How to Boost Revenue with Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation
The Rule of 7 in marketing states that a potential customer needs an average of 7 touchpoints with your brand before making a purchase. With lean teams and leaner budgets, the most cost-effective way to do this is to pair marketing automation with lead nurturing.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation uses a variety of tools or services, like lead management software or email automation systems, to reduce the manual tasks related to a particular marketing campaign.
Marketing automation tools can range from collecting customer information during lead scoring to outbound messaging for email campaigns. Here are a few examples of marketing automation actions you might already be taking during the course of your everyday workflow:
- Sending an automated email to schedule a meeting with a client success manager after someone has started a free trial.
- Emailing leads links with related content that addresses their pain points whenever a new prospect downloads your white papers, free guides, or other content.
- Starting an email marketing sequence that provides more sources when someone finishes watching a product demo or takes a virtual tour.
- Scheduling a reminder text to your SMS list when a welcome email discount or personalized coupon is about to expire.
- Reminding potential customers about their abandoned cart via email or text once a certain amount of time has passed.
Most of the time, CRM automation software does the heavy lifting when it comes to these tasks. This software tracks prospects, leads, timelines, and deal progress to send out alerts and reminders, show you new and missed opportunities, or recommend content. However, marketing automation platforms provide even more automation sequences and tools for real-time marketing recommendations.
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is when you turn a sales lead into a qualified lead or customer by building a strong, authentic relationship with the decision-maker or main point of contact. The most successful lead nurturing campaigns will anticipate the needs of your sales leads based on a variety of profile characteristics, including their industry, role, and title, as well as where they are in the buying process.
Automated Lead Nurturing
Now that you understand a little more about lead nurturing and marketing automation, you might start to see how they can blend into a singular solution for streamlining your sales processes to support both sales and marketing teams. With automated lead nurturing, you can develop a workflow with multiple touches for potential customers and standardize it throughout your organization.
Using the relevant information about a lead’s location within the buyer journey, you can create a marketing strategy that sends the right follow-ups at the right time to ensure they experience a personalized, guided approach from your sales team. A few examples of automated lead nurturing include:
- Emails about abandoned shopping carts
- Reminder notifications for events and webinars
- Follow-up emails with downloadable resources
- Anniversary or holiday messages
Modern Rules For Nurturing Customers
Remember when I was talking about the Rule of Seven in marketing and advertising? Well, this rule was designed during the Golden Age of Advertising — in the 60s. While it’s a good guide for anyone in sales, times are evolving, and we need a new guide for the modern age.
In the Digital Age, leads and prospects are inundated and distracted by ads, digital marketing, CTAs, and information from every corner. So, do you need more touchpoints or less? With all the information you have about each buyer’s experience, and where in the sales funnel they’re at, you can customize your touchpoints based on their needs.
If you’ve got a lead who has just started to research your product, you should probably send out weekly touches to remind them you exist, provide them with helpful information, and make sure you’re at the top of their mind until they’re ready to buy. You can also use them for a/b testing to see which demographics respond best to various strategies and landing pages.
However, leads and customers who have already made a purchase with you likely don’t need as many reminders. In fact, 85% of buyers have said they prefer monthly emails from companies they already do business with. Send too many emails, and you may end up with leads who unsubscribe.
Why Is Lead Nurturing So Important?
It’s tough to push sales when people prefer digital contact with salespeople (or no contact at all), so you should definitely enhance your influence with leads by developing relationships and building trust. When nearly 70% of the buyer journey is completed digitally, your team may never call or talk to a lead before they become a customer!
Instead of sales pitches, phone calls, and video conferences, make your leads feel confident, informed, and motivated by providing them with all the information they need digitally. They have a ton of options in a saturated market and they don’t have time to set a meeting with every single salesperson who has a similar product.
When you simplify your sales process, you stand out among the rest. In fact, Harvard Business Review found that vendors and suppliers who make buying easier are over 60% more likely to win the sale.
The Benefits Of Automating Lead Nurturing
Many business owners are incredibly hands-on, manually nurturing or overseeing every lead and sale. However, it’s time to automate your efforts as the needs of consumers change.
With automated lead nurturing you can address a variety of evolving factors in the modern sales process, including an audience purchase journey that doesn’t follow a linear path, multiple distractions along the buyer journey, and audiences with multiple stakeholders.
Non-Linear Buyer Journeys
In the past, you could count on people to follow a predictable marketing funnel that made it simple to lead them down the path toward a purchase. Today, with so many options and buying channels, leads aren’t as easy to nurture at scale because of all these opportunities.
