What is lead nurturing and what is its place in marketing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with individuals or entities who have somehow expressed interest in your company’s offerings. The main goal of lead nurturing is usually to lead a person from the moment they become a lead to the completion of a purchase. But it doesn’t stop there – we can also include maintaining good contact with the customer (including after the purchase) as part of nurturing activities.
Nurturing thus intersects with other marketing techniques, such as e-mail marketing (because sending e-mails is still one of the most effective methods of direct contact with potential customers). In these messages, you can inform leads about special offers, share expertise – in a word: show potential customers that your company is trustworthy and the products you offer are of high quality.
Contacting your subscribers on a regular basis is also a way to appear in their minds for a longer period of time – so that when they make a purchasing decision, they have the name of your company or your product in their minds.
What are the benefits of lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is a technique that, when properly implemented, ends in a sale, that is, the acquisition of a customer. The second major advantage of lead nurturing is that it provides a lot of relevant information about your company’s sales process. Based on the conclusions they draw, companies can significantly improve the path prepared for customers, and thus improve sales performance in the future.
Stages of lead nurturing
To be effective, lead nurturing must be implemented at each stage of the customer journey. We will now discuss them one by one, with each one adding a suggestion on how to apply nurturing.
Acquiring a lead
If a person who visits your store’s website, social media profile or simply clicks on an ad placed online leaves his or her contact information, it inevitably means that he or she is in some way interested in your offer. At this point you can already start the process of nurturing – for example, by sending your new subscribers a message thanking them for performing the action. It’s a good idea for this message to be personalized as much as possible and refer to the specific call to action the lead responded to.
Segmentation of leads
One of the most important steps in lead nurturing is segmenting leads by their potential. This is especially important if you are acquiring leads through free samples or downloads. You need to realize that many users will leave their email only to receive the free benefit you offer as part of a lead magnet and have no plans to purchase from your company. Your job is to separate the promising leads (hot and warm) from the cold ones.
Lead nurturing, or establishing and deepening a relationship with a lead
The next step in winning a customer is to initiate contact and try to establish and then deepen the relationship. How you approach this is not carved in stone. The idea is to address the leads with a specific message or encourage them to take action. You can offer a discount on upcoming purchases at this stage (if the discount was not a lead magnet in the lead acquisition step) or ask them to complete a survey. Finally – if you know the lead’s preferences – you can offer a specific product. And if you don’t know the potential customer’s preferences – ask about them.
Deepening relationships with leads is a process that cannot be encapsulated in a single email. Think of it as a multi-step journey that can take months, rather than a sprint whose results you’ll know after just a few moments. Remember, it’s not about pushing for the fastest possible sale! The intent of this stage is to actually create a bond between your brand and prospective customers.
The incentive to buy can come right away or a little later – for example, in the second or third communication. In this regard, a lot depends on what you are selling. In general, you can start selling low-value products more quickly, while expensive subscriptions for access to specialized software are products that require forging a deeper bond with prospective customers, and often a personalized approach and direct contact (at least by phone).
Transforming a lead into a customer
When do you know that the person you are communicating with is ready to move to the purchase stage? When she willingly responds to the call to action you give her, when she contacts your company herself about a purchase, or when she starts the buying process (for example, directly on your store’s website). This is your chance to show the full potential of your company. Be the customer’s companion at every stage of the buying process, responding promptly to concerns that arise and reacting to problems that are raised.
Lead nurturing campaign – how to plan it?
Like any marketing activity planned with the long-term in mind, lead nurturing should also have a strategy in place before you start implementing it. Especially if you want to leave as little as possible to chance, and instead build a strong relationship with your customers. To achieve this goal, you need to know the answers to three questions.
- Who is your company’s ideal customer?
- What is the voice of your brand?
- What customer problems do your products or services solve?
In search of the perfect customer
We have written about creating a customer persona before, for example, in an article about Facebook Ads. However, there must be data behind the idea of building a picture of the perfect user of your products. The persona must not be a collection of guesses, but the result of conclusions made on the basis of specific information.
Analyze your customers. What matters is not only their behavior during and after the purchase, but also the products they buy. Don’t forget demographic factors, too – check what age they are, where they live, what industry they work in. Find out what their needs are and how your products meet them. Any such information is an important part of building many strategies – not just nurturing.
With your customer data in hand, you can create a persona, or image of your ideal customer. However, if you have a broad business and your target audience is diverse, you may need to create more than one persona. The goal is to create a model that will serve at the stage of evaluating and segmenting and acquiring leads.
Persons can be useful to your company not only in the context of typical sales, but also for recruitment processes or planning special offers and accompanying events.
Know your brand’s voice and let it resonate
If your company has a specific set of values and style that it usually follows, you are already one step ahead. People who are interested in your products or services need to hear a consistent message from you. As part of your nurturing strategy, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to send your message to leads – make sure it does its job of motivating them to buy, but also builds your brand’s authenticity.
