Marketing automation tools help lead nurturing to push your contact further into the marketing funnel. With good lead nurturing techniques, your business will convert contacts into customers and then to promoters. The process of lead nurturing is a long but tedious one, although its effects are exceptional. According to the Forrester study, proper lead nurturing practices give you 50% more conversions.
Still, lead nurturing is an untouched area for many businesses as the data suggest that only 36% of companies take the lead nurturing practices seriously. What if we have a strong organized process for such an essential aspect of the business which works by itself? That i’s where automation comes in.
We will dig deeper into how automation helps businesses in the lead nurturing process and brings positive outputs.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing plays a vital role in inbound marketing. It is a never-ending process, which goes on even after the customer proceeds with the defined final action. The main aim is to convert as many leads into customers as you can. However, it should not be misunderstood with forced marketing. Lead nurturing is all about offering relevant content.
To put it in a nutshell, lead nurturing is building and maintaining a strong relationship with the customers. You hear from your customers for their feedback, suggestions, and complaints and offer them relevant content that answers all their queries.
This communication leads to creating awareness about your brand, helping your business convert your contacts into customers.
Marketing Automation Tools and Lead Nurturing
Marketing automation tools allow you to automate specific marketing tasks such as sending emails and posting on social media. It is one of the most effective ways of lead nurturing.
With intelligent marketing automation tools, you can create buyer personas with all information about users, including user behavior, demographics, browsing history, and social media interaction. This in-depth information lets you segment the leads in different categories and paves the way for launching effective email campaigns.
Highly efficient CRM tools such as Zoho, Hubspot, Engagebay, Freshworks, etc., enables you to automate all your email campaigns with particular content for each category to grow customer engagement.
Lead nurturing helps in improving your brand awareness, and automation strengthens the process further. Here are the ways to nurture your leads with the help of marketing automation tools.
Important Ways to Nurture Leads with Marketing Automation
- Lead Scores
Depending on the engagement and behavior, a specific score is assigned to the leads, known as lead scores. Lead score is attributed to the leads for each activity. The information with a higher lead score is the qualified lead and your potential customer. Pushing it more will result in the conversion.
A lead score is a great way to quickly recognize performing leads and work on them to get a better conversion rate.
- Email Marketing
Email is one of the most popular ways of lead nurturing. Brands always consider emails as the most trusted mode of communication. Email marketing automation only helps in enhancing lead nurturing. There are few circumstances where marketers send different types of email.
A drip email campaign is mostly used to nurture the leads with the information educating the recipient about a topic to get the user to the landing page. If the user finds the content in your email helpful, he/she will be visiting your page for more educational content.
- Advanced Lead Segmentation
Lead segmentation carries massive importance as it becomes easy to send separate emails for a specific bunch of recipients. Advanced lead segmentation is quite a difficult task to do. With automation, you can segment all your leads into different types and send the emails at the right time.
Say if you are targeting customers who have already signed up for your product. It is better to send emails to the person about your premium plans instead of further sending information about all your free services to further push the user into the marketing funnel.
Segment your leads in this way and prepare a campaign accordingly to get better outputs.
- SMS and Push notifications
SMS is a great way to nurture your leads through mobile devices. Send SMS to your leads with information about your product or a discount offer. In this way, users develop some interest in your brand. SMS enables your brand to stay connected with the customer at any time, which is significant for lead nurturing.
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Push notification is another important automated lead nurturing technique. Push notifications appear on your desktop or mobile screens showing important information about your brand. Push notifications are sent using Dynamic content, a type of content, which tends to change according to your browsing information as well as demographics.
- Content Marketing
Content is the most effective way to lead nurturing. No wonder it’s considered as the backbone of your entire marketing campaign. Keep in mind that the behavior of your content is changed at every stage of the marketing funnel.
Quality informative content only helps in improving user engagement. However, content and design go hand in hand. Good quality content should be accompanied by an attractive design to attract your prospects.
Conclusion
Marketing automation tools certainly make lead nurturing easy and gives a healthy ROI. Automate your lead nurture campaigns by segmenting your leads properly and running a campaign with different modes such as email, content, or SMS.
Bonus Tip
An important aspect you always need to do is to align your sales and marketing operations. A constant collaboration between the two teams helps nurture leads properly.
