As business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers, we spend a lot of time discussing how to acquire leads. There is a whole heap of strategies and techniques that we spend endless amounts of time talking about. And for good reason! What is a business without the customers that can support it?
Getting leads through the door is one thing. But keeping them around for the long haul is the hard (and most important) part.
To thrive and succeed, you need to cultivate those leads, transforming them into loyal customers who champion your brand. This is where lead nurturing enters the picture.
In this blog, we’re going to delve into the world of lead nurturing and explore the crucial elements of building a successful lead nurturing workflow.
Whether you're a small business owner, a marketing professional, or an aspiring entrepreneur, this guide will provide insights, strategies, and best practices to supercharge your lead nurturing efforts.
What is a lead nurturing workflow?
Lead nurturing is a strategic process that focuses on building relationships with potential customers at every stage of their buyer's journey.
In other words, to create a lead nurturing workflow is to nurture your prospects and clients at every turn. Whether they’re at the beginning, middle or end of their customer journey. Nurture is the aim and the game!
Successful lead nurturing programmes concentrate marketing and communication efforts on understanding prospects' needs and giving them the knowledge and solutions they require to establish trust.
At this point you might be thinking ‘’Okay. That is all well and good but how do I go about creating a lead nurturing workflow?’’
If you’ve had that thought or anything that was similar, you’re in luck - the next part of the blog will outline 4 steps that you can take to create the ultimate lead nurturing workflow.
4 Steps to create the ultimate lead nurturing workflow
1. Define your customer journey
Before you even think about attracting leads and nurturing prospects, you should have defined the customer journey your clients will go through.
Defining your customer journey is crucial for creating an effective lead nurturing workflow because it allows you to understand and address your potential customers' needs, preferences, and pain points at each stage of their buying process.
Here are a couple of steps that will help you you to define your customer journey:
- Personalisation
A well-defined customer journey helps you tailor your messaging and content to match each stage of the buyer's journey. At each stage of the buying journey, your leads will be at different levels of awareness. And so, they will need personalised messaging that speaks to them at the stage they’re in. This personalization enhances the customer experience and increases the likelihood of converting leads into customers.
- Marketing automation
When you have mapped out your customer journey, you’ll know what kind of messaging needs to be sent at each point. Your marketing automation system will allow you to implement triggers that send out the relevant messaging at the right time.
This ensures you engage with leads at the right moment, avoiding excessive or untimely communication that could turn them off.
And, it saves you a whole bunch of time as you don’t need to spend your days watching what your leads are doing and sending them the correct information!
- Lead scoring & behavioural segmentation
The customer journey helps you develop lead scoring and segmentation criteria.
As leads progress through the journey, you can assign scores based on their engagement level, behaviour, and interactions. This allows you to prioritise high-value leads and tailor your nurturing workflow accordingly. You can also segment leads into different groups based on their journey stage or specific interests, enabling more targeted and relevant communication.
2. Behavioural Segmentation
Although we touched upon behavioural segmentation briefly in the point above, segmenting your leads by behaviour is really going to up the ante when building a lead nurturing workflow.
If nurture is the aim of the game, segmenting by behaviour will ensure you get there!
Let’s imagine you aren’t getting the results you want from your leads.
Maybe they aren’t engaging or progressing through your customer journey. This would mean they are presenting some form of behaviour, just not the one you would like.
Here is where it gets good - whether the behaviour you’re being presented with is positive or negative, behavioural segmentation allows you to change that.
If it’s negative, get your nurture on! Get in touch with them, try and find out what they’re missing that is stopping them from progressing. If the behaviour is positive, stick to your customer journey mapping, go forth and prosper.
3. Create valuable content
Content is king and it always will be. (Read along with this blog if you would like to find out why!) With that being said, creating valuable content is the perfect way to create a lead nurturing workflow.
With the right content, you can educate, validate, entertain and keep your leads moving swiftly through their customer journey. It’s important to remember that content can come in many different forms.
You can choose lead magnets, newsletters, email series, e-books, checklists.. The list goes on and on for what you can get your teeth stuck into to help nurture your leads.
Demand Metric has reported that Content marketing generates over 3x as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. So, if you want the ultimate lead nurturing workflow while saving yourself a pretty penny, it is time to start creating that content!
4. Analyse & Optimise
As with most things, there is always room for improvement! It is imperative that you collect all of the data that you can so that you’re able to analyse it later down the road to optimise your lead nurturing workflow to bring in those results.
There are a few ways that you can analyse your data to optimise your lead nurturing:
- Define your goals
Clearly define the objectives of your lead nurturing workflow. This could include increasing conversion rates, improving engagement, or shortening the sales cycle. Setting specific goals will help you determine which metrics to focus on.
- Identify relevant metrics
Determine the key performance metrics that align with your goals. Some common metrics to consider include:
- Conversion rates: Measure the percentage of leads that progress through each stage of the nurturing workflow.
- Engagement metrics: Analyse email open rates, click-through rates, and time spent on website or landing pages.
- Lead quality: Assess lead scoring, lead source, and demographic data to identify high-quality leads.
- Sales metrics: Track the number of leads that convert into customers, sales cycle length, and revenue generated.
- Collect and consolidate data
You can gather your data from various sources that will be available to you. Your CRM system, marketing automation platform and you can use the analytics that come from your webpage, socials and emails. Consolidate all of this data and pop it into one location for you to be able to analyse it easier.
- Look for trends
Look for patterns and trends in your data. Analyse your metrics over time to identify any significant changes or anomalies. For example, observe if certain email campaigns or content types result in higher engagement or conversion rates.
Time to build the ultimate lead nurturing workflow?
When it comes to your leads and customers, nurture is the thing that is going to keep them on board. Through nurture you’re able to attract, educate and validate your leads all the way through their customer journey.
Now that we’ve gotten to the end of this blog, you know exactly what a lead nurturing workflow is and you’ve got 4 steps that will work for you when you decide to get your teeth stuck in and build the ultimate lead nurturing workflow.
We get it. Learning how to build a lead nurturing workflow can be a little bit of a tricky one if you’ve never done it before. But, luckily for you, your favourite Ninjas are on hand to help should you need it.
Whether you’ve just got some burning questions or you’re looking for consultancy and a little bit of help with your content, click below to book a call with one of the Ninjas and we’ll see what we can do for you!
