make a sale, it’s important for us to reach our leads wherever they are. Having multiple channels available to us gives us plenty of opportunities to create touches that keep us top of mind for our leads.
- It helps us create more precise and targeted touches. Using the digital tools available to us, we can collect information from each touch, then use that data to create or edit our content to make each touch even more effective.
Integrating sales and marketing strategies
One great thing about the surge in SaaS options over the past decade is the uptick in multi-use and all-in-one apps available to us. Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks, but they all have one major advantage: integration. Lately, it seems like we have our pick of apps that can help us integrate our sales and marketing strategies with a single subscription.
Depending on the app you choose, you can:
- Perform research
- Create content marketing campaigns
- Implement and test the efficacy of those campaigns, and
- Receive data that helps you further develop and refine your campaigns
Sometimes, you can create and implement a successful lead nurturing program within one app. Most times, you can limit the number of needed to integrate and execute various strategies and methods.
