Lead Nurturing Guide Part 1: Lead Nurturing Builds Effective Relationships with Leads throughout the Buying Journey

Are you having trouble converting leads into customers? You know leads are coming in at the top of your sales funnel, but you’re not sure how to entertain their specific needs, and promote your products and services to them without being too pushy. In such circumstances, lead nurturing is the most viable solution.

In its latest edition of The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, marketing automation software developer Marketo (@Marketo) provided a good overview of the basics and technicalities of the lead nurturing process.

Lead Nurturing versus Drip Marketing

As Marketo puts it, lead nurturing is “the process of building effective relationships with potential customers throughout the buying journey.” By implementing lead nurturing, businesses are able to increase engagement as well as conversions. A study by MarketingSherpa (@MarketingSherpa) suggests that as much as 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales because of lack of lead nurturing.

Because of its nature, which is basically to maintain an on-going relationship with prospects via different communication channels, lead nurturing is often confused with drip marketing. Drip marketing is a marketing strategy that sends or drips communications, such as email and direct mail, to prospects over time.

The difference between the two, however, is that drip marketing is “static and non-adaptive,” whereas lead nurturing is “personalized, adaptive, and can listen and react to buyer behavior in real-time.”

Elements of an Engaging Lead Nurturing Program

According to Marketo’s benchmark study, on average, 50% of leads aren’t prepared to make a purchase. Hence, businesses need to incorporate lead nurturing into their marketing strategies to build and maintain a long-term relationship with their prospects throughout each stage of the sales process. But how do businesses do that?

In the guide, Marketo mentioned the four most important elements businesses need to pay heed to in order to create engaging lead nurturing:

• Being trustworthy. Most consumers regard businesses that do not accomplish expectations as spam. Setting expectations and fulfilling them in the process “with every communication you share” (thus building trust), is definitely the key to sealing the deal.

• Being relevant. When you are relevant, you can pinpoint the exact needs of your audience, and can determine how and when they want to hear about these things from you. Segmenting and targeting buyers according to the data they share can help a lot to establish relevance.

• Adapting a multi-channel strategy. Today, providing an integrated experience to customers across every channel—be it email, social media, blogs, or websites—is highly crucial for marketers, as technology is continuously evolving and consumer behavior is constantly changing.

• Being strategic and impactful. To have a strategic and impactful lead nurturing program, you need to make use of the right sets of metrics that will allow you to measure your success rate and further improve your tactics.

Do you implement an engaging lead nurturing program for your business? What other advantages of lead nurturing can you cite?

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