Inbound marketing has become the most effective way for businesses to generate leads in today’s digital age. However, there’s one essential element required to maximize the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts — lead nurturing.
Creating an effective campaign means thinking beyond generating a lead and considering what happens after someone submits their information to download your inbound marketing resource.
This is where lead nurturing comes in. Lead nurturing will help you qualify and develop the leads your campaign generates, moving them from early-stage leads to interested prospects who are a good fit for your product or service.
4 Inbound Lead Nurturing Tips Every Biz Dev Pro Should Know
But what’s the key to effective lead nurturing? Here are four tips you should know:
- (Pre)segmenting the leads you’ll generate.
Before you start writing emails and setting up your nurturing flows, first think about who the leads are you are likely to generate and how you should follow up with them. It’s possible that one nurturing track and one set of messages will work for all of the leads your campaign generates, but it’s more likely that you can segment those leads and nurture them in more targeted ways.
For example, if your business caters primarily to two specific industries, you may want to nurture each industry’s leads in different ways and with different content.
- Defining your goals and creating email content.
With your segments in mind, you are now ready to start writing the email content for your nurturing flows.
When deciding what kind of content you’ll use, it’s helpful to ask yourself what your ultimate goal is for each segment you plan to nurture. If your high level goal is to turn early leads into sales ready leads, what does that mean in practical terms? Do you have different goals for different segments? Once you’ve determined the goal for each nurturing flow, start mapping out your emails and your content.
- Nurturing through your website.
You’ve got your emails written and your automation flows in place. That’s great! But nurturing your leads shouldn’t stop at the inbox. Your leads are likely coming and going from many different parts of your website all the time. Maybe they directly type in your web address to get to your homepage or click a link on social media and end up back on your blog. Depending on the tools you use, you may be able to deliver targeted messages to these leads too.
- Determine when leads are ready for your sales team.
The machinery of your campaign is almost fully set up! To take things the final mile, give some thought to when and how you’ll pass leads to your sales team. How this process takes place varies widely from company to company. If you get a few leads, you may walk over to your sales folks and have a face to face discussion about each lead that comes in. If you get a large volume, it’s helpful to have an ongoing process in place.