The biggest differences in B2B and B2C marketing and lead nurturing involve time and scale:
It’s in these differences where lead nurturing provides tremendous value for B2B companies. B2B companies will shorten sales cycles with lead nurturing. Market2Lead research found that nurtured leads have a:
More recent research from The Annuitas Group found that nurtured leads made 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Educating leads with high quality resources (blogs, ebooks, webinars, and demos for example) builds trust. The repeated touches via email (and other methods) establishes a rapport that establishes your business as a trusted advisor in your industry.
Start optimizing your email lead generation strategy and you’re on your way to larger contracts with a shorter sales cycle.
The following 14 tips and suggestions will help get your lead nurturing strategy off to a great start, or give a struggling strategy a shot in the arm.
You need to know what “success” looks like. Your goals could be simple (10% conversion” or “30% click through rate”) or more complicated (“20% higher contract value per customer). Regardless of your goals, establish them upfront. As your lead nurturing strategies mature, adjust your goals accordingly.
As your nurture campaigns mature and you follow the advice in this blog, the complexity of your efforts will increase. You’ll be better able to identify your ideal prospect’s buyers journey and match content to each stage of the process.
But before you begin to personalize; create multiple, automated workflows; multi-layered campaigns with touches across email, phone, text, and social media; and additional levels of detail; you have to take your first step.
Much like a baby usually learns to crawl before she walks, begin your lead nurturing efforts with a single nurture campaign. It’s easy to over-complicate and over-think by looking ahead a year to what you could be doing. Start simple so you can get there.
For instance, pick ONE persona to create a nurture campaign for. If you have multiple products or services, pick ONE product/service and create a nurture campaign for a single persona. Trying to do everything at once in the beginning is a recipe for disaster. Focus; learn; THEN add complexity!
What kind of content do you have available to share in your lead nurturing efforts? Blogs, eBooks, podcasts, social media posts, case studies, and webinars are all excellent examples of B2B content.
What are the friction points and challenges they’re experiencing at each stage of the buyer’s journey? Create email nurturing campaigns for each stage with content that addresses their pain points.
Lead nurturing is about making the sale, but attempting to sell too soon will quickly turn a warm lead into a cold one.
As you create the emails and the content you’ll use to nurture a lead from someone mildly interested in your company to a customer, always think about how this helps your lead. Answer their questions, especially the ones they don’t know they have yet. Be honest. Use easy-to-read language (NO JARGON!).
Your goal is to make it as easy as possible for your leads to learn from and interact with you.
A newsletter may seem outdated, yet remains one of the simplest ways to stay in touch with customers and potential customers. They are also widely used. In the Content Marketing Institute's B2B Content Marketing 2017 Benchmark, email newsletters were the third most-used tactic at 77% (only blogs, 80%, and social media content, 83%, were used more). However, they were the second-most effective tactic, with 40% of marketers saying email is critical to success (blogs were the highest ranked at 52%).
Most of us subscribe to newsletters. They come in all sizes and shapes, from simple text to all images to a mix of the two. Some are long. Some are short. What they all have in common is they are designed to focus attention on you.
Best advice: regardless of the format and frequency of your newsletter, focus on delivering relevant information your leads are interested in.
Most marketing automation tools give marketers the ability to test nearly everything. If you aren’t testing, you aren’t doing everything you can to improve.
What should you test? Here are a few suggestions:
This list is limited by your imagination and time to implement. Lead nurturing should not be a static, set-it-and-forget-it program. Tweaking your strategy over time will allow you to home in on what works best for your customers.
While marketing automation can support your lead nurturing efforts, by no means should your touchpoints be completely generic. Ensure that your messages speak to the specific pain point your buyer personas are experiencing in addition to these personalization tips:
Lead nurturing shouldn’t only be targeted to leads. Analyze your customer database to identify opportunities for upselling customers to a higher value product and/or to an adjacent product.
Survey results from Demand Gen’s 2015 Lead Nurturing Benchmark Study reveal that most marketers use fewer than five touches in lead nurturing programs. Meanwhile, research from the Marketing Lead Management Report reveals that prospects averaged 10 touches from the moment they entered the marketing funnel to becoming a customer.
Experiment with the length of your nurture campaign(s) and the number of customer touches in each, but don’t limit yourself to two or three emails because you don’t want to bother your leads. If you do, there’s a decent chance they’ll never become a customer.
Your lead nurturing efforts should be dynamic and recognize when prospects take specific action. For example, identifying that a lead has downloaded another resource from your website or viewed your pricing page should trigger different nurturing messages.
Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Constant Contact, or Marketo allow you to automate your nurture campaigns. For instance, in HubSpot you can set up an onboarding workflow for new customers that welcome the user and provide tips for how to get the most out of the product/service. That nurture campaign can be a single email in length or 30 emails. Further, you can drill down and create campaigns unique to each product you offer.
While your lead nurturing campaigns should focus on delivering useful information to your leads, don’t forget to include a call to action. Anything from a simple “We’re Here to Help, Contact Us for More Information” to a focused “Buy Here” button tells your leads exactly what to do next.
While I’ve focused on email in this blog post, lead nurturing can extend beyond email. Once you have at least one robust email lead nurturing campaign working, start thinking about how you can use additional touch points to supplement your email lead nurturing strategy.
A few suggestions are:
Smartly including these elements in an overall nurture strategy will move your prospects down the funnel and say “yes” to you.
Creating lead nurturing campaigns does take time and effort, but the results will be worth it. You’ll create a feeling of trust with your leads and customers, decrease sales cycles, and increase average sales size, especially for B2B companies.
Best of all, with automation you can set up email nurture campaigns and let them run (periodically testing and improving them of course) for years.
Not sure how to begin? We can help you create and execute on your B2B lead nurturing strategy. Give us a shout!