Again, while you’re chatting with them, it may be a good time to cross sell or up sell. Don’t push the sale though. It’s all about win win.
If it’s not right for the customer, it’s not right for you.
How Clarity CRM Supports Your Lead Nurturing
Clarity CRM helps you manage leads and automate nurturing campaigns without needing a complex setup.
With Clarity CRM, you can:
- Track every interaction with prospects
- Automate email sequences and lead scoring
- Capture data in one place and sync with your sales process
Clarity CRM makes it easy to build a consistent customer journey that grows your revenue over time.
To learn more about email marketing best practices and compliance, you can check Campaign Monitor’s email marketing guide.
Inspiration for Every Step of the Customer Journey
Lead nurturing campaigns are essential to warm up leads. Also known as drip campaigns, they help your organization stay top of mind and build trust with your potential clients.
For successful lead nurturing, you need to offer information that demonstrates your expertise and helps prospects on a regular basis.
Drip. Drip. Drip. That’s how your campaign can slowly and steadily build awareness and move prospects and customers through the journey. But unlike a drippy faucet that gains attention by annoying you, your content needs to be something that potential clients seek out. It answers their questions. It educates.
Your content should work like a consultative salesperson, not like a high-pressure used car salesman.
But what should that content look like?
This post leads you through the type of content you need based on each step in a sample customer journey. Bear in mind that every industry and market is different. So, you’ll need to adapt your content based on your own customers’ journeys.
What You Will Learn on This Page
This guide helps small and medium businesses build a lead nurturing plan that works. You will learn:
- What lead nurturing is and why it matters
- How to map your customer journey
- What content works best at each stage
- How to measure performance and keep compliance
- How Clarity CRM can support your nurturing efforts
Lead Nurturing Objectives
A lead nurturing campaign is not about sales today. It’s about building a foundation for future revenue.
Through your content and watching how people interact with it, you’ll be able to identify prospects and deepen your relationship with them.
The goal is to prepare prospects for contact with one of your sales people who may send them a sales email. And yes, sales emails are a different species from marketing emails.
Map Your Customer’s Journey
Successful lead nurturing requires planning. Start by charting your customer’s journey. Find out the questions they ask during each phase and identify opportunities to inform them.
Even as you educate, it’s okay to provide your viewpoint, position your product or service in the buyer’s mind, and gently stir their interest in your offering.
Sync with CRM
Lead nurturing is just one part of your approach to Customer Relationship Management. From unqualified lead all the way to brand advocate, nurturing should support your sales efforts and help prospects and customers move through the journey at their own pace.
Every prospect and customer communication should be captured in your CRM software or as part of your contact management system. Think holistically. Existing customers need nurturing too.
Deliverability and Compliance Checklist
To ensure your emails land in the inbox, follow these steps:
- Authenticate your sending domain with SPF and DKIM
- Publish DMARC (p=none or stronger) on your domain
- Enable one click list unsubscribe in headers
- Keep spam complaint rates under 0.3%
- Use an aligned From domain
- Honor unsubscribe requests within 2 days
These steps protect inbox placement so your nurture content is actually seen.
Attribution and Privacy Note
With third party cookies deprecating and cross site tracking increasingly limited, shift your nurture triggers and measurement toward first party data capture.
- Forms
- Product usage
- Email engagement
- Server side tagging
- Modeled conversions
Reduce dependence on third party cookies for retargeting and attribution so your program remains resilient.
Keep Your Audience Top of Mind
It’s a two way street. Your goal is to stay in the forefront of prospects’ minds. To do so, you need to put them first.
For example, are you selling to executive level buyers? If so, recognize they’re time starved. They’re trying to keep up with everyday business. Help them out.
Make your content concise and easy to digest. Your written content should be easy to scan. Include bullet points, headers and white space. Don’t be verbose. Cut the fat.
Also, increase engagement with visuals. And consider a variety of content formats. Infographics and videos, for example, can be highly engaging.
Finally, realize executives will read the majority of your message on mobile devices, so make them mobile friendly.
Metrics note: Treat email open rates as directional only. Apple Mail Privacy Protection and other prefetching can inflate opens.
Prioritize: clicks, form completions, trial activations, meeting bookings, and attributed revenue as primary KPIs for your nurture programs.
Content for the Customer’s Journey
Here’s some inspiration to help you get started with your content plan, with just one example of a customer journey. Your journey might look a little different based on your industry, product, customer needs, and prospect expectations.
You should design each piece of content to provide the information your buyer needs to move to the next stage. Once you’ve created content, you can automate much of the distribution with lead management software that sends mass emails to cultivate leads.