Again, it is useful here to refer to the concept of the customer journey and its various stages. So start by introducing your company or offering and in a non-intrusive way offer to learn more. In the next stages, show the benefits of buying your product and talk about the problems it solves. You’ll know what you can relate to if you’ve taken the time to get the right information at the ideal customer profile stage.
If, after this set of communications, some of the leads still haven’t decided to finalize the purchase, it’s time for an incentive in a tangible form – it could be a discount, a discount code or offering a set of products at a lower price than if they were bought individually. Of course, you can also introduce all these incentives at earlier stages.
Focus on (future) customers
When creating a nurturing strategy, it is useful to know the acronym CRM – Customer Relationship Management. Customer relationship management is a key point of nurturing. Once a relationship is built, it cannot be left alone, just as a built customer profile cannot remain the only point of reference.
At the end of a brand’s communication pipeline is always the customer – a person who needs to purchase a product or service for a specific reason. In the initial stages of communication, it is useful to use a marketing persona. As the relationship with the potential customer progresses, however, the pattern should be discarded and the focus should be on the specific person. Consequently, you will need more personalization of your communications. You can accomplish this by first segmenting leads into smaller groups. Over time, however, the system should be replaced with direct-to-consumer messaging.
Don’t end up selling
Sellers sometimes mistakenly think of finalizing the deal as the final step. Nothing could be further from the truth! The post-purchase stage is an extremely important part of nurturing. A stage that affects your further cooperation. After a successful sale, you can ask the customer for feedback, contact them for comments and suggestions, and encourage them to make another purchase.
Remember, however, when it comes to feedback, not to wait too long before contacting again. Often feedback is asked for almost simultaneously with a purchase, but there is no single, simple rule explaining which moment is best. Many products and services take time to say anything meaningful about them. So don’t require a customer to share his or her opinion on a complex product right away.
As in building relationships with people in your personal life, you must also show tact and delicacy with your customer. If someone has just spent a few hundred or a few thousand zlotys in your store, don’t immediately bombard them with a proposal to buy more expensive products. A lack of sensitivity in this matter can result in a broken relationship. Well-planned after-sales activities, on the other hand, are a chance to gain a loyal, returning customer.
Examples of lead nurturing – emails
It’s time for specific examples of situations in which to use nurturing. Remember, however, that in fact any time is a good time to build a relationship with a customer.
Registration
The moment a person registers – for example, in an online store – is the perfect time to open the relationship well. A welcome email doesn’t have to be just an empty formula proclaiming “we’re glad you’re with us.” You can include some practical tips, links to the most popular product categories, leave contact information or inform about the possibility of live chat with customer service. Let a new person know that he or she really is welcome here, and your company will do everything to make his or her experience of using the website more enjoyable.
Recruitment process
Recruitment itself is a process that requires a human, tactful approach. Nurturing in this case is so much easier because candidates themselves share a lot of information about themselves by sending resumes or cover letters. Building relationships with candidates makes profound sense – even those you may have to reject now may turn out to be exactly the people your company needs in the future.
Commemorative mail
This is a great opportunity to show the human side of your business. A birthday, the anniversary of an employee joining the team, or perhaps the round anniversary of your company’s existence? Any of these occasions (and many more) can be a good introduction to nurturing. A simple thank-you note, a birthday coupon or a special contest to celebrate your company’s 10th anniversary are all activities that show you care about creating a relationship with your customers.
Contacting an inactive customer
Many times we encounter a situation in which someone registers for a store and that’s where their activity ends. It also happens that after making a single purchase, the customer loses interest in the store’s offer. He still has an account there, but simply does not use it. Leaving things to their own devices is tantamount to agreeing to lose a customer. A message to an inactive customer can not only remind him that your company exists, but also encourage him to return.
Remember, however, that the message should not be a hastily put together text about a super offer, but a well-thought-out message, addressed exactly to the person it concerns. Use available data for this purpose – including purchase history.
Abandoned shopping cart
Any abandoned shopping cart can be the result of inattention or distraction, but it can also be a signal that the customer has found a better deal. What can you do? React as soon as possible – in this case, marketing automation can be helpful – and show the (would-be) customer that you have a specific offer for them. Sometimes a simple reminder about the products in the shopping cart is enough, but if that’s not enough, you can remind them about the possibility of financing their purchases with installments or deferred payment – if you have implemented such solutions in your store.
Lead nurturing – summary
These are not all the possible moments in which to apply nurturing. The truth is that leads – and subsequently customers – should be taken care of at every step of the relationship with them. This is another in a series of ongoing, long-term marketing processes that still need to be improved.
As with optimizing content or customer service, lead nurturing is a process that cannot be “finished” or get to the point where you can stop trying. Customers are worth striving for as long as there is competition. Even a monopolist should not lose vigilance – the market abhors a void, and dissatisfied customers will sooner or later be spotted by someone who will seize the opportunity presented to him.
