What is lead nurturing?
It is an automated marketing technique that allows you to develop relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and at every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of potential customers and providing the information and answers they need.
In other words, lead nurturing is a technique that seeks to inform and educate potential buyers so that your company can meet its objective. It can be used both to accompany our potential customer to the purchase (acquisition). As well as to increase the average ticket of a buyer (loyalty) by means of different upselling or crosselling techniques.
What is it based on? Principles of lead nurturing
Nowadays, this technique, as we have said before, applies to all the phases in which our potential client or recurrent client is. Think that the main objective is to be able to provide value, capture and build loyalty through different automated interactions.
As you can see, a world of possibilities opens up for us to interact with our potential lead. In fact, nowadays, these interactions take shape in many ways:
- In the form of email (the most common and oldest)
- Retargeting (to impact a user who has shown interest in us)
- Intelligent CTAs or chatbots
- And many others that we will explain later
But with so many possibilities of interaction, it is important to know the affinity (lead scoring) that this potential customer has with us.
Lead scoring is nothing more than a scoring system that takes into account:
- If this lead is similar to our buyer persona (potential customer)
- The interest that the person has shown in our brand, through different interactions
- Finally, the buying process in which the lead is in
By combining these three variables, we can get an idea of the real interest that the potential customer has in making a purchase. Once we have classified our lead we can trigger different interactions in a fully automatic way that will be more effective.
In the end, and being practical, it is not the same, a person who has only entered our website once and has left us their email, than one who has left us their email and has visited our prices page or has abandoned the shopping cart. The level of interaction or how we have to educate or treat one or the other is different.
But how to get started? Step by step
We know what the objective of lead nurturing is (to provide value, to attract and retain customers). And the how, which is to define interactions in a fully automated way, using for example remarketing techniques or chatbots. So far so good, but in order to get started, we recommend that you follow the steps below.
Steps to follow in Lead Nurturing
First of all, before we start creating automatic chains, it is important that we:
Try to get more information from our user: asking for too much information at the beginning can be a conversion killer. In fact, it is recommended not to ask for more than the right information from the user in order to get them to leave their email address via a form. Knowing this limitation, the best thing to do is that once the user has left their email address, try to ask for additional information, for example, access to exclusive content or exclusive offers. In other words, offer a hook with the aim of complementing the information.
Getting to know our company: once we know that our potential customer is more or less close to our buyer persona. We must try to get them to know our company. That is to say, the first chain of automated emails that we will send will be focused on getting the lead to become familiar with the company. Therefore, the type of content must be quality content focused on creating a better brand image. Do not try to send promotional content at this stage as it can be very intrusive and spoil the potential interaction with the lead.
Getting the user to enter into a purchasing process: after our customer has read several of our emails focused on general content is when we try to get them to enter into some stage of the process of acquiring our service. So, as you can see, we enter a new chain with educational content that urges the purchase of one of our products.
Lead nurturing to close the sale: finally, and knowing that our potential customer is at the stage of a purchase process, for example, has abandoned the shopping cart. We launch a chain of emails with the aim of getting them to make that purchase. In the email chain, we can highlight the properties of our product.
As you have seen in the step-by-step, we have mentioned two very important things to emphasise. The first is the need to be able to classify our potential customers (scoring) and the second is the ability to send emails according to different situations. So for both things we need tools that allow us to address both actions.
The most important lead nurturing tools
Scoring: a scoring system that allows us to qualify our leads, in order to understand whether they are more or less qualified to make a purchase or achieve a goal that we have set. Always taking into account the following factors:
- Affinity to our buyer persona
- Knowledge of our company
- In what buying process he/she is in
Smart lists: being practical is the ability to generate lists under certain conditions. For example, we want to send an email to people who have downloaded our ebook. To do this, we first need to know who these people are and generate the corresponding list.
Triggers: This is a fundamental part of lead nurturing, it allows you to program actions based on a stimulus or trigger. Continuing with the previous case, the trigger would be “the person who has downloaded our ebook”.
Workflows: this is a series of automated emails, sms or a set of messages that are activated according to the subscriber’s behaviour or data. The customer enters our website, downloads our ebook, and we send him an email explaining our brand values. They are very interested and open it, then three days later we send them another email offering a product. As he is like-minded, he ends up buying it, the aim of this workflow (customer steps/possibilities tree) was to get him to buy.
Dynamic CTAs: customisable buttons with the aim of interacting with the user. These allow you to create a more relevant and effective experience.
Retargeting: knowing that people have downloaded our ebook, thanks to the generation of dynamic lists. We re-target these leads with an email, this allows you to target people who have shown some interest in your service or product.
Chatbots: chatbots can be customised with the aim of informing the lead about what may be most relevant to them on our website, for example. We can try to launch personalised messages in the chatbot’s conversation window in order to bring the user closer to the purchase.
Education and Loyalty
Lead nurturing allows us to work, as we said at the beginning, on all the phases of the funnel, from lead acquisition through lead education to customer loyalty.
Education: it is normally oriented towards customer acquisition. The intention is to inform the customer about the different doubts that may arise throughout the purchasing process. For example, if I want to buy a mountain bike, first I get information, then I look for several models, compare prices and decide which one is the most appropriate for me. Lead nurturing can help us to complement relevant information to our potential customer with the intention that he/she buys from us. Lead nurturing can also play an important role in the loyalty processes of companies, especially in consumer projects and e-commerce.
Loyalty: it consists of getting our customer to repeat. Lead nurturing plays a fundamental role. In fact, we can collect very relevant information to follow up our customers and provide them with information or complementary products after their first purchase. For example, I have already bought the mountain bike we were talking about earlier, we know the date I bought it and where I live because it is in the delivery address. I could start a chain of emails with a first email about routes around my city, then ask him if I have been useful and finally after a month send an email offering an additional product, reflecting that with it he will be able to enjoy more of his cycling trips.
Closing
I hope that with this short video you have understood a little better:
What is lead nurturing?
What is it based on? Principles of lead nurturing
But how to get started? Step by step
Education and Loyalty
If you found this interesting, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel because in the following video I will introduce you to the essential tools that we use in all our marketing automation projects.
