6 Easy Steps to Create a Winning Lead Nurturing Strategy

Lead nurturing means maintaining interaction with your leads to remain on their radar and develop the relationship. Lead nurturing involves putting out content that improves your brand image, presenting yourself as an expert in your field. But careful strategising and planning, as well as the use of the right tools, is vital for effective lead nurturing. These are the 6 steps to create a winning lead nurturing strategy.

1. Define your Audience

The first step to create a winning lead nurturing strategy is to define your target audience for each nurturing campaign. You are bound to have different types of customers in your business so it’s important to know who you need to target before you do anything else.

2. Segment your Lists

List segmentation is the next all in important step. There are hundreds of ways you could segment your email list; by age, by location, by gender, by past purchases. The way you choose to segment your list will be dependent on your product and your industry. If you are an estate agent for example, the lead you should be targeting with your 3 –bedroom family home is different from the lead you should be targeting for a studio flat.

Segmenting your email list helps you to target the right people with the right content and enables you to create campaigns that are more relevant, therefore increasing your chance of conversion.

3. Define Your Objectives

What are the goals of each individual email or call? This is a key step to create a winning lead nurturing strategy. Each email should have a purpose, otherwise you shouldn’t be sending it! To help you with this, answer the following questions before composing your email:

• What is the subject line? I.e. Why You Should be Investing in a CRM System.

• What is the Call to Action? I.e. Take a Free Trial.

• What type of content are you sending out? I.e. A guide.

• What is the goal? I.e. To increase trials of the system.

This will help you get a clearer picture of what you want to achieve with each email and how this is going to help you achieve your overall objective.

4. Research and Produce Valuable Content

Now that you’ve defined your objectives, you can research and produce content that will help you meet your objectives. Lead nurturing is all about priming the lead for a conversion. Jumping straight into a sales pitch is likely to turn off your lead. Your lead will react better to valuable and informative content. Take a travel agents for example, if they’ve engaged with a prospect who’s interested in a trip to the US, they might send them “10 Cities to Visit in the USA”, followed by “10 top restaurants to visit in New York.” This kind of content will help to gently persuade the prospect to book their trip and keep the travel agents at the forefront of their mind.

Researching relevant content to engage your different audiences is probably the most important task as the content determines whether the lead is hooked or turned off.

5. Determine the Timeline

Sending out too many emails a day to the same prospects is likely to irritate them and this will only result in them unsubscribing to your emails. Sending frequent emails, once or twice a week, however is sufficient. Research shows that a lead needs at least 6 contacts to convert. Your emails should be well spaced to give the lead time to anticipate the next email.

6. Evaluation & Optimisation

How well are your emails/calls achieving their goals? Evaluate the performance and make tweaks in areas that need improvement. By optimising and improving your process, you’ll see higher success rates over time.

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