The top of the marketing and sales funnel is critical to creating brand awareness. Finding all ways to attract website visitors and prospects to your company remains the foundation of any marketing and advertising campaign. Marketing executives oftentimes think through their marketing budgets and stop thinking about the other levels of the marketing and sales funnels. We believe investments in the middle and bottom of the funnel can be even more critical than the top-of-the-funnel investments (search marketing, social media, advertising). In that case, creating an effective lead nurturing campaign can improve conversion rates and help your marketing budget work smarter and more effectively.
The mindset of Relationship Building For Lead Nurturing
First, any effective lead nurturing campaign is formed based on creating a relationship with the potential buyer of your product or service. There are many ways to create connections and feed your prospects with content and information, including an email finder, to help them find what they are looking for. By working to build a relationship with your prospect, you are creating a deep connection that will get them talking about you, sharing your content, signing up for your newsletter, and even calling you to become a potential customer.
How do you create that relationship? By better understanding who your potential visitor is and creating an experience that adds value to their lives and ultimately their business. For us at CustomShow, we sell presentation software but we also understand many of our customers care about marketing and sales funnel strategies. So we work hard to provide that to our base and we continue to create that pipeline of information. Go in with your lead nurturing campaign with this mindset and it will help translate into a more effective campaign.
Develop Premium Content Pieces
The next component of any effective lead nurturing campaign involves premium content pieces that will feed the beast. We’re not just talking about blog posts and social media posts. We’re talking about premium content pieces led by data and are incredibly useful. For example, thought leadership pieces can be great pieces but we’ve noticed that usable content pieces get shared more often.
Popular types of content can include the following:
- Whitepapers
- Videos of your product
- Webinars
- Case Studies
- Presentations
Score Your Leads
Lead scoring is the practice of scoring leads based on specific actions and information provided by the lead. For example, if you have an email sequence and the individual prospect opts into all three emails or downloads a total of your three premium content pieces, they are turned into a prospect that your sales team is directed to email or call. Each company has its way of scoring leads but this can be a critical area of productivity if you’re reaching out to every lead…even those that are likely not to convert. For the small business, this can be a small problem because every lead is an important lead. But for larger companies that get inquiries regularly, this can improve the productivity of the team.
Email Marketing Campaign
Email remains one of the lowest-cost customer acquisition programs in the digital marketing realm. Part of lead nurturing includes sending targeted content and well-crafted communications to people who sign up and connect with the company. By using CRM with email campaigns, you can send an email, or a series of emails automatically depending on an action or a trigger.
This may include sending 3 – 5 emails over 2 weeks with premium content pieces based on the initial information you collected from the prospect. Effective email marketing strategies often include timely and personalized communication with customers, such as sending examples of abandoned cart emails to re-engage potential buyers and encourage them to complete their purchase.
Whether you use Hubspot or HubSpot alternatives such as:
These have something in place remains the bedrock of any lead scoring and lead nurturing campaign.
The role of email marketing extends beyond cost-effective customer acquisition and includes the strategic implementation of automated campaigns through CRM systems, fostering lead nurturing by delivering timely and personalized communications to engage prospects and encourage desired actions, ultimately serving as a fundamental component in successful lead scoring and nurturing campaigns.
Email Opt-In’s
As part of a campaign that converts more people into leads, an email opt-in is paramount to any lead nurturing campaign. Email opt-ins allow prospects the chance to add their contact information to a form, which is usually placed on a squeeze page or the home page. This can be accomplished by adding opt-in forms to the home page and other critical pages on the website that attract the most traffic. Again, this is critical to email capture and remains the cornerstone of any lead nurturing campaign.
Chat Box
A Chat Box is another great way to convert more website visitors into leads. Not everyone will take action on the chatbox but based on our experience the chatbox can translate into 1 – 5% of website visitors who are looking for answers now and are prepared to engage with the company. The other great thing with Chat Boxes as they typically allow for adding an email, which can be useful for future premium content pieces you choose to send.
Directly Email Leads
Can’t get more simple than this approach. When someone reaches out to you from a web form, direct email can be one of the most effective ways in communicating back with them. Yes, this is a form of lead nurturing. Any form of communication back with the prospect is looked at as lead nurturing, but the key is following up with them within 24 hours or even sooner when their need or interest is most pervasive. Email tracking is a powerful tool that can help you maximize the effectiveness of your lead-nurturing efforts. With its help, you can even monitor when a prospect opens your email or clicks on a link, giving you valuable insights into their level of engagement. You can even be reading an article that is not even directly connected to your company but you know could add value to your prospect. So after reading, you go through your list of leads and send the article to them knowing it’s directly relevant to them.
Social Media
Nurturing leads extends beyond communicating via email. Social media is the likely next best channel to connect and engage with leads and those who have already connected with your company. Probably the best platform to connect with leads is Twitter followed by LinkedIn. You can next check weekly social media reports to see what can be changed to positively affect the performance.
Tools For Nurturing Leads
CustomShow – This is our presentation software tool that you can use for web meetings and share dynamic presentations with your leads.
Wistia – Great video platform for hosting videos on your website. You can also send wistia embedded emails to people.
Slideshare – If you create a lot of presentations, Slideshare is another great presentation software for attracting leads to your firm and sharing your presentations with prospects and leads.
Opt-In Monster – If you want to capture people before they leave the website opt-in is a nice WordPress plugin that accomplishes that. They say opt-in monsters can improve your opt-in rates by 200 – 400%.
Hubspot – Known as the premier lead scoring and marketing software for B2B, it does everything from email sequencing, to lead scoring and analytics.
Groupboss – A Facebook Group automation software, Groupboss enables you to collect leads from Facebook groups, save the info on Google Sheets and Dashboard and helps you avoid low-level admin tasks.
Salesforce – If you are in sales, Salesforce remains the one tool that you must use for tracking leads and contacts. It integrates with many other marketing and sales tools including Hubspot.
Zopim Chat – There remain other chat boxes but Zopim is our tool of choice. Connecting with the website visitors when they arrive brings a sense of immediacy and gives you the chance to communicate with them before they ever leave your website.
EngageBay – Known for its high affordability and comprehensive set of lead management features for small businesses and startups. It lets you map out the complete customer journey, manage sales pipelines, automate lead distribution, and personalize outreach.
