Lead Nurturing

Once a firm has acquired leads and qualified them (i.e., as MQLs), it enters a process of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing represents the “purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey, positioning your company as the best (and safest) choice to enable them to achieve their objectives” (HubSpot).

Let’s examine some of the key aspects of this definition.

First, lead nurturing is a purposeful process. In this chapter and the next, we are going to emphasize how this intent translates to always having a clear idea of what comes next for the consumer. What happens when you receive an email address from a consumer? What comes next? What email should you send them? What should be in this email? What action should they be asked to perform then? What should the lead be achieving there? This ties closely to the idea of having clearly defined conversion paths. When doing lead nurturing, the firm is interacting with the lead, but it has a clear script in mind. It knows the steps the lead should go through to convert them to customers.

Second, lead nurturing looks at engaging a defined target group. That has a few implications. First, a firm should have clearly defined personas that they want to engage. Second, lead nurturing campaigns are persona-specific. They are persona-specific because what makes a persona tick will probably vary between personas. They are also at specific stages of the buyer’s journey, which brings us to the third aspect of the definition.

Third, lead nurturing aims to provide relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. The only way to achieve this, i.e., to create relevant content for leads that varies depending on which stage of their journey they’re at, is to have in mind a clear persona and a clear understanding of their journey.

Last, firms practice lead nurturing in order to sell products. Yet as we have seen over the course of the preceding chapters, this should ideally come at the end of the lead nurturing process, i.e., when the firm believes that the lead has reached the purchase stage.

The following four main activities relate to lead nurturing:

• getting permission to market to consumers, or what we achieve during lead generation
• educating and entertaining leads with relevant information that aligns with their stage in their journey
• monitoring the progress of leads through lead scoring
• promoting your product once the lead has reached the purchase stage

On average, consumers who provided you with their email addresses receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of the sales funnel until they become a customer.

To facilitate segmentation for lead nurturing activities, firms typically create extensive email marketing lists. These lists should provide the information necessary to create campaigns that correctly address the needs, challenges, and motivations of consumers and the stage of the journey they’re in. Useful information to for email marketing lists includes the following:

• sociodemographic information, which facilitates targeting activities
• acquisition date, which helps to know whether the lead aligns with how long it typically takes a firm to sell a product to that specific persona
• frequency, i.e., how often the lead has indicated they would like to receive emails
• lead score and assumed journey stage, which should help tailor which email to send to which lead depending on their stage in the journey
• persona, to help tailor the message
• how/where you acquired the lead

Similarly to persona, this last point is helpful for continuing the conversation a firm started with a consumer. For example, let’s assume that a consumer signed up to an email list from a blog post or a pillar page on the topic of ‘“back pain” from the website of a shoe manufacturer specializing in back pain. Ideally, this consumer should receive information that is different from another consumer who signed up after clicking a search ad that offered “comfortable shoes.” The better the information a firm provides caters to a lead’s needs, motivations, and challenges, the more likely they are to engage in a conversation and ultimately buy a product.

The main idea here is that one size does not fit all. Lead nurturing campaigns should be clearly tailored to personas and the stages they are in.

The metrics used to analyze marketing campaigns include the following:

• bounce rate: the number of email addresses that had a bounce back from the ISPs
• open rate: the percentage of emails opened out of the total number of emails sent
• clickthrough rate: the number of subscribers that have clicked on at least one link in your email
• click-to-open rate (CTO): the percentage of recipients who opened the email message and also clicked on any link in the email message
• unsubscribe rate: the percentage of subscribers who opted out from your list (unsubscribed number/emails delivered × 100 = unsubscribed rate)

These metrics should help gauge the level of engagement of leads with our email marketing campaigns and where there might be issues. For example, if our open rate is great but our clickthrough rate is abysmal, this probably indicates that there is something wrong with the way the email is crafted, or that the content does not align with the subject line of the email.