INBOUND ACCELERATOR

In B2B marketing, especially when marketing services such as technology solutions, project management, or consultation, decisions are not typically made the first time a prospect visits your website.

The decision to sign a contract with a vendor comes after much research and consideration in a buying cycle that can often take weeks or months — sometimes even longer. That means that pushing every contact or lead you get straight to sales is a waste of time (both for your sales team and for the contact, who may have just been starting the research process — after all, 8 in 10 business buyers do research before contacting a vendor).

Automated lead nurturing is a key marketing tool that provides you with the ability to develop and maintain connections with prospects and leads without going directly to the labor-intensive aspects of direct contacts with sales personnel.

If your marketing team is like most, one of your key objectives is to convert leads into customers. But how?

In a world that revolves around information and connections, lead nurturing is the link that brings contacts and leads closer to that goal, with carefully timed offers of information and content.

We strive to keep this Inbound Accelerator blog loaded with useful information, easy-to-understand infographics, and great insights into inbound marketing, public relations, and all the tactics and strategies involved in bringing those together. But when we published 2-5 posts every week, I know it isn’t always easy for readers to keep up and see every.single.post.

Automated lead nurturing is designed to address a very specific challenge for online marketers: most of your new leads (and perhaps even fewer than 1 in 10 website visitors) are really ready to buy when they first visit your website or convert into a lead.

Lead nurturing is designed to continue the connection with the majority of new leads who are just starting the buyer’s journey and help guide them toward a purchase decision.

Automated lead nurturing has the potential to significantly impact the effectiveness of content marketing in developing sales. In fact, according to DemandGen, two-thirds of B2B marketers using lead nurturing saw at least a 10 percent increase in sales opportunities, with some seeing an increase of as much as 30 percent.

Usually when we talk about marketing content, we are referring to a few obvious elements: blog posts, social media posts and visuals, contributed articles, or downloadable content such as reports, ebooks or templates.

Too often, we overlook how the same concepts and strategies that are winners when creating the “big picture” content should be applied to the smaller elements, including the landing pages that are gateways for those downloadable offers that convert visitors into leads.

Not every lead or contact in your database has the same potential or needs the same things. They shouldn’t all get the same emails or see the same calls-to-action on your blog posts.

While it can be tempting to draw a distinct line between “email marketing” (often used strictly as an outbound tactic) and “inbound marketing,” in reality, email is an essential element in inbound marketing strategies as the vehicle for automated lead nurturing.

Carefully crafting each email in a lead nurturing workflow means providing your contacts with value that brings them back to your website and moves them further through the sales funnel. (Check out our Lead Nurturing Toolkit, including a Nurturing Workflow Template, for more details.)

Automated lead nurturing emails are an essential element in inbound marketing, providing the continuing connection after a visitor converts into a lead on your website.

By emphasizing three primary tactics when writing your lead nurturing workflow emails, you can capitalize on the benefits these emails have over random mass mailings — namely a 4-10 times higher response rate.