The Definitive Practical Guide to Lead Nurturing

According to the Harvard Business Review, “acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.” From the surface, this fact seems to contradict every business’s ultimate goal: to increase its customer base. However, taking a deeper look clarifies the error behind this conflict. In reality, businesses actually aim to increase revenue.

In order to maximize your revenue and reduce your expenses, focus on activating an existing database of leads that you’ve already build, with minimal added sales and marketing investment. In marketing, that’s called Lead Nurturing. Also known as “drip marketing”, lead nurturing is one of the most effective marketing strategies, and a powerful feature in marketing automation systems.

At its core, lead nurturing involves sending out a chain of emails, or “drip”, including relevant information to your sales leads. These emails are spread out over a time span and are usually based on user interactions with your email sends and/or other digital channels. Not only is email still the best lead generation tool, lead nurturing can bring in many benefits to both your sales and marketing initiatives.

Involve Sales Without Really Involving Them

Lead nurturing allows you to automate your communications ahead of time. Once your nurture program is set up, you’ll start reaping two main benefits. First, your leads will stop receiving spammy, generic sales emails. Instead, they’ll get targeted emails based on their profiles, interests, actions, and more. Second, while lead nurturing is actually automated sales emails, it requires little to no effort on your sales rep’s side. Instead, your marketing team designs the messages and campaigns once, and activates the nurture program. In the meantime, while these emails will appear to be sent out from your sales team, your sales reps will actually be focused on actually selling your product.

Waste Less Manpower on Low Value Leads

In a regular scenario, your sales reps would be wasting time – and as a result, money – communicating with leads who aren’t ready to buy. On the other hand, using a marketing automation tool, you would be able to add these leads to a lead nurturing program. This will automatically educate them, build their awareness, and move them through the sales cycle. Once they’re ready to talk shop, you can directly assign them to your sales reps to close the deal. If they lose interest, however, your sales reps wouldn’t have lost time nurturing a dead end.

Take Personalization to a New Level

Business who are personalizing web experiences, witness a 19% increase in sales. We’ll leave that sink in for a moment… Can you imagine how much a simple thing can impact your revenue?  Lead nurturing allows you to deliver the right content at the right time to the right lead. Not only so, but your emails can also be tailored to include personalized content. We’re talking first names, birthdays, abandoned cart products, and sending emails from a specific sales rep. You can base your emails on any information your leads have given to you, and any actions they’ve performed or interests they’ve expressed in your brand.

A Minimal Approach to Gaining More

Following up with existing clients can often be overlooked by both your marketing and your sales team. That’s especially true when both teams have their targets of revenue and new leads to meet. In comes lead nurturing, a simple and effective way of outsourcing this time-consuming, manual task and taking it off the plates of your marketing and sales teams. Now, their timetables have cleared up to ideate better marketing strategies and sell more products.

Lead Nurturing is Not Just For Sales

A final but no less important benefit of lead nurturing is that it allows you to put more effort – passively – into creating equally useful campaigns. Use drip emails to welcome and educate new clients, send out training materials or product updates, or share important industry best practices. You can also create special nurture tracks for upselling, pitching new products, promoting special offers, or any other creative sales ideas your teams can come up with.