5 Best Ways to Improve Lead Nurturing with Marketing Automation

This is a guest post by Dave Schneider, founder at LessChurn.

Customer experience is not the future, it is the present. Therefore, you should make it your top priority no matter how complex and difficult it sometimes may be.

We know that it is impossible to address the needs of each of your customers one by one. This would simply take too much time and drain the energy that you need to invest in other tasks.

Luckily, there are a number of different ways to automate certain aspects of your marketing campaign. Here are the best five ways to nurture your leads with marketing automation.

1. Segmentation

On your journey to increasing your leads, building a free email list is crucial. When you build your own list, you may have fewer subscribers in the beginning, but you will have a higher-quality list in the long run.

However, building your email list is only the first step. With personalisation being the norm of successful marketing, you need to tailor your email messages to well-targeted email segments. Instead of sending the same message to all your subscribers, you should use the information you know about them and create highly-targeted email lists that will help you nurture your leads.

And this is where automation tools like MailChimp enter the stage – they will segment your leads by the following categories:

demographics – age, gender, country, location, etc.
buyer’s stage – the stage of your customers in their buying process
events – a specific action which triggers a pre-planned email
behaviour – your leads’ actions on your website or your app

The more information you draw from various channels, the better your segmentation will be. This way, you will reach out to your leads with personalised content that addresses their specific needs.

2. Email marketing

Once you have segmented your subscribers, you need to send them targeted and relevant emails. This lies at the heart of successful lead nurturing because email communication is the most personal and effective marketing channel.

However, this also implies that you have to rock your email marketing campaign if you want to increase the number of your email subscribers. Here are the types of emails that you can automate:

welcome email – appears when a customer signs up or joins a group/community
thank you email – sent when the customer makes a purchase, gives feedback or donates something
onboarding emails – in these, you help your new leads get started or tell them more about the industry
exclusive offers and discounts
updates and newsletters
re-engagement emails
cart abandonment emails – these are mostly used by eCommerce websites
notification emails

When you send a specific message to each of your customers based on their website activities, you build trust with them and make them feel special.

3. Lead scoring

Lead scoring is a method which enables marketers to determine with great accuracy when exactly nurtured leads are qualified, i.e. when the sales team should outreach.

You can use automation tools to award points to your leads for a number of actions:

opening and clicking a nurturing email
completing a form on a landing page
visiting a high-value web page
requesting a product demo
registering and attending an event (e.g. a webinar)

When you have a score threshold, you can easily qualify your leads for sales. However, make sure that you regularly confer with the sales team and revisit the scoring system to get the perfect recipe for lead qualification.

4. Landing pages

Landing pages are like the entry points (of a particular part) of your website. They help you convert more visitors into customers. To create a landing page that converts, your best bet is to use the best WordPress landing page plugins. They allow you to quickly and easily create a landing page with simple drag-and-drop tools and without writing any codes.

But there is another secret to creating a successful landing page. It has to be the right landing page, not just any page of your website or your homepage. In addition, you need to track your results carefully to learn if your landing page is working or not. That is how you will get a good return on investment. For this, creating a high-converting landing page for AdWords is crucial. It will help you convert customers and make sure that your ROI is positive.

5. Content marketing

A majority of digital marketing experts claim that content is still the king, and we completely agree. Nurturing leads is impossible without dynamic website content. With great content, you are able to educate your audience, tell them about your services or products, as well as launch a contest or offer.

However, you don’t want to show the same content to all your leads. As we mentioned earlier, there are different stages in the buyer’s process. They are:

awareness stage
consideration stage
decision stage

These stages are pretty much self-explanatory, and for each of them, you need to have a specific content strategy. If you take time to plan all your steps and send the right content to the right audience at the right time, you will be able to nurture and convert your leads.

Apart from creating great content, you need to publish and distribute it, and this is where content marketing automation tools are perfect. With Buffer, Zapier, Hootsuite and other similar software tools, you will find that automation will save a lot of your time and energy.

Marketing automation improves customer experience

When you send personalised messages to your leads and tell them what they need to hear, you stand much better chances of converting them to sales. To do this, you need to rely on marketing automation methods as they can be crucial for your multi-faceted lead nurturing campaigns. If you use them wisely, these methods will improve the customer experience, increase personalisation and streamline marketing processes.

Marketing automation will simplify your lead nurturing and free up your marketing staff’s time that they can use instead to focus on building meaningful, long-term and high-quality relationships with the customers.

Written by Dave Schneider, founder of LessChurn

Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012, he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.