11 Steps to Successful Lead Nurturing

By Lisa Cramer, President and Co-Founder, LeadLife Solutions

When building a successful nurturing program, it’s more than just sending a series of emails. Successful nurturing really accomplishes a number of things. It provides the ability to develop a relationship (albeit from a distance) between the prospect and your company. It also provides a non-invasive (if done correctly) approach for introducing the prospect to your value proposition. Finally, good email nurturing should drive more qualified leads to sales.

The following are some basic steps for achieving successful lead nurturing:

1. Define the objective of your nurturing program – and keep it realistic.
   While we would all like to increase our revenue by 50%, making that the objective of your first foray into a nurturing program could be a tall order to fill. Start simple. For example, begin by first increasing measurable interaction between your company and prospects. Then strive to increase the number of qualified leads handed off to Sales.
   
   
2. Understand your prospect profile.
   Lead nurturing is most effective when you understand the profile of target prospects. If a prospect receives an email with language that is either irrelevant or not understandable, it certainly won’t be that effective in helping meet nurturing goals.
   
   
3. Segment your prospect profile based on unique content needs (i.e., industry-specific language versus title language).
   If you don’t have the data needed for effective segmentation, develop a plan to start capturing it (this is also known as progressive profiling).
   
   
4. Understand your prospects’ buy cycle phases
   Effective nurturing helps to move prospects through the buy cycle. But marketers have to understand their buying cycle first. This is not a particular organization’s sales cycle, but truly how customers buy.
   
   
5. Determine what would move your prospect through the phases (for example, thought leadership or education pieces versus ROI tools, etc.), and then develop and map content to these cycles
   Once organizations can identify the buying cycle phases prospects go through to make a decision, marketers have to determine what content would best work for each of those phases. It doesn’t help to nurture a lead if you are talking about pricing and implementation when they are still at the research/education phase of the process. As a matter of fact, that insensitivity most likely would ensure that the prospect unsubscribe from your nurturing.
   
   
6. Write emails that minimize branding and are conversational, engage prospects to take action and are relevant and personal. Leave them anticipating the next email.
   The way copy reads and looks to the prospect is everything. If prospects receive a flashy, heavily branded email (that’s also harder to get to the inbox), they might interpret it as a sales pitch before even reading the text. Fight the marketing urge for heavy branding and simply try and converse with the prospect.
   
   
7. Develop corresponding landing pages that are in sync with the email that drove the prospect there.
   Getting a prospect to interact with nurturing email is important, but where they are directed also is important. Landing pages help focus the message to the prospect and help to drive their behavior even more.
   
   
8. Based on sales cycle length, interest triggers and complexity of the buy cycle, layout a nurturing sequence (i.e., establish proper timing between items).
   This is where organizations need to layout a nurturing sequence or campaign. Timing between emails and conditions or decisions made in the nurturing sequence depend on each organization’s business and level of sophistication.
   
   
9. Implement small, manageable programs to begin.
   We’ve seen too many companies get so excited by the opportunity and flexibility that marketing automation tools provide that they make the nurturing programs so complex that they can’t keep track of or access the metrics. Start simple and then build incrementally.
   
   
10. Measure results.
    The most important facet of successful nurturing is that marketers can identify what’s working and what’s not. Measure prospect interactions (or lack thereof), the number of unsubscribes, promotion of leads to sales, etc. Armed with this visibility, organizations can refine and evolve nurturing programs.
    
    
11. Refine and expand.
    If you are starting on an email lead nurturing program for the first time, expect to make mistakes. It’s okay to start simple and be less effective and build (through metrics and visibility) to more sophistication and more effective use over time.
    
    

Successful lead nurturing is about more than sending out multiple emails over a period of time. It’s about relevance and is best measured by prospect engagement and qualified leads. Lead nurturing can get complex but it doesn’t have to be, especially when you’re just getting started. With relevant messages and metrics in place to evaluate their success, you can quickly become effective with your lead nurturing programs.

Lisa Cramer is President and Co-Founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of an on-demand lead management solution that helps drive revenue by bundling a state of the art marketing automation platform with highly-experienced marketing and sales specialists. In 2009 and 2010, Lisa was recognized as one of the top five “Most Influential People” in sales lead management. For more information on lead management or best practices call 1-800-680-6292 or email info@leadlife.com.

 

 

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