Nurtured leads convert much better.
In fact, companies that do lead nurturing make 50% more sales-ready leads (Forrester Research).
As if that wasn’t enough, each nurtured lead costs 30% less than a non-nurtured one.
In this article, we will break down the lead nurturing process and show how to adopt this approach to win more deals.
What is the Lead Nurturing Process?
The lead nurturing process is a systematic approach to fostering relationships with potential clients in order to move them through the sales funnel.
The end goal of the lead nurturing process is turning a lead into a customer.
Since nurtured leads convert twice better and easier, many businesses invest in lead nurturing strategies that help them stay consistent.
How Does the Lead Nurturing Process Work? 5-Step Framework
Let’s see how the lead nurturing process works in real life.
Take an example of lead nurturing in a B2B SaaS industry. That’s how the whole process could look like:
Step 1: Identify your target audience, including their current needs and pain points.
Identifying what leads you’re going to target is the first step.
If you run a B2B Software business, your target could be project managers and team leads in mid-sized tech companies. The next step is to find out their needs. For example, they would like to employ a tool that improves team collaboration, task management, and project tracking.
They had quite a few missed sales opportunities recently due to department silos and badly executed lead handoff to the sales rep.
As the main pain points, you can identify the fact that the existing tool is too complex for remote team management and is not intuitive enough.
Step 2: Content development and delivery.
You start by making an initial contact content with your leads. This can be done by:
- inviting them to a webinar or a podcast
- offering an ebook
- targeting them with paid ads
The middle funnel content follows right after. For example, you may want to send out a campaign of direct emails that include:
- case studies
- infographic
- video testimonials from similar-sized companies.
These emails should show how your software solved their pain points and what results it helped them to achieve.
The last part is sharing bottom-of-funnel content. An example is an email invitation to a live demo. In this demo, you could show real-time use of your software by a company of your lead size and industry.
Step 3: Engage leads across multiple channels.
Step 3 of the lead nurturing process involves communicating over all three main channels:
- emails (newsletter that features tips on project management and product updates)
- social media (sharing success stories and user-generated content on LinkedIn is an excellent method to nurture your leads)
- webinars, masterclasses, podcasts, etc.
In sales prospecting, there is a huge rise in multichannel prospecting strategy that combines all channels to:
- double lead response rate,
- drastically increase engagement,
- avoid missed sales opportunities,
- create new sales opportunities,
- add consistency to lead managing and nurturing,
- select the right channel for the specific lead.
Step 4: Prioritize which leads to nurture first with lead coring
Make sure you establish criteria for lead scoring, for example:
- Lead downloaded your eBook or attended a webinar (low score).
- Lead viewed the testimonial videos (medium score).
- Lead signed up and attended the live demo (high score).
You must prioritize nurturing leads with high scores since they are most likely to buy soon.
Your follow-up emails need to be personalized and provide them with tons of value.
Direct calls can also be done when nurturing hot leads.
Meanwhile, you can continue to share nurturing content that will increase the interest and engagement of your medium—and low-score leads.
When using lemlist, we suggest A/B testing your campaigns to see what works and getting creative with personalization, videos, and images.
Step 5: Use a strategy for your follow-ups
The success of your lead nurturing process hugely depends on the follow-up strategy you choose.
As an example, you can follow these steps:
- After downloading the eBook, send a follow-up email within 2 days asking if the lead has any questions about the content.
- Post-webinar, send a thank-you email with a link to a recording and a CTA to book a personal demo.
- Post-demo, follow up within a day to address specific questions and discuss potential implementation.
Use data from interactions, like questions asked during a webinar, to personalize your follow-ups.
The better you demonstrate an understanding of your leads’ concerns, the more likely they trust you.
Step 6: Automate your lead nurturing process with the right tool
While all the emails can be done manually, they don’t have to. Especially if you want more advanced nurturing techniques that result in more sales.
Sales engagement platforms like lemlist automate email sequences based on lead behavior and personalize the actual content based on specific interactions.
Take a look at this lemlist template that’s excellent for nurturing leads that already showed interest but hadn’t converted.
This is what you can do with lemlist:
- The powerful sales lead database with over 450 million verified B2B contacts
- Smart email verification
- Multi-channel outreach capabilities: LinkedIn outreach (incl. voice messages), cold email and cold call
- Precise sequence automation
- Advanced personalization features
- A perfect balance between mass outreach and personal touch
- Effortless email customization
- A clear & intuitive analytics dashboard
- AI writer & AI variables to scale outreach personalization
- Unified inbox to do all lead activities from one place
- 14-day free trial
3 Tactics to Enhance Your Lead Nurturing Process
1. Profile Your Lead Progressively.
Implement progressive profiling by gradually filling in contact record gaps through system prompts for additional information from prospects.
During the first 30 days of engagement, contacts are more willing to share personal details.
It’s crucial to start collecting information early in their journey by requesting that they submit details about themselves.
Each time a potential buyer interacts with an offer or link, they can provide more information about their interests or business goals.
This tactic enhances lead nurturing by creating comprehensive datasets for each contact.
The information collected is vital for nurturing leads and moving them closer to conversion.
2. Nurture Your Customers.
By engaging and educating your existing customers throughout their buyer’s journey and after it, you can build trust, loyalty, and advocacy.
That’s why customer nurturing is one of the most effective yet often forgotten tactics in the lead nurturing process.
To nurture your customers effectively, make sure you:
- Personalize your customer communications
- Segment your customers based on their past behaviors, purchase history, or preferences
- Launch a reward program
- Implement regular feedback loops
- Build a solid knowledge base to educate your customers
- Focus on customer service
3. Segment Your Leads.
Lead segmentation allows you to better target specific lead groups with a customized approach that appeals to them specifically.
You can segment your leads based on:
- demography
- geography
- behavior (past purchases, website interaction, product based)
- needs (preferences, features needed)
- engagement (active, inactive, new, lost leads)
- customer journey (awareness, consideration, decision)
- technology (current tech stack, software compatibility, tool preferences)
- budget
Key Takeaways
Nurtured leads are more likely to convert. Every lead nurturing should have a process that systematically builds relationships with potential clients to progress them through the sales funnel.
The lead nurturing process starts with identifying the target audience’s needs and pain points.
It uses a multi-channel approach, including emails, social media, and webinars, and employs content like webinars, ebooks, and live demos. All these content methods must be tailored to different sales funnel stages.
As part of the lead nurturing process, you have lead scoring. It prioritizes follow-ups on more engaged leads, and tools like lemlist automate and personalize email campaigns to enhance them further.
