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I wasn't always a lead nurturing fan. In fact, I had never done automated lead nurturing until HubSpot's dev team built it into our product and the marketing team became the company's guinnea pig for each new feature. Since then, I've learned how amazing lead nurturing is and how superior it is to outbound email blasts or even outbound email marketing's inbound sister, targeted mass email marketing.
6 Reasons Why Lead Nurturing Wins
#1: It's automated.
Lead nurturing has a one-time setup. Once you do that, emails are sent out automatically according to your schedule as new leads come in. Sounds like a high return for a low investment to me.
#2: It's timely.
One of the problems with mass email marketing is that you end up not connecting with leads as soon as they subscribe, which is when they're most interested in hearing from you. Study after study shows that email response rates decline over the age of the lead.
#3: Nothing slips through the cracks.
It's easy for marketers to fall victim to the "sales isn't following up on my hard-earned leads" complaint. Well, lead nurturing puts lead follow up more in the control of the marketing team. With an automated campaign that goes to each lead, you know they're getting a follow up.
#4: It creates more value out of what you have.
As a marketer, it's frustrating to constantly have to generate more and more new leads every month or quarter or year. Have a great month? Good for you. Now start all over. Lead nurturing lets you focus not on generating new leads, but on nurturing those leads to be better qualified to reach your sales team - perhaps an even greater value!
#5: It offers more precise targeting.
Studies show that targeted and segmented emails perform better than mass email communications. Lead nurturing allows you to target your followup based on a lead's conversion event, indicating their interests in the topic of that conversion event. Based on this information, lead nurturing emails can highlight reconversion opportunities that tie back to their earlier interests.
#6: You can repurpose existing content.
Content is key to attracting visitors to your site and getting them to give up their lead information. And it can be tough to constantly come up with new content offers. Well, with lead nurturing, all of your leads are new to you and your content, so you can repurpose offers you already have since these leads have never seen it!
All in all, lead nurturing provides better results for less work - what more could a marketer ask for? If you've been a mass email junkie until now, consider diverting your efforts to setting up lead nurturing campaigns. You'll be glad you did, and you can celebrate with a martini during all the time you're saving.
Have any other reasons why lead nurturing wins over email marketing? Or do you disagree? Share your thoughts in the comments!
Flickr photo by Garry Knight
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