Lead Nurturing Tools are used in the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of a sales funnel and through every step of the buyer’s journey. As companies utilize inbound marketing as a way to produce more leads, the value of having an effective lead nurturing tools strategy displays very clear. In most cases only a nearly small percentage of your inbound leads will be fast to make an instant purchase, leaving upwards of 90% of your inbound leads on the table. Performing an efficient lead nurturing approach can have a tremendous impact on the effects of your inbound marketing strategy.
How to Nurture Leads- With Lead Nurturing Tools?
Lead nurturing is the persistent process of involving a defined target group by providing appropriate information at all stages of the buyer’s journey. You want to actively lead the prospects with lead nurturing tools you have imagined through your marketing and lead generation efforts, to the point where they convert paying customers. Some tactics on how to nurture leads are through targeted content, multi-channel nurturing, multiple touches, timely follow-ups, and personalization. Despite the clear advantages of lead nurturing tools, marketers can struggle to build the right strategy around it.
7 Amazing Lead Nurturing Tools Best Practices
1. Support Targeted Content
When it comes to lead nurturing, one size absolutely does not fit all. As the research proves, strategically nurturing your leads using targeted content can significantly improve the results of your inbound marketing strategy. Using targeted content for lead nurturing tools may seem obvious, but it’s something that marketers are trying with. Last year Forrester Research reported that 33% of B2B marketers cite “targeted delivery of content” (i.e., delivering the correct content, to the right people, at the right time) as their largest lead nurturing challenge.
There are a few requirements for using targeted content for lead nurturing. First of all, you need to understand each of your unique buyer personas. Of course, you then need to create a variety of targeted content designed to nurture each of your personas based on their interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers. Lastly, you need to have a marketing automation platform in detail to help you identify, segment and target your different buyer personas as you scale your inbound marketing strategy.
2. Use Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing Techniques
In the past, most lead nurturing strategies included setting up a simple email drip campaign that would send out universal emails to a list of possibilities. Today, marketers like you are looking for new lead nurturing tactics and technologies that go ahead the limits of email. With the help of powerful marketing automation platforms, savvy marketers are now producing multi-channel lead nurturing approaches.
Effective multi-channel lead nurturing most commonly involves a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach. Because there are so many tactics required, to achieve this properly, you really need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are well adjusted and working cohesively.
3. Focus on Multiple Touches
While the buyer’s journey for every product and service can be quite different, research from the Marketing Lead Management Report indicates that on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of funnel until their closed-won customers. Interestingly, another research study from Demand Gen suggests that 49% of marketers admit less than five touches in their lead nurturing programs. If you’re in this category, it might be time to revise your lead nurturing purposes a bit.
As you can imagine, the most successful lead nurturing procedures deliver content that helps prospects progress through the buyer’s journey by addressing general questions and concerns. In addition to email tactics, consider how you can use a mix of content types like social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, or even direct mail, to nurture your promises into customers.
4. Follow Up With Leads in a Timely Manner
The benefits of immediate follow-up calls seem quite evident, but most organizations still aren’t acting very quickly. A recent article in Harvard Business Review highlighted the surprisingly delayed response times of most US-based companies. Here are a few benchmarks from the study which incorporated feedback from more than 2,240 US companies:
- The average first response time of B2B companies to their leads was 42 hours
- Only 37% of companies responded to their leads within an hour
- 24% of companies took more than 24 hours
- 23% of the companies never responded at all
Automated lead nurturing can help you reach large groups of views, but a timely followup email or a phone call is still quite often the best way to change inbound leads to adequate sales opportunities. As different research studies have shown, the odds of changing a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially more important when the lead is reached directly following a website conversion.
When you make a timely, well-researched call to an inbound lead it’s far more powerful than any volume of cold calling. You know exactly what the prospects are researching based on their recent browsing behavior and you also have enough information about the prospect to do some original research about the organization they work for and their particular role within the company.
5. Convey Personalized Emails
Many research studies indicate that email marketing proceeds to be the most effective tactic for lead nurturing. The research also consistently shows that personalization tends to perform significantly better results than generic marketing. A study found that 41% of consumers switched businesses due to a lack of personalization.
As highlighted in this helpful blog post, there are all kinds of ways you can personalize your emails to increase your lead nurturing strategy. You can send triggered emails when someone downloads your gated content, clicks on links in your emails, visits specific pages on your website, or when they show a high level of engagement. When you connect the power of marketing personalization with behaviorally triggered emails you can pass the right marketing messages to the right people, at precisely the right times.
6. Practice Lead-Scoring Tactics
For those who are new to the idea of lead scoring, it is a methodology used to rank chances against a scale that expresses the observed value each lead represents to the organization. Lead scoring can be performed in most marketing automation platforms by allowing numeric values to certain website browsing behaviors, passing events, or even social media interactions.
The resulting score is used to decide which leads should be followed up directly by a sales rep or which leads need to be trained further down the funnel. Based on this research, it seems as though lead scoring is an efficient lead nurturing tactic that most marketers simply aren’t taking the power of yet.
7. Be sure your Sales and Marketing Strategies are Arranged
According to a study by market research when both sales and marketing share duty for lead nurturing, companies experience a significant financial boost. In fact, organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer recognition rates.
In order for both sales and marketing to contribute to lead nurturing you’ll need to identify when possibilities should be transitioned within teams as they progress within the funnel. In creating your lead nurturing strategy, think about how you can use triggers like lead scoring, page views, workflow enrollment, conversion events or sales contact to transition leads from automation to direct one-on-one outreach.
The shared expectations, responsibilities and goals for this collaboration between sales and marketing should be outlined in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Creating a formal sales and marketing SLA will help the two teams hold each other responsible for changing leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers.
So, you are at the right place as Mailcot is the one which provides you with the best lead nurturing tools :
Our Lead Nurturing Platform helps you attract buyers and nurture them with personalized campaigns, so sales can step in when they are engaged and ready. Efficiently developing leads in today’s consumer-driven marketplace means organizing and nurturing buyer relationships with a strategic lead scoring system after which filling out that framework with a radical content material marketing plan.