What’s Lead Nurturing? Accelerate the purchase cycle

Once we have already turned our visitors into leads, the next step will be to get them to be customers of our products or services. To do this, we will have to start a Email Marketing Strategy, since we have your contact details. However, we are not talking about typical traditional email actions, as the inbound Marketing implements more sophisticated techniques such as lead Nurturing and lead Scoring. Then I’ll talk about the first one; What it is, what it does and the steps to carry it out. 

What is Lead Nurturing?

The lead Nurturing (cultivation or maturing leads) is a technique Used in Email Marketing within The customer closing phase From a Inbound Marketing Strategy.

It is the process of building relevant and effective relationships with our potential consumers, paying special attention to the time of the purchase cycle in which they are and their level of predisposition to purchase. 

How do we build these relationships? Through the sending of automated and personalized email chains that are interesting for the Buyer person and speed up the Buyer Journey. This will allow us to maximize the results and improve our company’s revenue.

This technique is based on the sophisticated technology of the Marketing Automation (computer software), which allows us to create personal and adaptive campaigns, and listen to and see actions of our Buyer’s behavior in real time, among other things.

What’s the use?

Nowadays users do not become clients by magic, but they need more and more sophisticated techniques. They look for more and more extremely personalized content and multi-channel experiences. They do not want to be spoken to, but want to be heard. They do not want to be bombarded with “generic” publicity, they want them to “fall in Love”.

Therefore, companies must build relevant trust-based relationshipsfor the user to purchase and at the same time provide us with more information about him.

Then you have 4 reasons why it is interesting to start a strategy of Lead Nurturing:

• • Build Relationships: Keep a constant conversation with your Buyer person and accompany the user throughout his purchase cycle, so that when you have to make a decision you will take into account and you will not be intrusive.

• • Branding and Leadership thinking: Help build your brand and keep you in the Top of Mind of the users and consider you as an expert in your sector.

• • Save time to Sales department: Classifying leads allows us to not waste time on opportunities that do not go anywhere and focus only on the users that matter.
  • Shorten the purchase cycle: Users have access to more and more information, so making a decision can take them much longer. Long shopping cycles are expensive for your company, so it is essential to accelerate and get the sale in the shortest time possible thanks to the Lead Nurturing. 

Features of Lead Nurturing:

These are the 4 pillars in which you have to base a strategy to cultivate leads to achieve results:

• • Confidence: Only if you transmit confidence the users will let you enter into “Your life”. You have to create a close relationship between the brand and the customer.

• • Relevance and Personalization: Impersonal and poor messages will cause your users to unsubscribe. You have to treat users by name and give them the content they demand. The key is to talk to the right person at the right time, this is what makes this type of email marketing the traditional.

• • Multi-Channel: Even though this is mostly email marketing, more and more users move from one channel to another quickly. You need to prepare a multi-channel lead nurturing strategy. You also have to take into account the device they use to optimize the experience as much as possible.

• • Strategy and Analysis: Like any strategy, the actions you make must be measurable and you have to take into account the ROI and define your set of metrics.

Steps of a Lead Nurturing strategy:

1. • Analysis of the initial situation and definition of your SMART goals: What is your current email strategy? What results do you want to achieve? Example: Accelerate the purchase cycle by X%

1. • Align sales and marketing team (S-Marketing): Before starting the strategy, it is essential that the sales team is aligned and that all the actions performed below are agreed between these two departments.

1. • Define who your potential customers are and what is a qualified lead (SQL): The two teams (sales + Marketing) must define the characteristics that “the ideal customer” should have and when a lead is considered to be fully prepared and qualified for purchase.

1. • Know what the cycle of users purchase : Over time you will adapt and customize depending on your business, but to start you can use the basic scheme of Buyer Journey (Discovery + consideration + decision).

1. • Create a lead Scoring methodology: A lead scoring system that will allow us to classify the level of interest of a lead and its preparation for the purchase.

1. • Mapping content: Creating a Timeline With the content that we will send via email according to the Buyer person, your Buyer Journey and the behavior you have.

1. • Create content and campaigns (emails + Premium content)
   • Analyze and test: Once the strategy is fully implemented, the following is to analyze and test continuously to polish it. Previously you have to define the factors that you will take into account and the metrics that you will measure to know if you are getting good results.

So far today’s article. In the next I’ll tell you about what is the Lead Scoring, another technique to be used within a strategy of Email marketing.