The word " nurturing " refers to " nurturing " prospects until they decide to make a purchase. This is a very important practice, especially in B2B where the decision process is often longer than in B2C.
Concretely, you will need to share quality content with your prospects to guide them through the buying tunnel (discovery, evaluation, decision).
We present six tips to help you walk your prospects through to conversion.
1 - Start slow
The road to an efficient lead nurturing strategy is long, take your time!
Start by isolating a group of contacts corresponding to a Buyer Persona in your database.
Analyze when these contacts interact with your site or social networks to determine at what point in the sales cycle it will be relevant to deliver content.
2 - Automate as soon as possible
As you know, sending email can be time consuming. Think automation as soon as possible!
Wherever possible, try to automate email blasts based on context. Avoid overloading these communications.
The goal is to test several object and content possibilities to see what works best.
Look for behaviors or dates (the renewal of a contract, for example) that will be triggers for your program to be automated.
3 - Establish a lead nurturing strategy
Lead Nurturing? A story of testing, analysis, understanding and patience!
With automation, you will be able to determine the most appropriate channel by prospect type.
You will be able to measure the contact's progress in the nurturing program with CRM integration.
4 - Scale your email sends
The goal is to gradually send emails to move prospects from awareness, to consideration and then conversion.
This way, your contacts in the "interest phase" will be redirected to a program that encourages them to convert. Continually test multiple channels and multiple mediums to gather information and ensure your messages are relevant.
From then on, you'll be able to present your prospects with multiple options. They will be integrated into a new nurturing program aimed at education.
If you notice prospects staying longer than average on your site and content, they are probably in front of consideration.
Feel free to place them in an " advanced " program to guide them further through the buying cycle.
If you notice that prospects haven't interacted with your site in a while, move them into a " re-engagement " program.
5 - Manage exclusions carefully
As your prospects move through the conversion process, stop sending them automated emails that might duplicate the more personalized ones sent by your salespeople.
6 - Measure the effectiveness of your nurturing
Test, analyze, improve and try again
To assess early lead engagement, analyze email open rates and click-through rates. If they're too low, adjust your messaging, timing and frequency of sending to find optimal values.
Then, measure how many of those leads move from one stage of the tunnel to the next and in how long on average.
To get an idea of conversion speed, calculate the number of days it takes to get through all the steps in the process for a prospect on average.
Analyze and adjust your program continuously to anticipate market changes, customer behavior and adapt your organization.
You now have the tips you needed to implement your lead nurturing strategy.
