INBOUND ACCELERATOR

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.

If you’ve been using inbound marketing and automated lead nurturing for a while, chances are your list of contacts includes a number of leads who downloaded one piece of content, but then went dark.

What process does your marketing team use to plan out content for upcoming campaigns?

Sometimes, the numbers speak for themselves. When 70 percent of marketers all agree on one top priority, it must be important. Converting leads into customers. (See the most recent State of Inbound Report.)

Lead nurturing, powered by marketing automation, is a powerful tool in the digital and content marketing arsenal, with the potential to create and strengthen connections between your brand and leads captured online through content and other offers.

Sales and marketing teams may still disagree on who provides the highest quality leads (check out the stats in most recent State of Inbound report), but that shouldn’t keep the two departments from working together to convert all leads—both marketing-generated leads and sales-initiated leads—into customers.