3 Ways to use Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing
At the forefront of each successful company’s business pipeline, there’s one thing – leads. Lead generation has become one of the most common phrases in modern-day business, and for a good reason.It entails identifying potential customers for your business, for the purposes of building an email list, some other form of promotion or simply for sales purposes.
However, at some point in time, marketers realized that generated leads aren’t really worth that much if all you do is collect their data to contact them. Thus, lead nurturing came to be.
What’s lead nurturing?
Simply put, lead nurturing is building a relationship with leads at each step of the sales funnel. Instead of leaving leads at the very beginning of the funnel, you slowly nudge them along, so they can go from cold leads to customers ready to buy.
In theory, lead nurturing can be rather annoying, especially if you have a long list of cold leads at different stages of the funnel. However, there’s a secret weapon in every good marketer’s arsenal – marketing automation. These tools allow you to nurture your leads while doing all of the heavy lifting.
Here are some of the best marketing automation practices to kickstart your lead nurturing efforts.
Lead scoring
Not all leads are created equal. There’s a vast difference between someone ready to buy from the first touchpoint and someone just browsing your website looking to get information. These two types of leads need to be treated – and scored – differently.
The idea is simple – you (your marketing automation platform) assign points to a lead based on a certain action they take. The more valuable the action, the higher the score for the lead. For example, someone signing up for a newsletter will get fewer points than someone booking a demo.
So, what can you score your leads for? Here are some ideas:
– Opened emails (+1 point)
– Visited landing pages (+2 points)
– Opted in for a lead magnet (+4 points)
– Completed a form (+6 points)
– Attended a webinar (+8 points)
– Requested a demo (+10 points)
– Requested to be called back (+10 points)
Depending on your marketing automation platform of choice, lead scoring is fairly easy to implement and it’s strongly suggested if you want to build and maintain a great funnel.
Although not commonly done, you can also decrease a lead’s score based on certain (in)activity. For example, you can remove a point for each month that the lead hasn’t opened an email or visited your site. In fact, removing inactive leads from your list will benefit your open rates and overall metrics.
With proper lead scoring in place, you’ll be able to better allocate your time and resources to market to those leads who are most likely to become customers.
List segmentation
Hand in hand with lead nurturing goes list segmentation. Just as not every lead that lands on your website is ready to buy, not every lead is ready to buy the same thing at the same time. Here are some of the ways you can segment your list and automate your lead nurturing.
Let them choose. Let your leads select what type of emails they get and how often. By incorporating a simple form on your signup page, you’ll be able to automatically segment hot leads from cold prospects.
Signup date. Someone who’s been on your list for a year probably won’t need the same information as someone who signed up a week ago. Keep the emails relevant to the stage in the sales funnel.
Product interest. If you offer a variety of products or services, segment your lists according to what the recipients are interested in. For example, if you sell running shoes and swimwear, you don’t want to bother either group with the other one’s products and promotions.
Last purchase. When was the last time a customer bought something from you? And what did they buy? Someone who bought product A a week ago and someone who bought product B last year should be put on two different mailing lists.
More general information. There is practically an endless number of ways you can segment your list. This includes gender, age, location, NPS, language, time zone – whichever trait is significant for your business model.
Hook up your CRM and marketing tools
Customer relationship management tools are built for sales teams to interact with potential customers before they even know they are customers. However, sales teams don’t use marketing tools and marketing teams don’t use CRMs – and this practice doesn’t help with lead nurturing at all.
The first reason for connecting CRM and marketing automation tools is that the sales team gets more relevant information. Automation tools allow insights into consumer behavior, such as pages visited, emails opened, as well as the pages they visited first and their last visit to the site, which enables better nurturing practices.
These precious bits of information allow sales to make more educated decisions on whom to contact and what kind of messaging to use for lead nurturing. Instead of doing the legwork to differentiate MQL (marketing qualified leads) and SQLs (sales qualified leads), marketing automation tools do it on your behalf.
The second reason for combining CRMs and marketing automation tools for lead nurturing is that the sales cycle is significantly shortened. According to research, the average B2B sales cycle lasts 84 days, while B2B is significantly shorter, depending on the industry.
By combining marketing automation tools and CRMs, you can send highly targeted, relevant messages that shorten the sales cycle and improves your bottom line. Another way you can blend these two is by using account based marketing tools, which get the best of both worlds in one package.
Alternatively, you can try out a CRM plugin for your site for a streamlined lead generation solution.
Should you use marketing automation for lead nurturing?
Absolutely so. Depending on your industry and how developed your current marketing strategy is, you can implement marketing automation in your lead nurturing and get excellent results. The initial time investment will pay off dividends in the future as you get better, more qualified leads in less time.
Dave Schneider
Latest posts by Dave Schneider (see all)
- 3 Ways to use Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing - September 26, 2018
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