5 Essential Lead Nurtures (You Need in Place Right Now)

Don’t leave opportunities to fester and your hard-earned marketing efforts wasted. Automating personal and dynamic nurture communications is an ideal way to stay in touch with prospects and customers to ensure the conversation is relevant and, for marketers specifically, to increase the efficiency and return on lead generation.

Today’s marketing automation technology makes it easy to automatically nurture leads who aren’t quite ready to buy from you or customers to keep the brand experience flowing. Marketo explains that lead nurturing using marketing automation is key in helping to align marketing efforts and messages and makes sure each lead receives the most relevant messages at the most opportune times.

1. Prospect nurtures

Nurturing for prospects starts with cultivating demand – latent to active. It’s then about subtle acceleration throughout the various stages of the cycle varying the content and message delivered through email and web pages. With a little science, some common sense and todays incredible marketing automation technology, it’s very possible. If done well, it can build strong brand loyalty, rocket-fuel the sales cycle and deliver tremendous returns for marketing investment (and of course sales).

For prospect nurturing, the cool bit is anticipating what happens next for a specific buyer type, serving up the right content via email, web or social channels. Spend some time analysing marketing and sales data, for example, what content was consumed during a sales cycle and how this relates to a buyer type. Pull this altogether into an automated always-on journey built with marketing automation and web personalization tools. The performance of your nurture campaign depends on how well you understand your buyer persona, and how effectively you tailor the content and journey to them.

2. Customer nurtures

Nurture journeys are a fantastic way to engage with new and current customers. Winning a new customer is a battle but sustaining the customer offers just as much a challenge. Using marketing automation technology, nurturing can enhance customer loyalty and support cross/up-sell campaigns. Simple, immersive and effective customer on-boarding programmes can get a new relationship off on the right foot. Enhance your credibility and engagement with drip email campaigns that serve up promotional offers and industry expertise. Don’t forget to personalize where possible for a positive user experience.

Oracle's eGuide 'Lead Nurturing Guide for Modern Marketers' supports the idea of nurturing for customers and says "Even when you’re bringing on a new customer, there are plenty of ways to nurture the relationship and drive adoption...you can funnel customers through onboarding programs tailored to their roles.”

3. Cold Leads / Dead opportunities nurtures

Increase the lead temperature of certain prospects in your database, while gathering more valuable information and behaviour insight to aid the Sales’ team conversion efforts. Too often we forget about lost sales or deals that are stuck in the sales cycle presumed dead. Not all prospects make it through the sales cycle and re-engagement nurtures with the aim of encouraging “hand-raising” is an ideal tactic to encourage prospects to re-enter the sales process. Blogs, industry insights, some cool visual content such as infographics and videos are all effective examples to resurrect the dead!

The 'Lead Nurture Flows Reconstituted' piece by Sirius Decisions explains 'though these opportunities are seen as low quality in nature, it is not uncommon to see reengagement rates of between 5% – 20% if executed properly'.

4. Renewal nurtures

If you offer a product or service that’s periodically renewed, this nurture journey must be #1 on the to-do list. A renewal nurture can be almost set-and-forget and usually kicks in 6 to 8 weeks prior to a renewal date. It’s an ideal format to really personalize the experience and perhaps introduce some light offers. Marketing automation is a best-fit solution to automate the workflow, to build each email step, manage the outcome (renew or not) and formalize the next step in the journey – welcome again and thank you, sorry we lost you.

5. Persona-based nurtures

Sirius Decisions emphasises that nurture content that effectively aligns to the buyer’s journey and persona preferences has higher change of prospect engagement and better conversion rates. Persona based nurturing is a very effective tactic that lots of your competitors will be using, and if you’re not, you should be. Persona orientated nurtures allow you to effectively target your content to deliver value and insight to that specific audience, based on their industry or role within the company, or their stage in the sales cycle.

Here’s a quick example of building persona types a product or service.

When selling a car, for example, understanding the buyer profile (or persona) would be suitable for this type of journey. A Classic Sports Car buyer versus someone who purchases a Sports 4X4 could be very different. The Classic buyer would be interested in style, speed, likely 50+, likely to attend track days and events. However, the 4X4 buyer would be looking for an off-roader with super style that appeals to the need for safety for his family, with perhaps some light off-roading. Other specifics such as income, age, locality, what they buy and why, ie. thrill & family practicality, help to define these persona types, tailor the message and encourage conversion.

Email Drip VS Nurtures?

You may be wondering what the difference is between email drip campaigns and nurture campaigns. An email drip campaign is a more static, impersonal approach which doesn’t monitor activity or behavior of your prospects. Nurtures grow over time, delivering more value to a business by providing with behavioral information, and a more positive and personalized experience to your potential customer.

TOP TIP: Consider integrating drip email campaigns into your nurture workflow, as this can help inform which nurture your prospect is entered in to.

Personalisation

To deliver the best experience possible, personalisation should be present at as many touch points as possible, integrated on email and asset specific web pages.

Acceleration

A strategic nurture program will be measurable, so you can evaluate the impact on your business’ ROI. With marketing automation in place, you’ll be able to analyse the effectiveness of your lead nurtures and optimise the journeys for greater impact.

Reporting

Consider introducing acceleration in your nurture programs to give your leads chance to move themselves along the nurture journey at a faster rate, and therefore speeding up transition between awareness and interaction with your Sales team.

Align sales and marketing to develop and review your current lead scoring and nurturing process. An effective lead nurturing programme relies on having valuable content, building a targeted workflow that delivers this content to the right persona at the right time in their buyer journey. In order to do this, you need to have a good marketing automation tool in place.

Takeaways:

• Your potential buyers expect a personalised cross channel experience; lead nurturing is an all-encompassing solution to this need.
• Nurture programs can empower your Sales team by providing insight into prospect behaviours and interests, building relationships and increasing conversion rates.
• Lead nurturing can also be utilised to build loyalty with existing customers, encourage repeat business and drive adoption.

Demand generation strategies can drive great marketing results, but you must get the creation and implementation of these strategies right. Download our eGuide: A Guide to Successful Demand Gen Led Marketing Execution.