Lead generation is the first step in the demand generation strategy; however, many studies suggest that the majority of lead generation does not result in sales. In most cases, it does not even indicate that the potential customer is ready to communicate with your sales team.
So, the questions arise, how do you make sure that the leads entering your marketing funnel purchase from your brand? How does your marketing team engage those prospects to generate repeated purchases? and most importantly, how do you ensure that your brand meets customer needs?
The answer to all these questions is lead nurturing. Evolving marketing automation software has made it easier to achieve lead nurturing, which has increased the available percentage of product leads at the hand of the sales team at a lower cost.
However, before we discuss how marketing automation is revolutionizing lead nurturing, which you can use to close more deals, let’s pause to understand the basics of lead nurturing and its advantages.
What Exactly is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing includes sending a series of emails to leads that are not ready to make a purchase. Best marketing automation software will help you in doing these campaigns to move the leads further into the sales funnel by increasing their engagement with your brand and products. These campaigns help in fostering trust, increase brand awareness, and rapport building until the lead is willing to communicate with your sales team.
Best marketing automation software also provides lead nurturing features that can track behavior, identify demography, and other web activities, and use purchase intent to rank leads. These rankings will help your sales team to understand whether or not the lead is ready for sales or should be further nurtured by the marketing team.
Major Benefits of Lead Nurturing
1.Minimum Investment
Despite promising higher returns, lead nurturing requires minimal investment. According to studies, lead nurturing emails receive 4 to 10 more responses when compared to one-time email blasts.
The best marketing automation software that provides lead nurturing features can customize your educational emails, which will not only answer the questions of your prospect but eventually convince them to make purchases. As a result, the cost of your marketing funds will reduce.
2.Establishment of Trust and Reputation
As lead nurturing will empower your company to position itself as a thought leader, it will enhance your credibility as a brand. Besides, proper automation marketing software that has appropriate lead nurturing features will help in fostering your brand’s relationship with its customers by using content that is practical, relevant, and information.
Moreover, it will become easier for you to show that as a brand you understand the problems of your customers and are seriously concerned about providing solutions that will alleviate their pain points.
3.Increases Business
The process of nurturing and scoring leads based on brand engagement will give you the opportunity of identifying hot or warm leads, which you can use to decide whether or not the leads should be sent to the sales team.
Marketing Automation and Lead Nurturing
Now that we have revised and established the benefits of lead nurturing, the next question that pops up is, how can it be used effectively by a brand?
The answer to efficient lead nurturing lies in marketing automation software. Attempting to track lead behavior without using proper marketing automation software will result in errors due to the copious data entry work that it would generate.
Thus, as a brand, you should look towards implementing marketing automation software, which will help in avoiding such fallouts and nurture leads efficiently. Market research reports have predicted that the market of marketing automation by 2027 will reach 9.5 billion USD.
Marketing automation in simple terms is software that will automate marketing activities of your business, like emails, social media, and website actions. Marketing automation software can alleviate your business by automating repetitive marketing campaign tasks, providing data-driven insights to enhance leads and campaign performance, creating workflows and emails based on lead behavior and intent, forecasting user behavior, and communicating accordingly for better conversion. The best marketing automation software can also create brand awareness through relevant emails and social media posts.
Why Choose marketing automation for Lead Nurturing
Implementation of marketing automation software will bring a significant difference in your lead nurturing.
- Help You in Beating Competition: The best marketing automation software can generate high-volume automated leads, which will help your brand in beating the competition. According to a study, roughly 65% of businesses use marketing automation for increasing their competitive advantage in terms of ROI and sales.
- Segment Your Contact Lists: Marketing automation software can also segment your contact list based on demographics, buyer’s stage, events, and user behavior, which can be used for sending personalized emails. Studies show that when emails sent to customers are designed in a way that is aligned with their needs, involves targeted content, and is carefully timed, it is more likely to influence customer engagement.
- Email Marketing: Marketing automation also enhances email marketing, which is the heart of lead nurturing. Thus, using marketing automation software to send emails, will not only improve your lead nurturing game but build trust with prospects.
- Scoring Leads: Marketing automation software also provides the opportunity of scoring leads. By using lead scoring software that marketing automation provides you can also elevate leads based on their behavior and interaction with your marketing team.
- Progressive Profiling: There are many marketing automation software that provide the opportunity of progressive profiling. This feature of progressive profiling gradually collects lead information over time through different landing pages and content, which helps in ensuring that your company does not ask for multiple details during form submissions. As a result, friction for users reduces.
How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation to Converse Cold Deals to Closed Deals
Marketing automation software has every feature that can help your company in lead nurturing campaigns, which will attract and develop new leads while pushing them further down the sales funnel.
However, identifying the appropriate marketing automation software can be challenging. Some of the barriers in the path of implementing marketing automation software for lead nurturing include the complexity of the software, limited options, and higher cost. These issues are relevant in some of the well-known marketing automation software providing CRMs as well. For instance, the cost of accessing marketing automation software in HubSpot can add up to 800 USD per month. Apart from the cost, availing of every feature required for lead nurturing is not included in the 800 USD package.
Keeping in mind these challenges that you might face while choosing the right marketing automation software for lead nurturing, the free alternative to HubSpot CRM, EQUP, is recommended. It is an all-in-one premium marketing automation CRM software,, which provides features starting from segmenting contact lists, email marketing, automating leads, scoring leads, and the feature of landing pages and forms, which eventually helps in progressive profiling.
