The goal of any lead nurturing campaign is to turn potential customers into loyal customers. But, to do that, you must create relationships with those future customers and this doesn’t usually happen overnight. Successful lead nurturing can help you to earn trust with new leads, increase your company’s reputation as the solution to their needs, gain valuable insights in terms of your customer’s pain points and help to show your prospective buyers why your solution can help them solve their pain points.
Most literature about lead nurturing will talk about how you move a potential customer through the various stages of a buyer’s journey/sales cycle. The most common stages of a buyer’s journey include the:
Awareness stage
This is the point when your potential customers become aware of their pain and start looking for a way to alleviate that pain.
The consideration stage
This is the point when a buyer starts looking for and considering possible solutions.
The Purchase stage
The point that your buyer decides to make a purchase.
The goal of a lead nurturing strategy is to move qualified leads from one stage to the next while keeping them engaged. If you do this right, you will be successful in not just earning a new customer but also building a relationship with that customer. And, if you can build a strong relationship with your customer this can result in moving that customer through higher level stages:
Loyalty stage
This is the stage when your customer becomes loyal. They start to swear by your company and won’t consider an alternative.
Advocacy stage
This is the highest level for a company. If you can have customers that aren’t just loyal but also advocate for you, you can start to see consistent growth that can help you to become a leader in your market.
What is included in successful lead nurturing strategies
If you want to be successful in your lead nurturing efforts, it is important to follow some best practices for your sales and marketing teams to follow as part of your lead nurturing program. Below are some common best practices to follow as you do so:
Have a clear understanding of your target customers and their pain points
A clear lead nurturing strategy must start with being specific about who your target customers are and an understanding of their pain points. If you don’t have those specifics, you won’t be successful in nurturing leads.
Have a proven tool to capture leaders during the awareness or interest stage of a buyer’s journey
Nurturing leads is not possible unless you actually have leads to nurture. This is a big area where Hello Bar can help as Hello Bar has proven to massively increase lead capture rates.
A clear sales funnel
In lead nurturing, you are trying to move your leads from one step in the funnel to the next. So, it’s critical that you establish your sales funnel so you know the specific buyer’s journey that you are going to try to move your leads through.
A lead nurturing process that enables you to keep your lead engaged
Your lead nurturing process must be specific and clear. For example, who is going to manage your lead nurturing process?
Is it going to be a specific sales rep, your head of marketing or other members of your sales and marketing teams?
What channels are you going to use for lead nurturing?
Are you going to have sales reps make follow-up phone calls?
Are you going to use direct mail? Are you going to focus on lead nurturing email campaigns?
And, with all of those, what value are you going to add each step of the lead nurturing sales funnel?
Be sure to tap into your content marketing efforts
Most successful lead nurturing efforts include providing relevant content during the sales cycle. This could be white papers, how-to guides, best practices overviews, benchmarks and calculators, and a variety of other content marketing products. The key is for your sales reps and your inbound marketing teams to work together to be sure that you are sending valuable content to move leads through the steps of your sales cycle.
Find the balance between automation and a personal touch
You will want to automate as much as you can in each lead nurturing campaign but you also want to take the time to share a personal touch within your nurturing campaigns. Remind each sales rep to send personal emails, send handwritten direct mail, remember birthdays (if you know those), share unique content that might matter to a specific lead and generally be personal as often as you can.
Be human.
Build relationships.
Show your potential customers that you care about them and their business.
If you have a very large number of leads, you can consider lead scoring to determine who to show a bit more personal care with. There are plenty of lead scoring tools out there to help with this, or you can have your sales reps ask specific qualifying questions to know which leads should be prioritized.
Have tools for nurturing your leads
Successful lead nurturing strategies include a “stack” of tools used in the various stages of the buyer’s journey. For example:
You can use Hello Bar to capture more leads and even to ensure you are generating highly-qualified leads.
With Hello Bar you can also include lead magnets and connect new leads to your marketing automation tool that will immediately send the first lead nurturing email or an email series.
You can then lean on your marketing automation tool to engage your leads on a regular basis.
Why Hello Bar Is An Essential Tool For Including In Your Lead Nurturing Strategy
As we have already said, the first step in lead nurturing is to be sure that you have enough leads from your target audience. Hello Bar has been proven to be an effective lead nurturing tool for over a decade. In fact, it is a key part of the sales process for companies big and small.
Hello Bar has prebuilt lead capturing templates
Hello Bar’s lead capture software has 100’s of prebuilt lead capture templates that have been designed by professional designers and conversion specialists. These lead capture templates are easy to customize and you can customize a wide variety of elements within these templates.
You can also use Hello Bar’s innovative “Design Assistant” feature which enables you to automatically match the look and feel of your lead capture units to your website design.
EASY to add lead magnets
A great lead nurturing strategy will usually include different lead magnets that can be used to capture a lead from your target audience. These lead magnets are easy to add using Hello Bar and you can A/B test different lead magnets to determine which is best for capturing (and nurturing leads).
It’s Easy to segment your leads to push them through DIfferent Lead Nurturing funnels
An effective lead nurturing strategy may involve sending each distinct target audience down a slightly different lead nurturing funnel. For example, you may have different content or a different lead nurturing program for leads from one industry vs another. Or, you might utilize lead scoring and then push different leads through different funnels based on that lead scoring.
