Boost Sales With These 8 Lead Nurturing Techniques (Infographic)

Churn. It’s one of the scariest words for professionals and business owners who try to generate leads, turn them into prospects, and then turn those prospects into customers. If you are losing current customers to churn, then how can you give your leads confidence in your brand?

However, utilizing the proper lead nurturing techniques can be your lifeline. Without these practices, “churn” may become part of your daily routine. Lead nurturing is a strategy that is constantly evolving, so it’s essential to be caught up with current trends.

In this article, we’ll go over the basics of lead nurturing, discuss how you can attract and engage with new leads, and provide techniques to nurture your leads into customers.

What Is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is when you engage and build relationships with your prospects before converting them into customers. As part of the marketing and sales strategy that moves prospects through the sales funnel, the marketing department is typically the first point of contact for lead nurturing programs.

You may be asking yourself: “Why the marketing team instead of sales?”

Well, that’s because a big part of lead nurturing is creating personalized content campaigns. Your content marketing should work in tandem with your sales and customer experience teams to educate your prospects with the goal of conversion.

Content marketing campaigns will allow you to create an ongoing dialogue while also building trust. Since lead nurturing is a never-ending process, you can even outsource and automate your lead nurturing efforts. We’ve included eight ways for you to do this.

8 Lead Nurturing Techniques

Although creating a lead nurturing program may feel like a time-consuming process, it’s important to remember how vital it is to your overall sales and marketing strategy and success as a company.

1. Outreach Campaigns

Outreach campaigns—phone, email, social media, or ad campaigns—generally contain two components: a target audience and the specific goal you wish to achieve.

Goals can be anything from educating an audience to email surveys to gain insight into the customer experience. These can happen at all levels of the sales funnel and can be made easier by outsourcing your campaigns.

2. Segmentation of Your Contact List

By segmenting your contact list using customer relationship management software, you are able to narrow your target audience for individual campaigns.

Contact list segmentation can narrow down your target audience into demographics and buyer’s stage. This automated process can help you A/B test your audiences and clarify their buyer personas.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing campaigns aren’t only an extremely effective lead nurturing technique but are also more cost effective when compared to social media marketing campaigns.

Make sure to create a marketing email campaign that touches base with your leads every step throughout the process from a welcome email to re-engagement emails. These marketing campaigns can become stale, though, so remember to keep them fresh and update them regularly.

4. Personalization

It’s a must to personalize all of your interactions with your leads, prospects, and customers. No matter where they are at in the sales process, creating a unique customer experience can do wonders for lead nurturing and conversions.

Use first names in emails and chatbots, stick to your brand voice guideline, and test and measure your outreach campaigns for sincerity. Make sure these emails aren’t too personalized, or else they may feel too upfront.

Utilize email personalization by creating authentic emails and product recommendations based on their purchase history and website interactions.

Optimize campaign and CX personalization from customer feedback from surveys and research. This data should influence your outreach campaigns and help you address new leads’ questions for future campaigns.

5. Landing Pages

Whether leads, prospects, or customers get to your landing page organically or through email conversions, they should include two things:

• Capture the reader’s attention.
• A call-to-action (CTA) that encourages them to sign up for, purchase, or subscribe to your product.

Landing pages are most effective when they allow users to interact with them. Include a live chat or customer service number to encourage your leads further into the sales funnel.

6. Surveys

Surveys are a critical part of lead generation and nurturing, and are evidence that the lead nurturing process never ends.

Since surveys help you identify the pain points of the customer experience, it’s vital that you include them periodically throughout the sales process. Identifying these pain points can help you avoid churn and burnout, and will help you identify your target audience.

Automate surveys in the lead nurturing process by having specific customer actions trigger a survey to be sent to them. Take this feedback and include it in your customer experience data. This will allow your company to address specific needs and make improvements.

7. Live Chat Feature

It’s important to respond quickly to everyone in your sales funnel during your lead nurturing strategy. By implementing live chats, SMS, and social media messenger, you can improve your customer’s experience and reduce churn.

Live chat automation may feel like a tricky task, but there are chat and campaign services that can operate live chats for your businesses 24/7/365 to relieve you of some pressure and give customers the peace of mind of knowing that somebody will always be there to help.

8. Lead Scoring

One of the most important aspects of a lead nurturing strategy is lead scoring. Implement lead scores by rating your leads by how they engage and interact with your website, emails, and social media profiles.

For example, assigning points to leads can be as easy as:

• Assigning a lead 10 points for subscribing to your email campaign.
• Email conversions taking a prospect to a landing page will gain them another 10 points.
• Did they spend more than five minutes on a page? Assign more points.
• Assign even more points if your lead did a click-through on your CTA.

The higher your lead scores, the more likely you are to convert them into a prospect and then a full-fledged customer.

The Importance of Lead Nurturing

Now that you know the basics of lead nurturing, as well as eight techniques to execute and automate it, it’s easy to see the benefits it will have for your business.

By utilizing the proper resources and outsourcing with reliable companies when needed, you can nurture your leads into prospects and your prospects into customers.