Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospects by engaging with them in ways that are beneficial to them. This involves listening to their needs and offering well-intended advice, information, and solutions to address those needs.

Lead nurturing takes place at all stages of the marketing funnel and requires a range of processes and tactics, including:

• Follow leads by email, webinar, webchat, sales call and so on.
• Offer personalized promotions to leads/customers, such as the email shown in Exhibit 29.11 from GoDaddy targeting an existing customer with a promotional offer for new orders.
• Retarget prospects through ads to remain top-of-mind.
• Use customer relationship management (CRM) practices to understand and manage customers and engage with them to build relationships.
• Use eCommerce to facilitate the sales process.

Focus on nurturing that engenders trust, as this is far more effective in building relationships. Intrusive approaches, such as emails, should be directed to those who opt-in or have the provision to opt-out or unsubscribe, as is the case for the GoDaddy offer shown in Exhibit 29.11. Fresh opt-in opportunities should be created constantly to encourage prospects to opt-in.

‘Pot sweeteners’ can be used effectively to build relationships. These are items of value to prospects that do not cost much to provide. For example, Kantar shares consumer insights via email campaigns, as shown in Exhibit 28.12, to nurture customers and remain top-of-mind. Since the insights are sourced from Kantar’s Worldpanel, an ongoing consumer panel service, producing the insights does not incur additional data collection or data processing costs. Yet, they may induce some prospects to subscribe to Kantar’s Worldpanel service for deeper and more detailed insights on their markets.

With emails, it helps if you can develop a personal touch. Personalization, in part, is a function of knowing your prospect and sending the right messages. It is important to send messages that are relevant to the recipient and that a real person is sending them, rather than a computer-generated message.

Email campaigns should be evaluated primarily on the basis of behavioural cues such as the frequency of visiting a website, the items downloaded, and the pages visited.

It is essential to keep your end goal in mind, particularly when nurturing prospects, and ensure that the messages are aligned with the goals. Intrusive tactics and irrelevant messages can be counterproductive and damage the relationship with the prospect.