Easy to connect to your various lead nurturing tools
While Hello Bar is an essential lead capturing and lead nurturing tool, the best lead nurturing campaigns will involve a variety of other tools.
You may have a lead scoring tool.
You may automatically send emails to new leads.
You may have a CRM that creates automated sales process steps for effective lead nurturing.
Well, with Hello Bar, there are many built-in integrations with a lot of the most popular marketing and marketing automation tools as well as sales CRMs. This means you can immediately activate your lead nurturing tactics when you capture a new lead through Hello Bar.
Hello Bar is Affordable & Has Great ROI
Capturing leads is expensive and your lead nurturing campaigns should involve multiple lead nurturing and marketing tools. The good news is Hello Bar is affordable and usually pays for itself with just a couple of new paying customers.
High Conversion Rates
All of the above adds up our email capture forms and tools getting very high conversion rates and that’s what matters. You want to grow your email list fast. Hello Bar helps you to do that. In fact, Hello Bar is one of the highest rated and most effective email capture software tools. .
Great Customer Service
Our longstanding customer service team is here to help. Our average customer success team member has been with the company for 5 years so can really help you get the most out of your Hello Bar email capture forms.
Some Good Lead Magnets For Effective Lead Capturing & Nurturing Leads
As we have said, lead magnets are a great way to incent a potential customer to leave their contact information. But valuable content can also increase click-through rates of follow-up lead nurturing emails or other reachouts. Below are some examples of good lead magnets and lead-nurturing content.
Research Reports
If you have good research on best practices and benchmarks that can articulate how people are using your tool to solve their pain, this can be a great piece of content to share.
ROI Calculators
ROI calculators are an effective lead nurturing and lead closing tool. If you can show your potential leads and current leads how your product or service can pay for itself, this can help move your leads through your sales funnel.
Case Studies
Share case studies of other companies or people using your product or service to be successful. Key elements of case studies include the problem they were trying to solve, how they used your solution to overcome that problem and the result of them solving that problem.
Tips & Tricks
General tips and tricks of how to use your product or service to solve common problems your audiences face and tips and tricks for doing so.
WEBINARS OR EVENTS
You can host webinars or events to showcase how people are using your tool to solve common problems. Informative webinars to convert leads at a high rate. Although they can be time consuming to host, they should be considered in your lead nurture programs.
Demo
Invite a lead to attend a live demo or record a demo and send it to your leads.
Other
Get creative – videos, infographics, product overviews, and more. Get creative with the content you share and how you share it.
Track Your Lead Nurturing Efforts
As we stated at the beginning, it’s important to have a clear and specific sales funnel. But, the work doesn’t stop there. You need to track how your leads move through that sales funnel. If you use a CRM, this can be easy to set up.
You can also use Google Analytics to track the success rate of a lead moving from one step to the next. This should be easy for most people to set up within GA4. The key is to track how many leads reach each step in your sales funnel and then determine the drop-off.
You then need to get in the habit of tracking your lead nurturing efforts so you know the activities that are meant to impact each step of your funnel and how well each of your lead nurturing tactics is doing that. For example, you may decide to add a research report to your lead nurturing tactics at the stage right after somebody attends a webinar.
The key is that you should track the percentage of people that make it through to the next step before and after you added this research report to your lead nurturing tactics. And, you should be sure to get in the habit of tracking changes over time. Include the data from your lead nurturing efforts in your weekly standups or meetings.
Setting Goals For Your Lead Nurturing Efforts
If you want to improve the conversion rates of moving leads through the various stage of your funnel, you need to track the progress of your leads through that funnel. But, you should also set goals for each step of your lead nurturing funnel. For example, let’s say that your funnel looks like:
50% of leads make it from stage 1 to stage 2
25% of those leads make it from stage 2 to stage 3
10% of those leads make it from stage 3 to stage 4
You should set a goal for each of these stages and then have clear tactics to reach those goals. For example, imagine how much your business could grow if you just made some small improvements in those conversion rates to:
60% of leads making it from stage 1 to stage 2
35% percent of those leads making it from stage 2 to stage 3
20% of those leads making it from stage 3 to stage 4
Those simple improvements would mean that your sales would go from 1.25 customers per 100 leads to 4.2 customers per 100 leads.
Again, get in the habit of tracking performance against these goals. Communicate these goals to your entire team and then share results against these goals on a consistent basis.
Conclusion: Hello Bar Can Be An Essential Part Of Your Lead Nurture Campaign & Help With Converting Leads
Most businesses are finding it harder to grow than ever before.
Driving traffic to a website is more difficult and more expensive.
Social media posts and ads are driving less engagement.
And, customers and consumers are more busy and distracted than ever.
This means that you need to convert more of your website visitors to become a lead and then you need to be effective in nurturing your leads through your sales funnel. Hello Bar is a key part of any effective lead nurturing campaign because the platform is proven to help you capture more leads, use lead capture content to drive action, enable marketers to segment leads into different nurturing funnels and help to qualify leads so you can focus on the best potential leads.
Hello Bar has been used by over 600,000 websites and is affordable and effective enough to drive massive ROI.
