If you are a marketer, your day would generally be beginning and ending with the word ‘leads’! Generating leads, nurturing leads, converting leads, retaining leads – a marketer spends most of their time thinking about these. Businesses run on leads. If your business fails to generate the required number of leads, you are setting up for loss and failure. While generating leads is important, it is equally crucial to convert them. This is where lead nurturing comes in.
Lead nurturing is nothing but developing relationships with buyers, at every stage of the buyer’s journey, intending to nurture them into converting. It is considered as one of the most effective marketing strategies as it focuses on understanding the needs of your customers and optimising all marketing communication to fulfil these needs. The best and easiest way to effectively nurture your customers is with the help of marketing automation.
Marketing automation tools come with multiple capabilities, one of them being the nurturing of leads. When your customers are many, manually nurturing them becomes impossible. Marketing automation allows automated lead nurturing. Automation software is commonly used by marketers and business owners to design campaigns that will add some value to customers and prompt them to move forward through the sales funnel. Here are some ways by which marketing automation can help in lead nurturing:
List Segmentation
A major way by which marketing automation assists in the nurturing of leads is by list segmentation. Why is list segmentation important in marketing automation lead nurturing? You nurture leads by giving them something that is uniquely created for them, something personalised. How do you understand how to personalise? Through list segmentation! List segmentation allows you to divide your customers into separate homogeneous segments based on certain common factors. Marketing automation tools collect customer data which is then used for segmenting. For instance, customers can be segmented based on demographics, past purchases, age, online browsing behaviour and more. Marketing communication, like emails, can then be personalised based on these factors, thereby helping in adding some value to customers and nurturing them.
Omnichannel Marketing
Prospective customers are present on multiple channels. To properly nurture them, you must act across all these channels, be it social media, website or anything else. Manually keeping track of different channels and engaging with customers across these channels can be impossible. On the other hand, marketing automation can easily track omnichannel customer behaviour. Marketing automation tools can not only track behaviour but also find out on which channels were your customers most active. This can help you in designing and optimising your lead nurturing tactics to be most effective on certain specific channels.
Drip Emails
Marketing automation experts swear by drip emails as an effective automated lead nurturing strategy. What are drip emails? Drip emails can be defined as multiple emails, that follow a sequence, which are sent out to prospective customers on specific dates or after particular actions. Simply speaking, it is a method by which marketers provide personalised communication to customers via emails, in a drip-like manner. The advantage is that instead of bombarding your customers with a lot of information, you send them relevant content in a time-bound manner. So, for example, when a customer signs up for your newsletter, you can send them a welcome email. After that, across several intervals, you can send them other emails with content and suggestions that will interest them. Finally, you can send them some exclusive offers to prompt them to complete a purchase. With marketing automation, you can automate this entire process, by creating a set of drip emails and setting up triggers based on which these emails will be sent off.
There are so many more marketing automation lead nurturing tactics. It is crucial you nurture your leads, whether manually or via automation (although marketing automation will make it much easier) to increase your conversions. At Telloquent Solutions, our marketing automation experts can help you create effective lead nurturing strategies that work! Get in touch with us to know more.