How to write Lead Nurtures that convert

As companies begin to adopt inbound marketing in order to generate more leads, the importance of an effective and efficient lead nurturing strategy can not be underestimated. In many cases, only a very miniscule amount of your inbound leads are ready to purchase immediately.

This then leads to roughly 90% or more of your inbound leads on the table. However, by adopting an effective lead nurturing strategy, you can enjoy a massive change when it comes to the results of your marketing strategy, customer retention, customer loyalty, revenue, and much more.

In this guide, we will take a look at and explain some of the most effective lead nurturing tactics you can use within your business.

What you need to know

The process of nurturing leads is all about purposefully engaging your target audience by offering relevant information, maintaining a sense of delight throughout every stage, and supporting them in every single way possible. This process is critical to your business and its success as it directly impacts your customer’s decision about whether or not they are going to convert into paying customers.

There are many ways for businesses to nurture leads including targeted content, multiple touches, personalization, multi-channel nurturing, and timely follow-ups. Despite all of the clear benefits of lead nurturing, many marketers actually struggle to build the right strategy. In fact, according to the 2019 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey, around 60% of respondents gave their nurture programs an awful failing grade.

There is a huge area of opportunity for savvy marketers, such as you, to implement effective strategies for lead nurturing and gain an expert advantage over your competition. Let’s take a look!

Effective lead nurturing tactics

Although there are many lead nurturing strategies out there, here are some of the most effective ones for you to implement. They will work no matter what type of business you’re in.

Leverage targeted content

When it comes to effective lead nurturing, you never want to use a one size fits all approach. As research has proved time and time again, nurturing your leads strategically with targeted content can significantly improve your results. You can begin by working to understand every single one of your unique buyer personas.

From there, you need to create an assortment of targeted content that is designed to nurture all of your personas based on things such as goals, interests, objectives, and marketing triggers. You also need to onboard a marketing automation platform to help you target, identify, and segment your unique buyer personas.

Use multi-channel lead nurturing techniques

Previously, most lead nurturing strategies have involved setting up simple email drip campaigns that would send out generic emails to a list of prospects. However, today, marketers like you are looking for new technologies and techniques that go far beyond email nurturing.

With the help of intelligent marketing automation platforms, marketers are now able to execute multi-channel lead nurturing strategies. Most commonly, effective multi-channel lead nurturing involves a great combination of email marketing, marketing automation, dynamic website content, social media paid retargeting, and direct sales outreach.

Because of all the tactics involved, you need to ensure that your marketing and sales teams are well aligned to execute it properly.

Focus on multiple touches

While the buyer’s journey for every service and product can differ, on average, research suggests that prospects receive roughly ten marketing touches from the time they become aware of your company until the time they choose to convert into paying customers.

As you could imagine, the most efficient, effective, and successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that allows prospects to progress throughout their individual buyer’s journey. This allows them to retrieve the answers to common questions and any concerns they may have.

In addition to these email tactics, you can consider using a mix of content types to truly prevail. Other content types include blog posts, social media posts, interactive calculators, whitepapers, and even direct mail in order to nurture your prospects into customers.

Follow up with leads in a timely manner

The benefits of being able to follow up leads in a timely manner will always be evident. However, this still doesn’t reflect on the quality of service provided by companies. Many of them are failing to act quickly.

Automated lead nurturing is an excellent way to reach out to large groups of prospects. However, more often than not, a timely follow-up email or phone call is the best way to effectively convert inbound leads into qualified sales opportunities for your company.

This is because the odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are so much higher when the lead is immediately contacted after following a website conversion. As customers, it can make them feel more important and that you truly value their business. This can build customer loyalty and benefit your brand greatly.

When you are able to make a well-planned and timely call to an inbound lead, it is far more effective than any volume of cold calling. You will also have far more respect from the customer than if you were to delay contact or cold call them given the chance. This is because you know exactly what your prospect is searching for based on their most recent browsing behavior.

On top of that, you will have enough information about your prospect to do some initial research about the organization they work for and what their role is within the company.

Send out personalized and well-written emails

Email marketing has always been, and always will be a very effective tactic when it comes to lead nurturing. Better yet, by personalizing these emails, you will likely get far better results. In fact, a study done by Accenture found out that roughly 41% of customers switched businesses due to the lack of personalization.

Your customers will feel more appreciated and valued if you are to personalize any contact you have with them. There are many ways for you to personalize your emails when improving your lead nurturing strategy. You can choose to send triggered emails when a customer completes actions, clicks on specific links, demonstrates a very high level of engagement, or visits certain pages on your site.

When you combine the power of behavioral-triggered emails and marketing personalization, you can deliver the perfect marketing messages to the right people at the right time. Make sure that everything you send out is well-written. Communication with spelling errors, grammatical areas, and bad readability will make customers feel as if you have rushed to contact them.

This can reflect poorly on your business.

Use lead scoring tactics

For all people who are completely new to the concept of lead scoring, this methodology is used to rank prospects on an intelligent scale that represents the expected value each lead represents to the organization.

Lead scoring can be implemented in most marketing automation platforms. This is done by assigning specific numeric values to certain website browsing behaviors, social media interactions, and even conversion events. The resulting score is essentially used to determine which leads are the ones that should be nurtured a bit more and which ones should be followed up with by a sales rep.

Align your Sales and Marketing strategies

When your marketing and sales align, it enables your lead nurturing strategies to become more successful. This means that your customer retention rates will drastically improve. For both sales and marketing to contribute to lead nurturing, you must identify the exact points in a buyer’s journey that prospects should be transitioned between teams.

In order to do this, you need to consider different triggers such as workflow enrollment, conversion events, and even lead scoring. The shared responsibilities, expectations, and goals for this cross-team collaboration are best outlined in a sales and marketing service level agreement, also known as an SLA.

By creating an SLA, the two teams will be able to effectively help to hold each other accountable for converting leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers.

The Bottom Line

Now, it is time to summarize what these seven effective lead nurturing tactics actually entail. Let’s take a look!

1. Targeted Content: Tailor entertaining, intriguing, and delightful content to target audience members in order to identify the most qualified leads.
2. Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing: Be able to reach and nurture your target audience where they are, on multiple different channels rather than email.
3. Multiple Touches: Boost touches with an excellent mix of content channels and types in order to increase engagement and interactions among target audience members.
4. Timely Follow Ups- Be able to follow up with your leads in a timely manner in order to keep them interested and engaged. You can also keep your brand top of mind with this strategy.
5. Personalized Emails- When you are able to, you need to personalize your emails and any other lead nurturing tactics to help with customer retention.
6. Lead Scoring- Implement an effective lead scoring strategy to help you find which leads you should focus your time on.
7. Sales and Marketing Alignment: Align both your marketing and sales team in order to improve your lead nurturing tactics and boost customer retention.

By using all of these tactics, or even just some, your efforts are bound to be effective.