So how can automation for lead nurturing help here? With the right software, you can design multiple journeys based on user behavior, including preferred communication channels or the initial interaction they had with your company. You also eliminate the need to move leads from their current path or send out manual messages. Your automation software will track leads and take the appropriate actions at the right time.
Distracted Audiences
Because the market for nearly every product or service is so saturated, you’re competing with many other companies for your audience’s attention. Add to that the daily distractions of social media, the newest viral video, and whatever TikTok craze has taken the internet by storm, and your target encounters multiple derailments every time they shop online.
To avoid losing their attention, you need a lead nurturing process that reconnects and reminds potential buyers of their previous actions. From templated messaging to tracking notifications, automation software enables you to more easily touch base with leads at scale through personalized messaging and reminders.
Multiple Stakeholders
It doesn’t really matter whether you’re in the B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer) sector of sales; you already know that your lead can be influenced by others when it comes to their buying decisions. In fact, WebFX research shows that in the B2B sector specifically, any sales decision may depend on up to 12 different stakeholders.
From households to multi-national corporations, you need a way to create a buying journey for each decision-maker. Your automation software can ensure that you have a pitch that’s appropriate for IT professionals, accountants, marketers, and even various types and sizes of families (if you’re in the B2C world).
Top Lead Nurturing Automations
You have a few options when designing lead nurturing strategies for your sales team, but all of them revolve around a clear understanding of your ideal buyer persona and an in-depth knowledge of how your product can benefit them. Here are three of the top automated lead nurturing strategies to get you started on the path to effective, powerful campaigns.
Targeting Leads with Personalized Content
Part of nurturing leads is making them feel like you actually understand their needs. Targeted, customized content will make them feel like they’re being heard without them having to say anything — especially when you curate a two-months long campaign to convert them.
Using contact information and behavior data, you can show your targeted leads the most relevant content that meets their needs in a more authentic way. While a single email won’t have a big effect on sales conversions, multiple touches over time will keep you at the forefront of their mind. You can use automation software to verify and schedule emails every week or two until they convert.
For ideas, take a look at these options for automated lead nurturing content you can send.
1. New Buyer Discounts
Gifting new leads with a discount right away is a great strategy for boosting first-time purchases. You typically send this email when someone first browses your website or signs up for your newsletter. The discount encourages their first purchase. Hopefully, the quality of your product convinces them to come back for more.
The thing to remember here is unless you’re giving a pretty big discount (25% or more), people aren’t typically impressed with the basic welcome offer. Make your offer personal and interactive with a quiz, recommendations, or social proof with reviews of your best sellers.
2. Abandoned Cart Emails
With a rate of 70%, abandoned carts are a massive loss for retail sales totalling as much as 4 trillion a year. But there is hope! Hotjar finds that abandoned cart reminder emails have an open rate of nearly 40% and a click-through rate around 20% that shows pretty high engagement with this lead nurturing tactic.
You don’t have to give up just because a lead didn’t go through with a purchase right away! You can set up abandoned cart reminders that wait a day or two before sending buyers a message to get them back on track. You can also enhance this strategy when you offer a small discount to entice people back to your checkout process.
3. Product Education
If you’ve got a more complicated product or service, education is essential — especially if leads are using a free trial or freemium account. You want to teach prospects how to use your product and highlight advanced features to ensure they recognize your value quickly.
Whether it’s an onboarding email sequence or a downloadable guide, consider what your customers need to know to get the full value of your product. Create a touchpoint for each of the most important moments. You can even repurpose existing content (like blogs or white pages) to get a jumpstart on your sequence.
Using Lead Nurturing Automation Effectively
No matter which combination of strategies you decide to use, you need to create an authentic, organic cadence that makes your leads feel like you’re a thought leader. You want to build yourself up as a trustworthy resource in your niche so your leads turn to you when they need guidance.
Why is trust so important? Redline shows that 88% of marketers reach their sales goals by building their credibility with a lead. However, building trust is a long-term strategy that takes time (typically 60 days) and requires tailored, customized content — not generic email blasts.
But just because it has to be personalized doesn’t mean your content can’t be automated. Lead nurturing automation software has built-in features to guide you toward creating the best content for each lead or segment through editable templates and touchpoint reminders. Use these to more effectively personalize nurturing campaigns and convert more people to lifelong customers.
Dynamic Duo: Marketing Automation & Lead Nurturing
I’ve covered a lot of information in this blog that explores automated lead nurturing, but that’s not all automation software has to offer. With marketing automations for nearly every part of your process, you can integrate your CRM, lead generation, and sales tracking software for more visibility into new opportunities.
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