5 Lead Nurturing Tactics That Work

Did you know that 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales due to a lack of lead nurturing efforts?

This means that nearly eight out of every 10 prospects aren’t converting to sales because business-to-business (B2B) companies haven’t:

• Built enough trust
• Effectively told the organization’s brand story
• Clearly explained the value of relevant products or service offerings
• Created personalized lead nurturing and customer experience strategies

Lead nurturing develops relationships with your prospects with the goal of earning their business—when they’re ready. Your company needs to stay in front of leads throughout their entire buyer’s journey.

But how do you stay in front of your leads?

In this blog, we’ll discuss the lead nurturing tactics that help improve sales efficiency, reduce or eliminate missed opportunities, increase brand awareness and perceived value and ultimately shorten your sales cycle.

Lead Nurturing Tactic #1: Lead Management

As you generate leads, it’s important to have an effective lead management process in place to manage those leads. A lead management process helps to ensure that your sales teams are filtering out less sales-ready leads and focusing more on qualified leads.

An integrated marketing automation (MA) and customer relationship management (CRM) solution ensures your sales team is armed with data that will help them better target leads and convert them into sales.

Lead Nurturing Tactic #2: Email Marketing

Email marketing is the perfect way to provide leads with information that aligns with where they are in the buyer’s journey. Of all marketing channels for B2B companies, email marketing is the most profitable.

According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), email has a 38-to-1 return on investment (ROI). So for every $1 spent on email marketing, a company’s average return is $38. Entire email campaigns can be set up weeks or months in advance and published automatically. Email marketing can be highly customized to:

• Convert leads into customers
• Turn existing customers into even happier customers
• Re-engage with past customers

Lead Nurturing Tactic #3: Lead Scoring

For an effective lead management process, sales needs to engage with the best leads. Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects in terms of how valuable they are to the organization. Company size, industry segment, job title or geographic location may be valuable information to your business about a lead.

By attaching values to each of your leads based on their professional information and the behavior they’ve shown on your website, you can use this data to help determine when your leads are ready to talk with a salesperson.

Why Score Leads?

• To increase revenue
• To increase sales-ready leads
• To increase sales productivity
• To boost marketing effectiveness

Lead Nurturing Tactic #4: Sales and Marketing Alignment

If your sales and marketing teams are not aligned, how can you expect to increase sales? A study by CSO Insights revealed that 89% of companies that aligned sales and marketing lead nurturing efforts reported measurable increases in the number of leads that turned into opportunities.

To attract new customers and expand upon existing relationships, your company needs to become both sales- and marketing-driven. To do this, today’s B2B companies need to think about:

• How their buyers buy
• What motivates them

Lead Nurturing Tactic #5: Targeted Content

Leads nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities. Delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time, however, is the biggest lead nurturing challenge for some B2B marketers.

In order to effectively nurture leads with content marketing, you must first know your audience. Once you understand each of your unique buyer personas, you need to create a variety of targeted content designed to nurture those personas based on their goals, interests and objectives.

Some of the most effective content formats for engaging customers and prospects include:

• Offers (e.g., case studies, guides, whitepapers)
• Infographics
• Videos

Now that you know these lead nurturing tactics, you will be better positioned to improve sales efficiency, reduce or eliminate missed opportunities and shorten your sales cycle. Successful lead nurturing campaigns provide all of this, which results in increased brand awareness and perceived value.