The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing

About the Guide

How can lead nurturing help your business?

The relationship between consumers and marketing is vital, but it's also changing faster than ever before. Making a purchase takes more time for a buyer than it has in the past, as that process now includes self-education and a need to build trust with the company they are looking to buy from. In order to champion these ever-changing challenges, your lead nurture programme must be sophisticated, intuitive and considerate in its courtship with the customer.

Not only is the buyer's process and timeline evolving, but they are also engaging with brands on a wide spectrum of different channels and media, before your more focused marketing efforts even reach them directly. In a landscape where cutting through the clutter and establishing a trusted relationship is everything, it's essential that you deliver relevant communications with a consistent voice and value, while also considering their individual pace throughout the sales cycle.

Enter lead nurturing. By developing a lead nurture programme and implementing it with the right marketing automation process, you'll be able to create intuitive, adaptive communications at scale. This allows you to establish and maintain long-term relationships with buyers, which creates consistency in buyer interest and ultimately builds loyalty and advocacy for your brand. Your individual lead nurture campaigns will also allow you to measure the interest and behaviour of your buyers as they interact with your brand along their entire journey, so you can ensure your future campaigns are always evolving to become more relevant and ultimately, more profitable.

What's in the guide?

• What is lead nurturing and why does my business need it?
  Lead nurturing builds trust with buyers, developing more substantial relationships with potential customers throughout the entire buying journey. Learn how to function on the buyer's timeline and ensure that they'll have you in mind when they're ready to purchase.
• Establishing a lead nurturing strategy
  Modern lead nurturing allows you to listen and respond to customers across social media, web, email and mobile. Learn how to use lead nurturing to set qualitative and quantitative objectives for your company and achieve even your loftiest goals.
• Setting up your team and technology
  Review the roles and responsibilities of a successful lead nurturing team, including learning what skill sets and technology resources you'll need to increase efficiency and grow revenue faster.
• Who needs to be nurtured?
  Use our checklist to define your leads and learn the basics of lead scoring — fit, interest, behaviour and buying stage/timing — to create alignment between sales and marketing and ensure the health of your lead database.
• Learning multichannel lead nurturing
  Discover how to approach lead nurturing with a modern, cross-channel lens — establish a framework of engagement across your website, social media, direct mail and mobile.
• Creating the right content
  We'll walk you through how to plan and produce content that tells your business story to the right people, the right way. Learn the different types of nurture content, the anatomy of a nurture email and best practices for email creation.
• Exploring segmentation
  Understand the foundations of audience segmentation by dividing leads into definable and actionable parts. We'll walk you through different buying stages and buying profiles, explain how each part of the funnel demands a different approach and even provide a worksheet that will allow you to deepen your targeting and develop and track specialised campaigns.
• Testing, optimisation and ROI
  Learn tactics for maintaining the health of your lead nurture programme and determining your ROI, from measuring the basics (sent, delivered, bounced, opens etc.) to more advanced metrics like engagement, lead acceleration and revenue impact.