Lead Nurturing – What’s All The Fuss?

Lead nurturing is a powerful tool — and not just for your marketing and sales teams, but for your customer service team as well. While it’s often marketed as a way to engage with non-sales-ready leads during the sales process, the applications of lead nurturing or automations actually extend through the entire length of the buyer journey, from initial brand awareness to a repeat customer.

In fact, lead nurturing can also play an important role in your customer education efforts (let’s be honest, what can’t lead nurturing do?).

For some tips on how to get more creative with your nurturing campaigns, we’ve put together a list of ten must-try campaigns to add to your repertoire.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO ENGAGE…

1. Welcome Campaign

Welcome emails are highly anticipated, frequently opened, and simple to automate. Keep in mind that new prospects in your database should be treated differently than the ones that have been with you for weeks or months.

By turning your welcome emails into a nurture campaign, you can introduce these new prospects to your company, product, or service at a comfortable pace, instead of flooding them with information right off the bat.

Remember to remind them why they converted, confirm their opt-in, and start providing them with light educational content to build awareness and keep them interested.

2. Top-of-Mind Campaign

The top-of-mind nurture is designed to engage with your not quite sales-ready leads at regular intervals, preventing leads from forgetting about your company and getting swooped up by your competitors.

This nurture takes place over a longer period of time, providing sales with consistent touch points, and provides content primarily focused on value to the prospect. Some great content to consider for this type of nurture would be blog posts, building process, videos, latest promotions, and relevant industry news.

3. Re-engagement Campaign

Not all of your prospects will make it through the sales process and become a closed deal. At any given time, your database will likely consist of a number of leads who became inactive at some point during the sales process. Re-engagement campaigns are targeted toward these inactive leads.

The goal is to encourage leads to take a “hand-raising” action that will indicate that they are ready to re-enter the sales process. Try sending a helpful blog post, a market update, a cool piece of interactive content, or a great testimonial for these kinds of nurtures.

A key component to this campaign is creating the perfect moment to re-engage your prospect. By delivering unique, personalized moments to customers across every digital channel, your brand can create lasting, meaningful relationships.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO EDUCATE…

4. Product-Focused Campaign

As prospects progress through the sales process and begin to seek out more product-focused content, you will want to make sure they’re getting that information from you, and not a competitor or biased third party.

Focus on your prospects’ pain points, how your product or your process can address them, and the key features and benefits that can help. For this type of nurture, you will want to use more middle-of-funnel content like information about your building process, customer testimonials, interior design trends, and more relevant industry updates.

5. Competitive Campaign

This campaign focuses on differentiating your product or service from your competitors by highlighting the advantages of using your product, as well as the disadvantages of not using it (note: you’ll want to refrain from harping on the disadvantages of your competitors’ products, since this can come off as distasteful).

Tailor your content to the priorities of your prospects and the competitors that you come up against with sales.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO CLOSE…

6. Industry Expertise Nurturing

As prospects move closer to the middle and bottom of the funnel, it becomes important to reinforce that your company is the right choice. Pass on any helpful press releases, industry reports, or high-traffic content as part of this nurture to establish your company’s authority.

For example, if your company was recently covered by a magazine review or newspaper article, be sure to share it with your prospects and put your own spin on the review.

7. Promotional Nurturing

As your prospects near the purchase stage of the sales funnel, a well-timed promotion or special discount can be just the catalyst they need to pull the trigger on a purchase.

Consider offering special pricing or additional features based on their individual needs, especially if you’re working with bigger budget customers where closing the deal is critical to growing your business.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO RETAIN…

8. On-boarding Campaign

On-boarding a new client will always be a high-touch and manual process, and rightly so. However, nurturing campaigns or automations allow you to automate some of the more repetitive tasks involved in on-boarding, like providing introductory information, a list of next steps after a deposit is paid and a contract is signed, timelines for different phase of the building journey, and frequently asked questions.

These helpful resources can help your new clients understand what is happening, without having to wait on a customer service rep for assistance.

9. Upsell Campaign

The upsell (or cross-sell) campaign is designed to capitalize on your existing pool of clients. By providing your clients with information and incentives to increase the options they can include in their new home, you can drive more revenue with little effort from your sales team.

Just be sure to focus your message around the benefits of the upsell, instead of turning your emails into sales pitches, BUT be aware of ramifications of offering more options and changes in the middle of the pre-construction period and the effect it can have on approvals and timelines.

10. Update Campaign

The update nurture can be a convenient way to keep customers informed about what to expect in the next phase of the building journey including after handover.

This nurture can be triggered when certain milestones are achieved like progress stage claims, handovers or warranty periods. These emails can remind customers of their obligations at certain stages, the next steps to expect or actions they need to take in the coming weeks or weeks. You can send multiple reminder emails over a specified period of time and notify the assigned user in the marketing automation tool if no action takes place.

This makes it far less likely that your clients will miss the important steps they need to take and takes the tedium out of the process for your service reps having to chase up customers all the time.

The whole purpose of The 3C Mentor is to help create really great businesses in the residential building industry and delivered by our unique ‘Three Pillars to Your Success’ – Business Coaching, Business Consulting and Business Resources.