30-second summary:
- According to response audit’s research, most companies throw away business by failing to respond to leads properly.
- There are several benefits that lead nurturing can bring to your business.
- From contextual communication to encouraging referrals, there’s a lot of benefits that your business can get by nurturing leads earned through digital marketing.
- Co-founder of Ally digital media, Abhishek Shah guides you through to maximize your digital sales.
For every marketer ever, when it comes to the number of leads, enough is never enough. More leads mean more chances to make a sale. Thanks to digital marketing, it is now possible to generate leads through multiple sources. If done right, the quality of leads is also as good as freshly minted currency notes. But, generating leads is just the beginning of fetching the prospect’s contact. There is much more that needs to be done to turn a lead into a sales deal. The prospect has to be guided through several stages of the sales funnel, or every phase of the buyer’s journey. Such a process is referred to as lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing, a quick introduction
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects/leads throughout the buyer’s journey with the aid of marketing communication. Lead nurturing ensures that at each stage of the buyer’s journey, the prospect is supplied with enough information to make an informed buying decision. It increases product awareness, creates an interest in the product/service and also guides in making the right choice that is deemed fit for the prospect’s requirements. 
Source: ResponseAudit
How lead nurturing can help maximize your digital sales
Now, why should businesses bother about lead nurturing?
What benefits can it possibly provide?
According to response audit’s research, most companies throw away business by failing to respond to leads properly.
There are several benefits that lead nurturing can bring to your business. Some of them are described below:
Contextual communication
A lead is a prospect who has shown interest in your product/service. At the onset, they may lack contextual information about your business offerings and how it can help them. As a matter of fact, you cannot pitch the business offerings right in the first interaction.
Be persistent but not annoying
It is necessary that the prospects are educated and made aware of what the business is offering, which scenarios can it be useful and so on forth. Lead nurturing takes care of this contextual communication throughout the buyer’s journey. The benefit of this contextual communication is that buyers make an informed buying decision. Also, there is a higher chance an educated customer will make a purchase.
Addresses pain areas
Lead nurturing offers a splendid way to understand your leads better. What pain areas are they trying to address through your business offerings? With lead nurturing emails, it is possible to extract the right kind of information or even engage with prospects so that the sales conversations become more focused or warmer towards closing the deal.
Make it a point to use personalized messages to each lead as that is probably what you would want to receive if you were the lead.
Another allied benefit of lead nurturing is that it helps segment customers based on their pain areas. For example, startups would require basic plans that offer primary features, while enterprise customers would need advanced plans with elaborate features.
Maximize engagement
Lead nurturing can be used to nudge dormant leads who have stopped interacting with your business and its multiple touchpoints like website, mobile app, and the web app. In other words, it can be used to rekindle the interest that prospects had shown during the initial stages of the buyer’s journey.
How lead nurturing can help maximize your digital sales
For example, a prospect whose trial had expired and has not bothered to interact with the business again. A lead nurturing email campaign or a social media-based retargeting campaign can help resume the interaction with the prospect. The drip mail campaign or social media post or even a display ad can act as a reminder for the prospect to reconsider their interest in the business association.
Create cross-selling or up-selling opportunities
Lead nurturing is not just for winning new customers. It can also be used effectively to cross-sell or up-sell to existing customers. Studies by Market2Lead have found that nurtured leads have a nine percent higher average deal size. In other words, selling more to existing customers is not only cost-effective but is also more profitable.
Cross-selling or up-selling ensures that the customer remains within the business’ ecosystem and does not venture out to sign up for other services. The direct benefit of this is that the business continues getting recurring revenue over the period of years thus reducing customer acquisition costs and maximizing profits.
Encourages referrals
One tactic used in lead generation is producing and publishing valuable content. If your prospects find the content you share to be valuable, there is a higher chance that they will do it with their peers and close networks as well. This, in turn, can create the multiplier effect of bringing more leads purely out of interest.
A classic example of this is HubSpot. HubSpot publishes thought leadership, informative, and tactical content on marketing. Their content is so powerful that marketers and business owners reckon them as an authoritative word of the marketing world. This, in turn, brings in more organic traffic as well as leads for HubSpot. Needless to say, this makes the task of conversion easier.
Final thoughts – Nurture, nurture, and nurture
The great benefit of lead nurturing is that it provides businesses to up-sell and cross-sell to existing customers. It also empowers the business to get more referrals from existing customers who are impressed by the informative content that the business creates. This, in turn, strengthens the relationship that the sales and marketing teams use. A well-aligned sales and marketing team will be able to add more meat to the bottom line than one that is constantly out of sync.
In the end, lead nurturing helps marketers achieve one goal — increase the volume and quality of leads.
Abhishek Shah is the co-founder of Ally Digital Media, a leading voice in digital media and marketing. He advocates for evidence-based marketing strategies to fuel the businesses. He can be found on Twitter @abiishek.
