What's your lead nurturing strategy for automated leads?

1 What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your leads by providing them with relevant and valuable content, offers, and interactions that match their needs, interests, and stage in the buyer's journey. Lead nurturing helps you to educate, engage, and persuade your leads to move closer to a purchase decision, while also building trust and credibility with your brand.

2 Why is lead nurturing important?

Lead nurturing is important because not all leads are ready to buy from you right away. According to a study by MarketingSherpa, only 27% of B2B leads are sales-ready when they first contact you. The rest need more time and information to evaluate your solution and compare it with other options. Lead nurturing helps you to stay in touch with these leads and influence their decision-making process, while also preventing them from losing interest or going to your competitors. Lead nurturing can also increase your sales performance, as research by DemandGen Report shows that nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads.

3 How to create a lead nurturing strategy for automated leads?

Creating a lead nurturing strategy for automated leads requires four steps. First, you should segment your leads based on their profile, behavior, and needs. Criteria such as industry, company size, job role, pain points, goals, challenges, interests, preferences, and actions can be used to group leads into different segments. This allows you to tailor content and messages to each segment and offer more personalized experiences. Second, you should map content to the buyer’s journey. Understand the stages that leads go through before buying from you - such as awareness, consideration, and decision - and offer content that aligns with each stage. For instance, blog posts, ebooks, webinars, and case studies can be used in the awareness stage; white papers, reports and demos in the consideration stage; and testimonials, reviews and free trials in the decision stage. Thirdly, you need to set up lead nurturing campaigns using a lead generation automation tool or software. You can use email, SMS, social media or chatbots to communicate with leads and deliver content and offers. Lastly, test and optimize lead nurturing campaigns by monitoring performance and analyzing metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, revenue and ROI. Evaluate elements of campaigns like subject lines, headlines, copy and landing pages to improve response and conversion rates. Lead nurturing is essential for generating qualified leads for your business. By following these steps you can create an effective lead nurturing strategy for automated leads that will help boost sales and grow your business.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?