Step 1: Prospect identifies a business problem or need
Content for the Journey: Prospects know they have a problem and are interested in finding a solution. To catch the prospect’s attention in this phase, focus on education.
Educational materials enable your organization to stand out as an authority and build trust.
Demonstrate your expertise. Be generous with your help. If you put the buyer’s interests first, you’ll win in the long term.
It’s important to show that you empathize with your buyers, understand their problem, and can offer solutions. So, provide a guide on how to solve the issue.
For example, a lead management software provider might create a guide entitled “How to Convert Leads and Build Strong Customer Relationships.” The guide could review several solutions, including lead management software.
Note that prospects may do some early exploratory work offline in conversation with industry peers. Even so, it’s good to have your name out there. Colleagues may recommend your company as a resource.
Step 2: Prospect researches and determines a product category
Content for the Journey: Your potential client has chosen a product category. Now it’s time to help them review their product options within that category.
Continue to educate. Offer an eBook entitled “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About [Your Product Category] But Were Afraid to Ask.”
When you point out features prospects should seek, make sure you mention the benefits of those that your product offers. Build the case for your product in a subtle way.
Step 3: Prospect learns about your company or product
Content for the Journey: They’ve discovered your product or service. Now you’re officially in touch with your prospects. You need to continue education, but you can start persuading more directly.
If they have not seen some of your early stage content, you can offer it now.
You might provide a “Buying Guide,” which compares the features, attributes and benefits of various vendors’ offerings.
You also could create a “Definitive How to Guide” that moves the buyer step by step through implementing your type of solution or using your category of products.
Through these materials, the prospect becomes aware of your product.
Step 4: Prospect compares vendors and narrows down options
Content for the Journey: Now prospects have a list of vendors or products that potentially meet their needs. The list is too long to investigate each product in depth, so they want to narrow it down.
This stage is an opportunity to focus on the prospect’s industry or market segment. Offer Case Studies and Solution Guides tailored to their concerns.
Case studies are essential to boost your credibility.
Step 5: Prospect inquires about your solution
Content for the Journey: At this point, some companies transition from marketing to sales emails. Whether or not you do this depends on the cost and complexity of your product.
The more expensive the product and the greater the time commitment from the customer, the sooner sales needs to be involved.
If you’re transitioning to sales, a representative will rapidly contact the prospect, answer questions and provide consultative advice.
Your goal is to have the prospect experience the product through Free Demonstrations, a Trial or both.
Make it easy to test your product. This minimizes risk and helps prospects determine how it works for them.
Step 6: Prospect considers your product and others
Content for the Journey: The prospect may sit in the consideration stage for some time. Your job is to help during the selection process in a consultative way.
Remind your prospect of the benefits of taking action now and that there is a cost associated with inaction.
Create a plan to stay in touch. Provide tools that can help make the final decision.
- Cost Calculator that outlines costs of various solutions
- ROI Calculator that helps determine return on investment
Step 7: Prospect chooses your product and becomes a customer
Content for the Journey: Finally, they are on board. No, don’t relax. Avoid post purchase dissonance by reassuring them.
Your sales team should provide a “Welcome Kit” and an “Onboarding Program” full of valuable information.
Once again, marketing can supplement their efforts.
Step 8: Your company provides the product or solution
Content for the Journey: To ensure your customer gets the most out of your product, provide Training and Support.
Sales representatives should follow up to make sure that customers are satisfied, or better yet, delighted.
Step 9: The customer starts using your product or solution
Content for the Journey: On an ongoing basis, check in to see if there is anything you can do to help customers get more out of your product.
This helps deepen the relationship and ensure long term sales. You may discover opportunities for upgrades and cross selling.
Since you’ve already trained your customer on the basics, move them to the next level by offering “Best Practices Guides” and “Industry Benchmarks.”
Step 10: The customer becomes a brand advocate
Content for the Journey: Identify clients who are delighted with your brand and remind them to suggest your product or service to their colleagues.
Referral programs are a powerful way to accomplish this.
You can also ask brand advocates for testimonials to place on your website, or whether you can use their stories for your case studies.
Again, while you’re chatting with them, it may be a good time to cross sell or up sell. Don’t push the sale though. It’s all about win win.
If it’s not right for the customer, it’s not right for you.
How Clarity CRM Supports Your Lead Nurturing
Clarity CRM helps you manage leads and automate nurturing campaigns without needing a complex setup.
With Clarity CRM, you can:
- Track every interaction with prospects
- Automate email sequences and lead scoring
- Capture data in one place and sync with your sales process
Clarity CRM makes it easy to build a consistent customer journey that grows your revenue over time.
To learn more about email marketing best practices and compliance, you can check Campaign Monitor’s email marketing guide.
