Lead Nurturing: 6 effective tactics to nurture leads
Lead nurturing is the process of engaging a defined audience by providing relevant information at each stage of the customer journey.
Some ways to achieve this are through targeted content, multichannel relationships, and personalization.
The Importance of Lead Nurturing for Online Business
In simple words, a lead is an individual or organization that shows interest in what you are selling.
To express this interest, the person usually shares contact information such as name, email address, phone number, etc.
The next step seems simple, doesn’t it? Just contact the customer and finalize the sale. But it doesn’t work quite this way.
In most cases, only a relatively small percentage of your leads will be ready to make an immediate purchase, and this is usually for two reasons:
- The person / business needs more information to be convinced of the benefits of closing a deal.
- The person / company got the wrong impression about your service / product and actually has no interest in what you are offering.
In either case, note the importance of implementing an effective lead orientation and generation strategy so that no one wastes time.
Forrester research has shown that marketers see an average 20% increase in sales leads when lead nurturing occurs.
So, this is the time to ask yourself: Which lead nurturing tactics work best?
6 Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics
As we noted at the beginning of the post, lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with buyers at all stages of the sales funnel.
– Understand How the Sales Funnel Works
To do this, you need to focus your marketing efforts on listening to the needs of your prospects and providing the information and solutions they need. Learning the basics of sales prospecting can also aid your lead generation and nurturing efforts.
Here’s a list we have prepared with 6 effective lead nurturing tactics.
1. Targeted Content
Stimulating your leads by providing targeted content, that is, focused on their needs, is the goal of Content Marketing, one of the most effective sales and advertising strategies today.
But doing this is no simple task. First, you need to understand each of your buyer personas and what stage of the buying journey they are on.
– What is it and how to create a buyer persona
Buying journey consists of four steps: awareness, interest, decision, and action.
This journey is divided into the sales funnel, whose purpose is to represent the steps that the customer goes through until the moment of decision making and purchase.
The more leads you capture, the harder it is to do this segmentation and tracking, so we suggest that you use a marketing automation platform to identify, segment and target your Content Marketing strategy.
– Content Marketing to Sell Online Courses
2. Multichannel Lead Nurturing
In the past, most lead nutrition strategies involved creating a generic email marketing campaign.
You simply sent a sales email to the entire prospect list, and that was it.
Focusing solely on email relationship strategies is no longer enough.
Today, marketers are investing in new tactics and channels to relate to their audiences.
Effective multichannel lead nurturing strategies most commonly involves a combination of email marketing, social media, remarketing, dynamic website content, and direct sales ads.
– Understand What Remarketing Is and How It Works
Because there are so many tactics involved, to get it right, you really need to make sure your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and working cohesively.
3. Ongoing Relationship
While each buyer’s journey through the sales funnel can be quite different, research indicates that, on average, each prospect receives ten marketing interactions from the moment they enter the top of the funnel until they make a purchase.
Interestingly, a survey by Demand Gen shows that 49% of marketers make less than five customer contacts in their lead nutrition programs.
The most successful lead nurturing strategies aim to build a customer relationship by providing content that helps them progress on the buyer’s journey, answering questions and providing solutions to their problems and concerns.
In addition to email tactics, consider how you can use a mix of content types, such as social media, blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, ebooks, and even newsletters, to deliver value to your potential customers.
– Step by step to create a blog
To succeed in building a good and lasting relationship with your target audience you have to show that you care about what they think and are willing to help them find the best solution for them needs.
4. Personalized Email
While not the only strategy you should implement, studies indicate that email marketing remains one of the most effective lead nurturing tactics.
– How to create a successful email marketing campaign
However, sending that generic email we mentioned earlier is no longer enough.
In fact, a recent study by Experian indicated that personalized emails can generate up to six times more revenue than non-personalized campaigns.
The good news is that there are several ways to customize your emails to improve your lead nurturing strategy.
You can send a specific message via email when someone downloads your content, visits certain pages of your site, demonstrates a high level of engagement, and of course, make a purchase.
When you combine the power of personalizing marketing with behavioral emails, you can deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time.
5. Lead Scoring
Lead Scoring is a methodology used by sales and marketing departments to determine the value of leads by assigning values to them based on their behavior related to the products or services offered.
The “value” of each lead varies from company to company, but is usually determined by the customer’s interest or position in the buying journey.
To do this, companies assign point-based systems or simply refer to their captured leads as “hot”, “warm” or “cold” based on their interaction history.
Lead scoring can be implemented on most marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values to certain website browsing behaviors, conversion events, or even social media interactions.
The resulting value is used to determine which leads should be directly traced by a sales rep and which ones still need to be nurtured.
As your lead scoring process becomes mature, you can do some analysis to see, for example, which content was the most successful among leads that become customers.
– Know what your personas are looking for and attract leads
6. Sales and Marketing Alignment
Gone are the days when a company’s marketing and sales departments were two industries that were completely independent of each other, with almost no interaction.
It is well established that companies that align their sales and marketing efforts experience a large increase in the number of sales leads generated.
For both sectors to contribute to lead nurturing, you must first identify when prospects should be transferred between teams as they progress through the funnel.
The shared expectations, responsibilities, and goals for this sales-marketing collaboration should be outlined in a service level agreement (SLA).
Creating an SLA will help both teams take responsibility for lead conversion and will drive better results.
In a next step, both departments need to come together to develop a lead scoring strategy to identify where a particular individual is on the buying journey.
This is the backbone of a strong lead nurturing system because it identifies when and how to approach each buyer with the most timely and relevant communications.
Lead Nurturing to Sell Online Courses
Finally, track your results and always look for opportunities to optimize your lead-focused conversion strategy.
Never forget that digital marketing is in the constant process of improvement and transformation, just like everything else on the internet.
The tactics listed above apply to any type of business, and are perfect for those who are starting to sell courses online and need to capture and retain students.
With a little organization and a focused strategy, you’ll soon be attracting potential leads and getting your first students.
The Coursify.me is a Learning Management System (LMS) completely dynamic and customizable, that assists and provides resources for those who want to create, promote and sell online courses.
– Whats is a Learning Management System
Serving companies and professionals in over 60 countries, Coursify.me has a nice and easy to use interface, ideal for those who want to start their own business without investing anything for it.
Visit our website, test the platform and learn why we are the best option for you.
