Effective Lead Nurturing Strategy

Think of lead nurturing as systematic customer or prospect engagement.

In this post, we share a practical way to do this for your business. so you can stick to it.

Why lead nurturing

There are 2 key purposes of lead nurturing.

1) Stay top of mind – When you first interact with clients, they may not be ready to buy or move to the next step. But by staying in touch, you can ensure that your brand, and you, will be remembered when they are finally ready to engage.

2) Gauge interest in your offerings – these are also called buying signals. By structuring your outreach systematically, you can make more educated guesses for when clients may be ready to engage. That timing is important in any sales process. You can see that by how your recipients are responding (clicking, downloading, responding, etc.) to your messages.

At all times your lead nurturing should be helpful to clients. So you should include any company announcements as a PS, not as the primary topic of your message unless these are existing clients or well engaged prospects.

How to nurture?

Now that we have the foundation, here is a list of things to do:

1. Invite to events – these could be trade shows, partner events, online, or even local meetups. So long as they are relevant, you may invite clients and prospects as a speaker, give them a complimentary ticket, or introduce them to others they might like to meet (e.g. their peers). Just be on the lookout for opportunities to engage.

2. Share insights on relevant topics – these could be blogs or articles that you and other experts in your company are writing, 3rd party reports, or your own research. Litmus test – first ask: is it going to be helpful to this client or prospect? Tailor your topics by audience – e.g. technical, strategy etc. But don’t go overboard with segmentation. Keep it simple.

The most important thing is to get started.

What do you need for lead nurturing?

Tools are important but doing is more important than a perfect set up.

It’s just like getting a fitness club membership. Unless you have your routine down before signing up, you are likely to just waste your membership after an enthusiastic first week or month.

Start with a simple calendar of potential events you could talk to your clients about. This could be a basic spreadsheet shared with other members of your sales, product, and marketing team members. Work this manually for a few months. See what’s working. These things are difficult to automate any way.
Start putting a database together with email addresses and other information. Be sure to segment a bit – title, business area, practice area, location, etc. A shared spreadsheet works well. Don’t worry if you have a lot of contacts. Spreadsheets can handle it. Refrain from anything that postpones this task (e.g. let’s subscribe to a CRM).
Create a simple insights framework to help your clients evaluate and benchmark where they are. Examples include measuring digital CX, data management processes, work-life balance, etc. An insights framework is nothing but a list of categorized questions – think of it like a maturity model. A framework like this provides you with a steady list of helpful topics to engage your clients on. Read what a maturity model is, and also how to use it to create thought leadership.

When you finally have all this down, you can now invest in:

1. An email automation tool / CRM – helps you automate your emails, manage your database properly, and tracks clicks and opens among other things. See a list here.

2. An assessment creation platform like Evalinator – makes your framework actionable in the form of an online, interactive assessment. It’s great for lead generation and in sales meetings too. We can also help you create your insights framework to get you started.