How to Effectively Nurture Leads to Get Revenue

Are you spending more than half your budget on lead generation and still struggling with low conversion rates?

You are not alone! 

Showing interest and being ready to buy is the first step for potential customers, and not all of them are at this stage. 

In most cases, this process may take months, which means wasted opportunities, time, and money for both the prospects and the business.

This is where lead nurturing comes into play.

A well-crafted B2B lead nurturing strategy can sweeten the deal and shorten the sales cycle by keeping communication with prospects consistent. By using personalized messages at pivotal moments of your leads' sales journey, they may view your business as a partner they're ready to invest in.

We've created this guide to show you how effective lead nurturing can be, and the benefits it can bring to your business. 

Let’s explore. 

What is Lead Nurturing? 

Lead nurturing is communicating with prospects over time to build relationships and move them closer to becoming a customer. It’s not just about sending emails — it’s about understanding the journey from lead generation to conversion and providing the right content at each step.

Lead nurturing, when done well, can build a rich pipeline of sales-qualified leads at a lower cost. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate about 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower costs, according to Invespcro. 

Importance of Lead Nurturing

While businesses continue to invest in lead generation, it's just one piece of the puzzle — the real magic happens when you nurture leads.

Marketers are heavily investing in lead generation: 53% of them spend half or more of their budget on it, but sadly 79% of marketing leads never translate to sales. The reason is the lack of lead nurturing!

It's evident that lead nurturing and lead generation go hand-in-hand. They are essential for your business to thrive, but if you're doing one without the other (or worse, neglecting either), it can hurt your bottom line.

When you step in and nurture your leads, you can ensure that your leads are ready to buy and you don't lose them. It's the perfect way to help turn potential customers into loyal customers and enjoy better conversion rates. 

Let's know how it works to help you understand the big picture and how it can help your business grow.  

How Does Lead Nurturing Work? 

Think of your buying habits, for instance. 

Will you buy a product based on the advertisement that popped up online? Or Will you spend time dwelling on the product, checking reviews, and researching?

Most probably, you fall into the second category because we all want to be sure about the product before committing to it. One has to know the product well before making a decision.

This is precisely what lead nurturing campaigns do for you. An ideal funnel to nurture leads has three different stages. You have to craft strategies carefully to get your leads from the top to the bottom of the funnel and convert them into buyers!

• Stage 1: Awareness Stage: This is the first stage of your funnel, where you want to educate your prospects about your brand and what it has to offer.
• Stage 2: Consideration Stage: In this stage, you want to give your prospects a reason to consider your brand and its offerings. You can do this by providing them with additional resources, such as interactive product demos or case studies that educate the user further.
• Stage 3: Conversion: The conversion stage is where you want to give your prospects a reason to convert to customers. You can do this by offering them a discount or a free trial period.

Now let's see how to nurture leads.

1. Scoring your leads

Nurturing campaigns first starts with bulk leads, but you don’t want to use up your efforts on leads that are never going to convert. This is where lead scoring comes in.

This will help you understand which leads are ready to buy, which ones are just interested in learning more about your product, and which leads should be removed from your database.

For example, you can assign a score if your lead has clicked on a specific link in your email, opened an email from you, or interacted with your interactive demo on your website. And you can decide on specific scores to move these leads to the next stage. 

2. Segmenting your leads

Once you have scored your leads, segment them into different groups based on their level of interest in your brand. For example, you can create a segment for leads who are highly interested in your product and another one for those who are not interested in your product. You can differentiate this based on your lead’s level of interaction with your email. 

This will help you send the right kind of content to each group.

3. Developing a lead nurturing program

Once you’ve segmented your leads, it’s time to develop a lead nurturing program. This is a set of automated emails that will be sent out over time to each group of leads. The goal is to educate them about your product, showcase value, and build trust, so they eventually become customers.

For example, if a lead is interacting with all your content, you can show them how your product can work for them by sending them an interactive demo that educates your prospect more about how it works with a strong CTA. This helps you to push them closer to the conversion stage.

How can you give a realistic experience of your product with an interactive demo to push them down the pipeline?

This is where Storylane comes in. It helps you to create an interactive product demo that gives prospects a first-hand experience with your product. Here’s an example of how an interactive demo looks like.

Include a demo here

Interactive demos help your prospect evaluate your product's value in real-time. Moreover, you can track how your prospects are interacting with your demo to move them to the next stage of the funnel.

4. Evaluating the performance 

When evaluating the performance of your lead nurturing campaigns, look at how many people are getting to each stage and where they drop off. This will help you to determine if a particular step in the campaign needs attention or not.

