Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing can be defined as a series of tactics and processes designed to build relationships with prospects and customers, even when they aren’t actively looking to buy. Top performing companies implement lead nurturing tactics to set various benchmarks in order to achieve best practices.

The top three challenges that companies face in terms of lead nurturing are:

1.       Developing nurture marketing content

2.       Quality of customer data

3.       Measuring return on investment

Nurture marketing is about using value-added content to build relationships and earn a reputation for your brand as a trusted adviser in the purchase cycle. Creating marketing content in this competitive era could be tricky for businesses. It should be designed in a way that it matches to the emerging trends and yet is not explosive, as it could lead to a hyper-competitive environment. Recent studies show that marketers are seeing diminishing returns from marketing tactics like mass email campaigns. Top performers who embrace lead nurturing excel in market-share growth, revenue growth and customer satisfaction because prospects disregard generic broadcasting marketing communications. Multiple factors like trigger marketing, lead scoring, content marketing, multi-channel engagement, and the use of multiple lead nurturing campaign leverage top companies to maximize ROI.

Use of Lead Nurturing consists of the following:

1.       Value added content that is engaging, captivating along the entire spectrum of the lead lifecycle: from lead to prospect to customer.

2.       Multi-channel communications that will describe your target audience.

3.       Drip-marketing & trigger marketing tactics. With drip marketing, marketers pre-configure the time intervals between communications with prospects.

4.       Lead scoring. Lead scoring is an automated way of aggregating prospect behavior to qualify and determine the propensity to buy.

Since, the buyers have become more informed, it affects their buying decisions. Depending on the organization’s objectives, different nurture marketing tactics can be configured to address different stages of buying cycle.

1.       Revenue from unknown prospects (Leads)

2.       Revenue from known prospects who chose not to buy in the past (Prospects)

3.       Revenue from customers through cross-selling and up-selling (Customers)

Marketing Metrics for Lead Nurturing

1.       Click-through Rate: Click-through rates are a measure of engagement in digital media on the website, email campaigns, landing pages, etc. This is a great way to ascertain how effective different lead nurturing messages are at engaging the right target audience.

2.       Lead Score: Lead scoring assigns numeric scores to prospects based on behavior, activity and profile attributes providing a clear picture to the B2B marketers about the prospects that have a higher propensity to buy.

3.       Conversion Rate: This is used to measure tangible revenue like the engagement and the number of times an asset was downloaded or even a possible visit on a critical webpage.

4.       Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A metric used to measure a prospect’s propensity to purchase. MQL ensures that marketers are educating and qualifying leads before they are passed to sales.

5.       Campaign Attribution: Campaign attribution tells marketers which campaigns are sourcing qualified leads and the number of leads generated.

According to Gleanster, lead nurturing delivers 4x higher engagement with prospects who are not ready to buy in the short term but still represent viable prospects. That means with the same spend and the same lead volume, your organization could quadruple revenue by plugging the holes in the pipeline with lead nurturing.