Best Tactics for Nurturing Leads

Not too long ago, most lead nurturing efforts came down to drip email campaigns personalized for each stage of the marketing funnel. But as the market grew ever more competitive, brands realized they needed to adopt a more creative, multi-channel approach to engage and nurture leads if they wanted to boost their conversion and client retention rates. 

In a nutshell, lead nurturing involves adopting multi-channel marketing tactics suitable for each digital channel and customer journey stage. In practice, the process is somewhat more intricate, of course. Below, we will discuss some of the most effective tactics for nurturing leads and essential factors marketers should consider while designing their long-term lead generation and nurturing strategy.  

Explore New Ways of Audience Targeting

The importance of creating detailed buyer personas for future audience segmentation cannot be underestimated – this is the cornerstone of every marketing strategy. Besides the conventional targeting approaches that imply studying lead demographic and behavioral data, marketers could consider a few additional targeting tactics for narrower segmenting. Some possible examples include:

• Technographic segmentation: segments users based on the technology they use and is especially useful for tech brands targeting specific platforms or technologies.
• Engagement level: we all know that leads are not made equal, so it makes sense to monitor your audience engagement levels with the brand on social media for future lead scoring. 
• Customer preferences: here, the list can go on for pages, but the obvious start is to analyze specific customer preferences. In e-commerce, for example, generative AI already does wonders analyzing customers’ past behavior and offering suggestions for future purchases – just like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon already suggest new products based on their clients’ browsing history.

Speaking of AI, one should not forget predictive segmentation, which helps create detailed buyer personas and offers accurate suggestions on future marketing tactics. In the B2B segment, brands simply cannot do without firmographic segmentation, which helps hand-pick companies that could benefit from acquiring your products or services. The method is based on analyzing industry, size, company specifics, and much more. 

Understanding the Customer Journey

After figuring out detailed buyer personas, the next step is to consider how each of the target buyers progresses through the essential marketing funnel stages. In most cases, the progression logic will be similar, but with some products and services, additional levels of differentiation may be necessary. Still, there are a few types of promotional materials that can help nurture all sorts of leads at different stages of their customer journey.

• Awareness stage: when leads are only becoming aware of your brand, it’s wise to emphasize general information about your products, focusing on the unique value proposition (UVP). Investing in quality content marketing, SEO, and paid advertising can help with that.
• Consideration stage: this stage can become a tipping point in the customer journey, which is why organizations should invest in personalized email marketing. The best promo materials at this stage are product guides and comparisons – possibly with free demo offers. At this stage, it also makes sense to retarget ads for leads who have visited the website but have not made a purchase.
• Decision stage: during this phase, brands need to be extra careful with personalization. This is when custom segmentation comes into play – a personalized, carefully targeted offer based on the lead’s previous behavior will most likely result in conversion. Clear calls-to-action are a must here, while a simplified checkout process (especially for e-commerce) is of great help for conversion optimization because it helps prevent last-minute drop-outs.  
• Post-purchase/ Retention stage: a very important and, sadly, largely underappreciated stage that can help retain clients and turn them into regular customers, if managed right. The more advanced the product, the more opportunities a brand has for onboarding. Offering guides and tutorials can help retain clients and prepare the ground for future up-selling and cross-selling. With simpler products, introducing loyalty programs or offering personalized discounts can help achieve the same effect. 

These are the essential tactics a brand can adopt to nurture leads and turn them into regular customers. A combination of content marketing, email automation, and consistent follow-up strategies is usually enough to build this kind of connection with leads. Below, we will discuss each of these communication channels in more detail. 

Leveraging Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the most powerful tools for lead generation, no matter if the content is distributed via social networks, email marketing campaigns, or SEO-optimized blog posts. Depending on the industry segment (B2C vs B2B), and customer journey stage, content types may differ, but one thing is certain — brands can never go wrong with emphasizing their product UVP. There are several proven tactics that help not only with conversion optimization but also with client retention, for example: 

• Optimizing content for every channel to make sure leads get access to unique promotional materials;
• Using relevant lead magnets, especially during the awareness and consideration stage;
• Regularly A/B testing landing pages and experimenting with calls to action for greater conversion optimization;
• Searching for ways to personally engage with followers through social comments rather than using content marketing as a single-way broadcast channel. 

Marketing Automation & Lead Scoring

Email automation can help brands turn their CRM into a true lead management system, and lead scoring plays a huge part in that. Lead scoring is a logical addition to lead segmentation, but with scoring, prospective clients are also assigned a score based on their perceived value for a business. 

The scoring logic may vary; it makes sense to start with the basic parameters necessary for lead segmentation (i.e., demographic and behavior) and later progress to custom metrics, which may even include negative scoring – unsubscribes, periods of inactivity, checkout drop-offs, etc. Based on this data, brands can customize their workflows and create streamlined, automated content distribution patterns.  

Follow-Up Strategies

The best way for brands to build customer loyalty is through email marketing and quality follow-up strategies can help achieve this. While there is no universal formula for choosing the right follow-up frequency, careful segmentation and consequent content personalization can point marketing teams in the right direction.  

Here are a few other tips that can engage leads and boost conversion rates:

• Use a multi-channel approach whenever possible: even though most brands follow up with leads through email, it makes sense to leverage other communication channels, including phone and social media – if leads share this info, of course.
• Retarget ads for leads at different stages of their customer journey for maximum effect. 
• Outreach personally whenever possible and try to engage in direct conversation with leads, especially high-scoring ones. 
• Ask customers to share their feedback through surveys to keep improving your lead nurturing efforts.

Measuring and Analyzing Results

Choosing the right sales KPIs is not always easy, and you should first align your sales and marketing strategies before you can decide which KPIs to track. To make sure sales and marketing strategies align perfectly, pay special attention to transition points at each stage of the customer journey and set clear goals for each stage of the funnel. While analyzing the success of an organization’s lead nurturing efforts is not always based on pure Math alone, it’s wise to focus on the following KPIs:

• Lead velocity: how quickly a lead moves down the sales funnel is the surest indicator of a brand’s nurturing efforts. Here, it is important to identify the bottlenecks in the pipeline where most leads ‘slow down’ to figure out potential solutions for better lead engagement. 
• Pipeline velocity: one of the possible solutions to speed up the conversion is to shorten the sales cycle. As you analyze the lead velocity ratio and identify the most common bottlenecks, you may want to eliminate these bottlenecks from the pipeline. 
• Customer llifetime value to customer acquisition cost: obviously, improving CLV to CAC ratio is about increasing the first and reducing the second, but in practice, this is not always easy to achieve. Still, all tactics listed above aim for this purpose, and regular analysis can help get closer to this goal. 
• Sales-marketing alignment: many parameters, including conversion rate, pipeline velocity, and cycle length, can affect this score. But while the actual metrics to determine the score may differ, the best effect is achieved through regular communication, joint planning, constant feedback, and uninterrupted collaboration.  
• Brand sentiment: this KPI implies using social media listening to collect data from all available digital channels and analyzing it either manually or with the help of generative AI. Whichever method you choose, keep in mind that you need to track sentiment over time rather than focus on short timeframes. 

Conclusion 

Brands that embrace multi-channel lead nurturing tactics while carefully aligning their sales and marketing goals always win in the long run. Understanding your target audience and their needs at each stage of the customer journey is one of the surest ways to convert leads and boost customer retention rates. 

Plus, if you keep updating your lead database through proven email list building strategies we already discussed in our previous posts, you will have access to a regular supply of new leads to engage and nurture. So, stay with us for more tips on leveraging the full power of marketing and growing your business!