Using product demos as a part of your lead nurturing strategy is an added advantage here as it helps you to know how your prospects are interacting with your demos. This allows you to tailor your efforts to meet the needs of your prospects.

Remember, you can’t expect to get it right the first time. You need to test and refine your lead nurturing campaign until you find a formula that works for your business.

This is where evaluating the performance of each stage of the funnel comes in handy. It helps you improve certain aspects of the campaign and make them more robust so that they can help you convert more prospects into customers.

5 Tips for Lead Nurturing Strategy

Similar to all marketing strategies, there is no one size fits all lead nurturing strategy for B2B businesses. The reason being, it depends on multiple factors like the price of your product,  the industry your business is in, the competition, and more.

Here are the 5 tips that will help you nurture leads build your strategy; 

1. Set realistic goals

It may tempt you to push thousands of leads to your funnel and send thousands of emails to convert them as much as possible. 

But it won't work that way. 

You have to set realistic goals and try to achieve them in the best way possible.

Establish the KPIs you want to measure and ensure you are tracking them. You can set goals like the number of leads flowing into the pipeline, conversion rate, or which stage do sales-qualified leads tend to drop-out. The more you know about your business and goals, the easier it will be for you to achieve them with the right tactics.

2. Lead your campaigns with a strong CTA

When you want a lead to convert, ensure they understand what your product can do for them. Then clearly outline the next step they need to take — it should correspond with where they are at in that moment and match up logically with how big of an issue their pain points are for them.

Based on their interaction with your CTA, you can use lead scoring, as mentioned above, to segment and send targeted content. In fact, email list segmentation is the most effective way to personalize lead nurturing, according to 51% of email marketers.

Leverage it accordingly and send targeted content to each segment. 

3. Personalize your content

After  you have segmented your leads, you have to target them with personalized content that educates them further about your product. In fact, personalized customer experiences can increase sales by an average of 56%.

To do this, you can embed personalize product demos to warm leads to help them explore more about what your product can do for them. 

With Storylane, you can automate this process to send personalized demos to prospects. On top of that, you can see how the leads interact with your demo with the help of demo analytics in Storylane so that you can optimize your product demos.

4. Multichannel targeting for multiple touchpoints

Though email marketing is the best way to nurture your leads, you can cover your bases and use multiple channels like social media to reach the same audience.

Before you start using any platform, do a quick research and find out which channels your audience uses and promote your content there. It is essential to have a sales funnel with multiple touchpoints to build brand awareness with your leads. 

5. Follow up in a timely manner

This is the most crucial part of nurturing leads. You should follow up with your leads promptly to ensure they are still interested in your product.

The goal is to keep the conversation going and establish an ongoing relationship with your prospects so that they want to try out your product. When you follow up occasionally, you can increase the probability of closing that deal!  

Benefits of Lead Nurturing

There are a number of benefits that can be achieved by using lead nurturing. Some of them are:

• Identify their interest or pain: With lead nurturing, you will be able to identify the pain points of your leads. This helps you reach out to them only when they are ready and willing to buy from you. You can also use this information to create content that directly addresses their pain points; this way, you will have a better chance of converting qualified leads into paying customers.

• Helps you build a relationship with your prospects: Lead nurturing is a great tool for building a relationship with your prospects. By sending them relevant content, you can help them to understand your product better and build trust in your brand.

• Helps you identify more qualified leads: As you are scoring your leads based on their interaction with your content, you will be able to determine which ones are more qualified leads. This helps you reach out to only the right people, which in turn saves you time and effort.

• Shortens your sales cycle: Lead nurturing reduces the time it takes to convert a lead to a customer. This is because providing relevant content can help your leads better understand your product and see the value of your product in their workflows.

Nurture, educate and convert with the best content 

The lead nurturing process takes time, but it is also one of the most effective ways to generate qualified sales leads. By providing your prospects with relevant content and building a relationship with them over time, you can ensure that they know your company’s value proposition and are ready to purchase from you when an opportunity arises.

The crucial step is to deliver the right content format that educates your leads and pushes them to take the next steps. Your leads have to know how your product works for them and how they can benefit from what you have to offer. One of the best ways to do this is by creating a product demo.

Storylane helps you create interactive product demos in minutes and personalize them for all stakeholders involved in the buying process. 

The best part is that Storylane also allows you to create tailored interactive demos without any coding skills!

Want to see how you can add a product demo to your lead nurturing process? Schedule a free demo with Storylane and test it out!