What is lead nurturing and how important is it in your marketing strategy?

If you run a business and you have a website, you know how important it is to exploit this channel for lead generation to collect data from prospects.

But, perhaps, what you don’t know is how to make the most of the potential of this data to communicate at every stage of the customer journey and build profitable relationships.

These are the cornerstones of lead nurturing. Curious?

Don’t waste your time! Read our article to find out what this technique is, what it is for and what strategies you can adopt to put it into practice.

What is lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is a inbound marketing technique that consists in delivering automated and personalised content to leads, prospects and customers at different stages of the customer journey.

As the term itself indicates, this technique helps to cultivate and grow relationships with users who come into contact with your brand, from first interaction through to purchase (and beyond) and create a lasting relationship.

Your main goal should be to make each lead feel the centre of interest in your company, to the point where you can be perceived as the only option to satisfy needs.

To do this it is therefore necessary that a lead nurturing campaign is calibrated on each lead and prospect: the campaign contents must answer in a direct and personal way to the user’s questions on the basis of his specific needs.

From small things come great things: cultivating relationships with users day after day, taking care of the small details serves to lay the foundations for increasing sales and transforming a user passing through your website into a loyal customer.

Why lead nurturing is relevant for your business

Usually acquired leads, although interesting in your brand and your proposals, are not yet ready to buy.

It is therefore necessary to involve them and “push” them naturally in the customer journey towards the purchase phase in order to transform them from leads into customers.

Today, the traditional funnel model is being increasingly questioned, since user behaviours are more and more varied and particular: marketers must try to adapt their strategies to these variations.

That’s why lead nurturing is so important: it’s about being present in the users’ memory and being found whenever they need you.

Still not persuaded?

Here are the main benefits that will make lead nurturing a strategy you can no longer ignore:

• It creates engagement with prospects through honest and continuous dialogue;
• It is a direct communication channel;
• You can use this strategy to define your brand authority: if you create valuable informative content, users will perceive you as an expert in the field and not simply a salesman. This generates trust;
• It is a marketing automated strategy;
• It is not only about customer acquisition, but also about cultivating relationships with existing customers: making them feel special will help to retain them.

How lead nurturing works: the basic outlines

As we stated above, lead nurturing is not about immediate sales (although it has a big impact on them).

Rather, it is about keeping the relationship with users alive and holding the brand at the forefront of the target audience‘s mind, so that when they are ready to buy, they will think of you as the only possible solution.

In general, therefore, a lead nurturing strategy is based on some indispensable concepts:

• Value of information: if you want to create a truthful and trusting relationship with your users, you cannot simply send out promotional spam emails. You need to know the needs of your audience and create content with the aim of adding value to their daily lives. Why should they open your emails? Because they know they can find something useful, entertaining and, why not, educational in it that will take them one step further;
• Personalisation: not all users are the same. Everyone has different needs or is simply at a different stage of the customer journey. Don’t send the same email to your entire mailing list, but try to segment your target audience and offer different content to each one;
• Do not sell, but lay the basis for it: lead nurturing is all about this concept. If you build a relationship of trust, it is very likely that the contact will come to you when they are ready to buy;

Proper contents (sent at the right time), customisation and consistency: these are the keywords of a good strategy.

But now it is time to understand how to plan a lead nurturing campaign and which tools you should use to reach success. Find out how with us.

Tools and techniques for a successful lead nurturing campaign

As we have said, a lead nurturing strategy is useful at every stage of the buying process, so it can be used to achieve different goals: awareness, consideration, conversion and post-purchase.

Depending on the type of objective you want to achieve, you can choose which channel to use to get in touch with your users.

• Social media: more than promoting, you can use social media to entertain and create engagement. If the user feels they are important to you and gets valuable content, they are more likely to create a lasting and trusting relationship with you;
• Google Ads: being found is very important in the early stages of the funnel. Google Ads help to give you the boost at this stage and it is great tool to create audience segments;
• EmailAn email (or electronic mail) is a method of exchanging communications through the internet. It is one of the most used features on the web and the number one mean... marketing: it is essential to send direct one-to-one communications to readers. In view of lead nurturing, every email and newsletter must be focused on the readers and their needs.

Among all these, however, email marketing remains the preferred channel because of its directness and susceptibility to segmentation. All you need is a mailing list obtained honestly by following GDPR rules.

Email marketing automation

To optimise your work and achieve good results, it is unthinkable to work without email marketing automation platforms. With these softwares, infact, it is possible to know tastes, habits and purchasing preferences of users.

This makes it possible to send personalised, relevant and less repetitive messages: from mass communication to one-to-one communication.

A normal email platform such as Gmail or Outlook are therefore not sufficient for these activities. You need to rely on a professional email marketing platform such as GetResponse, MailUp, iContact and many others.

Among these, you can choose to adopt our Mailsenpai, which can automate all your communications, segmenting mailing lists and scheduling automatic mailings based on user behaviour for previous newsletters.

Get the most out of your lead nurturing strategy: tips to remember

For your lead nurturing plan, you need to work on a content strategy.

Here are some examples of emails you can send to your leads to provide them with added value:

• Updates: informing users about the latest industry news will help you to position as an expert professional. You could therefore share news related to your sector, opinion articles on a specific topic, your intervention during an event, a live broadcast with another player in the sector;
• Testimonials and case studies: telling how your product/service has helped a customer solve a problem and achieve goals is always a trump card. Testimonials are always a great incentive to convince the hesitants to convert;
• Useful links: share with users all the information that could be useful to improve their lives (obviously if related to the area of your business). For example, if there are new useful tools, funding announcements, other interesting articles and much more, always share it with them;
• Recap of the week: summarise the week’s events by offering your own point of view, tell about things that have inspired you, recommend books and experiences that can help people improve their lives.

As you can see, all this contents are not directly sales-oriented, yet helping you to establish yourself as an expert has long-term sales consequences.

Therefore, we advise you to find your own writing style and specific tone of voice to position yourself in the market and be recognisable.

Also, research the content you share and create an editorial plan so that you are always aware of the topics you cover and the timeframe you follow.

Finally, last but not least, always remember to include a call to action; the text and link will depend on your objectives (inviting the user to contact you is always a good solution).

In a nutshell….

In conclusion, you will have understood how important but equally difficult it is to implement a lead nurturing strategy.

Our advice is always to set your goals, know your audience and monitor the progress of a campaign (you can either adjust it in the moment or learn from mistakes for the next campaign).

Using an email marketing platform is also helpful.

Mailsenpai is a tool that offers support for the creation of email marketing campaigns, ensuring 98% deliverability, automating processes, providing predefined templates for the creation of your newsletters and much more.

It also supports you in managing your social media marketing strategies which, as you know by now, are another tool for cultivating your relationships with users.

Want to know more? Visit our website or get in touch with our team! We are always at your disposal!