B2B lead nurturing is essential for converting leads into sales. It ensures that every lead is given ample attention and educated (through relevant content) about the solutions your brand can offer them until they’re ready to make a buying decision.
Without content, it’s impossible to keep up the dialogue that’ll influence their thinking and forge those relationships of trust that are so necessary to convert leads to sales. The B2B lead nurturing process is one that needs to be finely monitored and tracked, and this is why marketing and sales automation software is so indispensable. Partnering with the right agency also ensures that you’ve got the right processes in place to create a healthy lead nurturing system that’ll maximise conversion rates.
Content tailored to your leads guides them down the buying funnel to purchasing decisions, in their own time
As mentioned in the introduction, targeted content forms the foundation of a B2B lead nurturing system, as it’s through content that leads are slowly educated – rather than persuaded – into making a buying decision. Any old content won’t do. Your content needs to be highly original, speak to your leads’ pain points and be relevant to the stage they’re at in the buying process. You need to create content for first-time visitors to your site, those that are evaluating solutions, and those that are ready to buy. And you need to ensure that this content is delivered to every lead, at the right time. Needless to say, this is quite an endeavour, especially when you’ve got hundreds of leads in the sales funnel. That’s why enlisting the help of an agency can be so beneficial – they can either create the content or make sure it reaches all your leads (or both), allowing you to focus on other tasks.
For successful lead nurturing, every single lead needs to be followed up – within five to ten minutes
So you’ve got a list of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) that look promising. – they’ve all downloaded content offers on your website or signed up for a quote. But fail to follow up with each lead in a timely fashion – i.e. within five to ten minutes – and they’ll look elsewhere for a solution. Even waiting longer than ten minutes can have a huge effect on the chances of making successful contact with a lead. Marketing and sales automationsoftware can alert you to the fact that a lead has moved along the funnel and send out an email immediately – something even the most diligent marketing professional might struggle to do.
Use a combination of personalised, segmented email campaigns and telemarketing to improve engagement with leads
As we mentioned in a previous article, plain text emails (as opposed to HTML) are far more effective in creating that personalised touch that’s so important for B2B lead nurturing. If you’ve invested time in prospect profiling, the data gathered during this step can help you segment your data lists to make email communication more personalised. Combining email with B2B telemarketing will also help encourage leads down the sales funnel from MQL to a sales qualified lead (SQL). This integrated approach improves engagement with your leads, as relying on email alone is a risky strategy given that email rates don’t often exceed 20%. And the more touches your lead has with your business, the higher the chances of them converting.
Lead nurturing can also apply to customers – leverage your database of leads to target them
It’s easy to spend all of your time and effort on converting new leads – but don’t forget you’re sitting on a database of leads who have already converted and become customers. The B2B lead nurturing process can also apply to leads that have already bought from you. Through content, engagement and communication, it’s possible to cross-sell other products to these customers. The advantage of this is that you’ve already got plenty of information about them and their purchase history, which you can use to create content just for them. The key in this is to ensure that your data lists are kept up to date and relevant through data cleansing. Go through your databases and rid them of duplicate or inactive email addresses, and see whether there are any gaps in this information which can be filled – an agency with experience handling data can do this for you.
An aligned sales and marketing team is crucial for a well-functioning lead nurturing unit
The rivalry between sales and marketing might be a source of comedy (check out our previous article), but when it comes to lead nurturing, both teams need to be playing on the same side. Rather than viewing the B2B lead nurturing process as belonging to either marketing or sales, it needs to be designed so that both teams are responsible for different parts of the process. Both sides need to be clear on who does what, as well as the exact point at which marketing passes a lead over to sales. This is why having a lead scoring system in place is important: to avoid MQLs being passed onto sales too early, and sales wasting their time pitching to leads that aren’t ready to buy.
With a defined lead nurturing system in place, it’s possible to generate more sales and at a lower cost too – as long as you know how to convert MQLs to SQLs. Download our guide for advice on how to achieve this:
