Have you heard of it, but still don't know what leads are or what a lead nurturing strategy is?
In this post, we will answer these questions and guide you on how you can apply this important strategy in practice in your company.
What are Leads
Leads are potential customers. People who have already shown interest in topics related to your company's business, such as by obtaining an ebook, and have given contact information such as name and email in return.
With easy and practical access to information nowadays, people do a lot of research and go through a sequence of steps before making a purchase. For this reason, the moment a person becomes a lead, it is essential that the company guides them through the purchasing journey appropriately, identifying their level of interest and the stage of the journey they are in.
If a lead has already downloaded some material with details about your product, they are most likely closer to purchasing than a person who just downloaded an ebook about a curiosity in your segment.
Having this understanding helps the lead solve their problems faster and in the correct order, consequently generating more sales for your company.
What is lead nurturing
As we mentioned before, people go through a sequence of steps along the purchasing journey:
Learning and Discovery: Moment when the lead is learning about the company's segment, discovering more in detail how it works.
Problem Recognition: At this stage the lead is identifying that they have a problem.
Solution Consideration: After identifying the problem, the lead needs to know all the ways they can solve it. Maybe he can take some internal action to resolve it, or hire a company or product. At this point you want to understand these forms of solution as well as the product or company options available.
Evaluation and Purchase: Having the options in hand, the lead now needs to compare them, identify the one that has the best cost-benefit and make the purchase.
In theory, this sequence represents the purchasing journey very well, but in practice we know that it is quite possible for a lead to already be in step 3 and return to step 1 to learn a little more about the company's subject.
The most important thing is to be clear on how to identify whether a lead is ready to go to the next step and to have a strategy that makes this possible. We call this process of leading the lead along the purchasing journey Lead Nurturing.
Why a lead nurturing strategy is important
For the vast majority of businesses, the purchase takes days to make and almost always the time spent visiting your website is not enough to explain the business, show the lead that they have a problem, present solutions and promote your product. .
This is one of the big reasons why leads are so fundamental to any company’s digital marketing strategy. This allows the company to communicate with the user for a much longer period of time and better understand their needs.
If the company has 1 million visits to its website, but is unable to store the visitors' name and email, it will not be able to communicate with them and will be missing out on many sales opportunities.
Another great reason that justifies the use of the lead strategy is that the increase in sales occurs at the same time that the cost of marketing grows much less, that is, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) becomes lower.
How to organize a lead nurturing strategy
To organize a lead nurturing strategy, the following points are necessary:
Specific content and pages for each stage of the purchasing journey
As we mentioned before, it is essential to have pages on your website or blog that meet the needs of people who are just learning about the subject to those who are almost ready to buy. It is the basis for starting and developing a relationship with the lead. For a store that sells running shoes we could have the following content as an example:
Learning and Discovery: What are the biggest health benefits of running, What are the types of running, What is a marathon.
Problem Recognition: How to prepare to run a marathon, What equipment improves the running experience, How to avoid injuries when running.
Solution Consideration: What are the different types of running shoes, What are the advantages and disadvantages of each type of running shoe, Which running shoe is right for you.
Review and Buy: Best deals on sneakers for beginner runners, Buy now with discounted sneakers for professional runners.
Lead conversion pages and forms
To be able to talk to users you need ways to obtain their information, this is done through lead conversion pages and forms. These conversion resources can be applied to any type of page with an offer, such as an ebook for example, but they are usually applied to pages at the beginning of the purchasing journey mainly.
Email automation flows that take the lead along the journey
Email automation flow is the way you can scale your business. With a large volume of leads arriving daily, it is extremely unproductive and complex to manually forward emails, especially when it is possible to define some type of pattern and sequences of sending content.
Lead Scoring Application
Lead scoring is a way of measuring the lead's level of interest and stage along the purchasing journey. The higher the value, the closer they are to making a purchase. Scores are established for each type of lead action, for example:
Email opening: +1 point
Click on the email button: +2 points
Download of benefit material and use of the product: +10 points.
Creating content for each stage of the journey is easy to do without the help of tools, but the other points are more complex. Conversion pages and forms, Email automation flows and Lead Scoring measurement are difficult to execute without using a robust product.
Tools to execute your lead nurturing strategy
We have listed below some of the main reference tools that you can use to execute your lead nurturing strategy:
2. Hubspot
4. MailChimp
Graduated in Civil Engineering from the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM). He worked as a management consultant at Falconi on projects in the public sector, automotive retail, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, focusing on applying PDCA to improve operational results. He is currently an analyst in the marketing operations area at RD Station, where he works on identifying opportunities for improvement in the sales funnel.