Did you know 73% of B2B leads aren’t ready to speak to sales? How, then, is a marketer supposed to further qualify their leads to confidently hand them off to their sales counterparts?
You might be saying to yourself, “Why, lead nurturing, of course.” If you are, you’re right on the money. But there’s a lot to consider to get the most return from your lead nurturing strategy. Here are some of the most important pieces to think about as you create your next nurturing campaign.
Nurturing the right audience.
The first is segmentation. Marketing in 2017 is defined by personalizing every touch point with a lead as accurately and as often as possible. And segmenting the correct audience before you start your lead nurturing campaign is key. Whether you group your contacts by buyer persona or by interest in a particular industry topic, marketers need to understand all of the properties and lead engagement actions available to them to filter the correct audience before going live with a campaign.
Nurturing with the right number of emails.
Once you've defined your audience, you need to implement a nurturing framework to decide how often you’ll be sending nurturing emails. Factors like campaign duration and typical email frequency will affect the overall number and cadence of emails in your lead nurturing campaign, so the “right” number of email sends will differ from business to business.
Look at previous lead nurturing activities you may have run to decide on an appropriate email cadence. If your leads are used to receiving emails from you every five business days, you may want to stick with that for this campaign. You can then test different campaign lengths for future campaigns to uncover the nurturing duration that works best for your contacts.
Nurturing with the right content.
Another big question to answer is what to send these people in the emails you’ve planned for them. We’ll stick with the theme of personalization here and look at both the type of persona you’re nurturing and where they are in their buying cycle.
It’s important to send your audience relevant content that they’ll want to consume, but you also need to consider how you’ll structure the content in this nurturing engagement. You may want to start by building rapport in your early emails, send some additional downloads in the middle, and then end with an email asking them to take action that aligns with the goal of your campaign.
Learn how to become a lead nurturing pro.
If you’re looking for a hands-on session to methodically build out a lead nurturing campaign with all of these best practices and more, join me for the Nurturing Leads with HubSpot training session at HubSpot Training Day @ Inbound 2017.
What will you learn in the lead nurturing HubSpot Training Day session?
We'll take a deep dive into what I’ve mentioned above, but we’ll also cover:
- How to define a lead nurturing campaign and the best practices to implement it.
- How to define the types of filters that can be used to segment contacts for enrollment in a HubSpot workflow.
- How to understand the actions a workflow can perform that are integral to a lead nurturing campaign.
- How to use the HubSpot workflows tool to track your goals and ensure the right contacts are getting nurtured at the right time.
