By Gerry Wilson
2019 is here and businesses have geared up for leading-edge conversion techniques. Many companies have already discovered the most effective lead nurturing techniques, and thus you need to uncover them to stay ahead in the competitive digital landscape.
If leads do not qualify, fall out of the funnel, or are not nurtured, a business will suffer greatly. Therefore, we have created this article to reveal the best lead nurturing techniques for small businesses in 2019. Read along to discover everything.
Organize Your Database
In case, you do not nurture leads properly, there will be least chances for them to proceed in the funnel. It is the reason that the prime step in any nurturing strategy is the organization and categorization of leads. It involves categorizing leads in different groups based on individual characteristics, needs, and interest.
Since a lead can fall into different criteria, among the prime ones are buyer persona and lifecycle stage. For instance, you cannot simply ask a 4th grade student to take a high school exam. Having said, leads segmentation can nurture leads throughout the buyers’ journey through sharing content in a specific order, preparing them for conversion eventually.
So how do you actually know about what a buyer is looking for? It all begins with building buyer personas. Thus, it is essential to spend time and invest resources on getting the personas right. Most importantly, a lead nurturing strategy can fail if you do not include buyer personas in a strategy.
Having said that, a buyer persona can be based on aspects such as background information, demographic, purchasing triggers, buying behavior, preferred content, and more. These factors can assist you in categorizing the leads in the most effective manner. In this way, you will be able to nurture leads hassle-freely.
Email Marketing
Email stands as the prime way to nurture leads. It enables a business to initiate a direct conversion with the leads. On top, you should include three main types of emails in a lead nurturing strategy. These emails include:
Nurturing Emails
These emails hold the best potential to automate workflows. These emails can be sent after considering the actions that a subscriber has with a business over a period. This type of emails can personalize end users’ experience, speeding up sales cycle and reducing the cost of customer acquisition.
Triggered Emails
These emails include welcome mail or cart emails that are sent as a response to a specific action that a subscriber takes. These emails tends to be relevant and time specific.
Drip Emails
Drip emails can keep a brand at top of mind as leads proceed in a buyer journey. A drip email can assist in nurturing fresh leads and retention of the existing audience.
Since, traditional emails can just present content to readers, the personalized ones can be more powerful in term of connecting and bringing in engagement.
Nurturing Personalization
Personalization is often an underestimated lead nurturing technique. It requires merging marketing automation system, segmentation, and lead data, creating a relationship with leads through recognizing leads as individual having distinct needs and wants.
Interestingly, a large number of customers are aware of these emails, and think of them as the ones with their names at top of it. However, effective personalization requires a person to customize content specifically for a single customer. It can be only possible if you create segments that we have discussed. In this way, you will be able to utilize the segments for creating personalized content and sent it respectively.
In the modern day technology landscape, a business can achieve this task through making use of dynamic content that enables you to present different versions of an email, landing page, or web page based on the person who is at receiving end. It means that rather than setting individual campaigns for a segment and routing leads to the best one, you can build a single campaign. It will save time, allowing you to make campaign tracking easier and delivering a personalized experience to end users.
Apart from messaging and content, you can deliver great experience to users by adapting a responsive website design. According to Google, about 61 percent of users tend to exit mobile site they had faced an issue when accessing. Moreover, the remaining 40 percent of visitors go to competitors’ website. In case, your templates are not designed to be suitable for a specific device, you can face a risk of losing them.
Automated Workflows
If you want to enhance efficiency of sales along with your marketing team, then look no further than automated workflow. A workflow serves as automated actions triggered by specific events including form submission or an online purchase.
Workflows can be utilized to nurture leads through guiding them across the sales funnel in a systematic manner. When a lead submits a form to download the 1st among the series of content tailored for individual stage in a buyer’s journey. Once download is received, a lead will be placed in a workflow, triggering email sending and encouraging them to download the upcoming one in series. Through this way, workflows can ensure that leads are consistently nurtured without requiring you to send emails manually.
In the B2B landscape, workflows come into handy for filling in the time gap. Through leveraging the workflows, the leads can be nurtured hassle freely.
Determining Success through Reporting & Analytics
To win, you need to set a goal first. Thus, you need to set benchmarks for achievements to gauge success of campaign. It is essential to set benchmarks for what you wish to achieve regardless of the fact that it either is an enhanced repurchase rate, rapid sales cycle, or enhanced conversion rate. The moment you set these benchmarks, you become able to utilize the gathered data from analytics platforms, determining if your campaign is over or underperforming along with the areas that need improvement.
When talking about lead nurturing, the exchange of information from marketing and sales team is relevant for understanding what campaigns are delivering the best and invalid leads. You can create a monthly report, highlighting a clear view of campaign’s KPIs. In this way, you will be able to measure success and create benchmarks for upcoming campaigns.
For more tips you can use in 2019, read about the leading digital marketing trends for this year.
