The 7 Mysteries of Lead Nurturing Unveiled
With more and more responsibility landing on marketing to help fill the sales pipeline, lead nurturing programs must be employed to involve the 45% of inquiries that go dormant. While marketers do not struggle with the value of lead nurturing overall, according to research from Bizo and Oracle Marketing Cloud, many do wrestle with the functional concepts and how to extract that value to maximize pipeline. What follows is the answer to 7 questions that have been asked time and again by those marketers that believe they still have a lot of optimization ahead of them in order to deliver on the promise of lead nurturing.
Mystery 1: Will lead nurturing produce sales qualified leads?
Lead nurturing’s goal is not to produce sales qualified leads. Lead nurturing is a sequence of emails that are used to continue to engage with leads. The goal is to keep your solution top mind, provide thought leadership and to evaluate engagement levels as an input and indicator of sales readiness.
Mystery 2: What is included in each email nurture touch?
There are various levels of complexity for a single nurture touch. The email itself can be very simple with a single call-to-action link or it can be more visually engaging with graphics and buttons. The call to action can take the recipient directly to a piece of content marketing or to a landing page with qualification questions (e.g. BANT) that when answered will take the lead to desired content.
Mystery 3: How specific or general should my nurture programs be?
The specificity of the nurture programs is based on your organization and maturing level for nurturing. If you’ve never run a nurture program before, start with one general program. As you grow in maturity, you can add programs that are more specific based on buying cycle, persona, need, and product.
Mystery 4: When should I start nurturing my leads?
Best practices recommend nurturing start as soon as the leads are generated. But if that is not possible, do not panic. Leads can still perform well in a nurture program if they have been dormant for a month. However leads that have been untouched for six-months or more are not good candidates for nurturing as their needs may have shifted and their relationship with your brand may have grown stale.
Mystery 5: What is the optimum length of time leads should be nurtured?
Leads typically let you know when they are done being nurtured. Either they stop engaging with emails or their velocity of engagement significantly increases. When the velocity picks up, that is an indication the lead is ready to be converted. Leads that have stopped engaging are no longer interested in the topic. These leads should be routed from the current nurture program
Mystery 6: What percentage of leads can I expect to convert?
The stringency of the conversion rule or score algorithm as well as quality of the ingested leads and content are the biggest impacts to the number of leads that are converted. All things being optimal, a realistic goal for a nurture program is 2 to 5%.
Mystery 7: How can I determine if my program is working?
Pipeline growth, an increase in the percentage of leads that are qualified by sales, and a reduction in the time to close a sale are all indicators that the nurture program is working. Comparing these metrics from before and after the program is implemented is ideal, i.e. a solid baseline will provide quantitative “before-after” evidence of success.
Lead nurturing is a proven approve for engaging leads with relevant and personalized content. With the 7 mysteries revealed, initiating lead nurture within your marketing stack should produce on average a 20% increase in sales opportunities from leads that are not nurtured leads to leads that are.
