The Definitive Guide To Customer Nurturing

About the Guide

How customer nurturing can benefit you

Studies have shown that you lose up to 25% of email subscribers each year due to attrition. When you think of how important those subscribers are for your customer nurture programmes, this loss can have a serious impact on your ability to convert customers over time.

This statistic should be no surprise. Today's customers navigate buying much differently than they did a few years ago. Now, individuals have the ability to educate themselves about brands and products before they even encounter an ad campaign. Information is available from a multitude of channels and while this can make customer communication more complex, it can also build a strong relationship if approached in the right way. This is where the importance of customer nurturing comes into play. Keeping in mind that on average 50% of potential customers aren't quite ready to buy, we can utilise various platforms, like social media, display ads and email, to build and maintain a relationship on the customer's terms until they're ready to make a purchase.

Once in place, a strong nurturing programme goes far beyond monitoring and responding to feedback—B2B marketers can collect data about behaviour including details about the buyer journey before, during, and after purchase. With this, you can help to support your company by driving repeat purchases and rekindling once stagnant opportunities. At the same time, you can increase conversion by creating a more relevant experience for leads and turn existing customers into brand advocates. Additionally, an engagement marketing platform can help you to create flexible, adaptive communications at scale by implementing a customer nurturing strategy and programme.

What's in the guide?

• What is customer nurturing?
  Start by reevaluating your ideas behind customer nurturing and its direct tie to a modern organisation's revenue streams. A successful customer nurturing programme will help you build trusted relationships with a personalised, cross-channel experience that leads expect throughout the buying journey.
• Four elements of engaging customer nurturing
  In order to create a reciprocal relationship in which customers feel heard and understood, you'll need to address these key elements of an engaging customer nurture programme: trustworthiness, relevance, multi-channel communication, strategy and impact.
• Goal setting
  Creating a customer nurturing programme is a key step to optimising your marketing return on investment (ROI). To do this in a way that is accelerated, educational and engaging, you'll need to define exactly what you want to achieve across your current customer lifecycle process, in terms of your qualitative and quantitative objectives.
• Technology selection
  You have a variety of options for how you want to connect with buyers, measure tasks and plan your marketing calendar. Use our checklist to explore the ways you can automate the customer nurturing process and determine exactly what solutions are best for you. Use our checklist to evaluate vendors based on whether they support two-way conversation with your customers, as well as online and off-line communication, help you to build relationships across the entire customer journey.
• Customer scoring
  We find that companies who use lead scoring see a huge lift in ROI. When you collect data about buyer behaviour, customer fit (demographics), customer interest, customer behaviour and buying stage, you'll be able to highly personalise an experience for each customer regardless of where they are on their purchasing journey
• List building
  Your customer nurturing programme needs fuel to function—we'll show you how to build and maintain your email lists from website registration and landing pages, social media channels, off-line events, online events, purchase history and blog subscriptions.
• Nurturing in a multi-channel world
  The modern, digitally-empowered buyer is channel-agnostic. This means, as a marketer, you'll need about how to nurture anonymous customers across your website, retarget customers via display ads, combine email and social media, as well as how to add direct mail and mobile campaigns to personalise the customer experience from awareness to decision.
• Segmentation
  Segmentation allows you to divide data to reach your goals. By breaking down your goals into segments, you can address buyers on a personal level. In addition to speaking to customers during the lifecycle purchasing stage, you can further segment into persona groups, geography and location, as well as buying behaviour.
• Calculating the ROI of nurturing
  There are a multitude of ways to track the effectiveness of your customer nurturing programme to see what is working and what can be improved. Start by tracking basic email metrics like sent, delivered, bounced, open rate, click through rate, unsubscribed, marked as spam etc. Next, add advanced metrics like an overall engagement score, to see how the combination of actions outlines a customer's readiness.

The Definitive Guide to Customer Nurturing will walk you through the entire lifecycle of turning an empowered potential buyer into a returning customer.