Lead Nurturing: How to Keep Your Prospects Engaged

by Kim Garmon Hummel

If you want to grow your business, you need to close more sales. To close more sales you need to keep prospects engaged. So, let’s assume you have valuable content in place to attract prospective customers, and clear service offerings that show prospects just how you can solve their problems. BUT, what happens when a prospect isn't yet ready to buy? Are you providing value-packed, relational touch points as they progress through their journey to choose the best solution to their problem (aka- you!)?

Sales cycles can be long– especially those in the B2B space. The time from contact conversion to sale conversion can span weeks or months. During that time, your prospect can lose focus or even forget about your business.

To prevent that, your marketing strategy should focus on engaging your prospect with content and information to keep you top of mind and move them closer to becoming a customer. The best way to engage with your prospects is through automated lead nurturing.

Lead Nurturing: the process of developing and maintaining relationships with prospects at every stage of their journey with the intent of nurturing the lead into a customer.

The goal of lead nurturing is to provide the right information to the right person at the right time.

Why Lead Nurturing?

Let me say that again for those in the back–The goal of lead nurturing is to provide the right information to the right person at the right time.

Almost 80% of new leads don’t convert into a sale. That’s because 96% of people who visit your website aren’t ready to buy your product–even if they fill out a form and become a contact. Without a thoughtful nurture strategy in place, those prospects fall through the cracks and languish in a no-man’s land of unqualified sales leads. That’s money left on the table for your business.

Moving a lead along their buyer’s journey to a sales conversion is at the heart of nurturing. This process takes time, a deep understanding of your customer, and a strategy. Here are some tactics that will help you engage your prospects thoughtfully so your business stays top of mind when contacts reach the decision stage.

Tactics For Engaging Your Leads Through A Nurture Campaign

Know Your Customer & Their Journey

In order to engage your leads, you need to know your prospective customer. This is where you can put your buyer personas to good use, and determine how your lead wants to be nurtured and what information they’ll need to move toward a purchase decision.

A deep understanding of your buyer’s journey will also inform your lead nurturing process. If you know whether your lead is at the awareness, consideration, or decision stage of the buyer’s journey, you’ll know the type of content they will want to engage with.

Thoughtful implementation of your buyer personas and buyer’s journey will help you put the right nurture content in front of the right people.

Be Timely

B2B sales cycles may be long, but that doesn’t mean you have time to waste. When you score a website conversion, the likelihood of that lead converting to a customer increases when they’re emailed or called promptly.

But let’s be clear. This isn’t a sales call or email. This is the first step in nurturing your lead into an eventual sale. It’s very unlikely that the lead is prepared to make a purchase decision. Instead, think of this point of contact as an opportunity to get to understand your lead better and to make contact.

Contacting a lead in a timely manner helps you engage your leads better. It helps you determine the right time to put the right content in front of the right person.

Make It Personal

Personalized emails enrich your leads’ experience. Let’s not forget that leads are real people, and the more you engage with them as real people, the better off your nurture campaign will be.

Think of personalized emails as a responsive system of cause-and-effect. When your lead completes an action (like clicking a link in an email) or demonstrates a trait (like high engagement with your content), your workflow triggers an email that responds to that action.

Personalized emails like these put the right content in front of your lead at just the right time.

Strategize for Engagement

On average, leads require ten marketing touches before they convert to customers. This doesn’t mean your strategy should only include ten touchpoints, but rather that you have many opportunities to engage your leads.

Your strategy should anticipate your prospects’ questions and concerns and aim to deliver related content and answers. Think about the different ways you can provide context and relevant answers to your prospect’s questions— through blogs, social media, interactive forms, whitepapers, and email. The key is not to throw everything at your lead and see what sticks, but rather to tailor the content to the lead to create content they delight to engage with.

Start Nurturing Your Leads!

Engaging your leads doesn’t happen by accident. An effective strategy is the first step, but implementing the right tools is equally important. When you partner with experts, like those on Team Sauce, you get a team that is equipped to help you avoid the learning curve and start nurturing your leads like a pro!

If that sounds like just the thing you were looking for to help your business #GrowSmarter, schedule a risk-free connect call with a certified Growth Guide to get started.