Effective Lead Nurturing Strategy

Think of lead nurturing as systematic prospect engagement after you have generated a lead.

However, even though it’s really important for converting a prospect to a customer, lead nurturing is not easy to plan and execute.

So in this post, we share practical ways to do this for your business.

Why lead nurturing?

There are two key goals of lead nurturing.

1) Stay top of mind: When you first interact with clients, they may not be ready to buy or move to the next step. But by staying in touch, you can ensure that your brand, and you, will be remembered when they are finally ready to engage.

2) Gauge interest in your offerings: This is also called “evaluating buying signals”. By planning your outreach and tracking systematically, you can make more educated guesses about when clients may be getting ready to make a buying decision. For example, they may be reading more detailed blog posts, or looking through pricing tiers of your product or service, attending a paid event, etc. This timing is important in any sales process. And you can see that by how your recipients are responding (clicking, downloading, responding, etc.) to your messages.

At all times your lead nurturing should be helpful to clients. So general company announcements and sales messages should not be the primary focus of your nurturing sequence. You can still indirectly do a lot of these and we show you how below.

How to nurture? 3 simple ways

Now that we have the foundation, here are three simple things to do:

1. Invite to events: these could be trade shows, partner events, online, or even local meetups – free or paid. So long as they are relevant or fun (such as a game). You may invite clients and prospects as a speaker, give them a complimentary ticket, or introduce them to others they might like to meet (e.g. their peers). Just be on the lookout for opportunities to engage.

2. Share insights on relevant topics: these could be blogs or articles that you and other experts in your company are writing, 3rd party reports, or your own research. Litmus test – first ask: is it going to be helpful to this client or prospect? Be mindful of your core audience that will influence or make a buying decision. But don’t go overboard with segmentation. Keep it simple.

3. Share customer stories: Clients are really interested in good case studies – both success and failure. Write them in the form of a blog post that outlines what the problem was, why it was important, why it generally occurs, the benefits you delivered to clients by solving it, and the challenges that were encountered. Include a bit about how you solved the problem too but not in too much detail.

That’s it! The most important thing is to get started.

What do you need for lead nurturing?

Tools are important but doing is more important than a perfect set up.

It’s just like getting a fitness club membership. Unless you have your routine down before signing up, you are likely to just waste your membership after an enthusiastic first week or month.

Start with a simple calendar of potential events you could talk to your clients about. This could be a basic spreadsheet shared with other members of your sales, product, and marketing team members. Work this manually for a few months. See what’s working. These things are difficult to automate any way.
Start putting a database together with email addresses and other information. Be sure to segment a bit – title, business area, practice area, location, etc. A shared spreadsheet works well. Don’t worry if you have a lot of contacts. Spreadsheets can handle it. Refrain from anything that postpones this task (e.g. let’s subscribe to a CRM).
Create a simple insights framework to help your clients evaluate and benchmark where they are. Examples include measuring digital CX, data management processes, work-life balance, etc. An insights framework is nothing but a list of categorized questions – think of it like a maturity model. A framework like this provides you with a steady list of helpful topics to engage your clients on. Read what a maturity model is, and also how to use it to create thought leadership.

When you finally have all this down, you can now invest in:

1. An email automation tool / CRM – helps you automate your emails, manage your database properly, and tracks clicks and opens among other things. See a list here.

2. An assessment creation platform like Evalinator – makes your framework actionable in the form of an online, interactive assessment. It’s great for lead generation and in sales meetings too. We can also help you create your insights framework to get you started.

Next steps

Think of lead nurturing as client or prospect engagement. Every client is also a prospect because you are always cross-selling, up-selling, or renewing!

Get your toolkit ready: