BEST PRACTICE GUIDE

Nurturing leads:
the secret is in CRM
 Prospects don’t become customers overnight. You need to welcome them
and nurture them, take them on a journey which builds trust with your brand.
Nurturing leads: Customer experience is super important, in a busy market where customers
expect good customer service, you need to offer a seamless and intelligent
the secret is in CRM customer experience to stay relevant.

Buyers surveyed are on average 34% more likely to buy and 32% more likely to
renew a contract with B2B leading suppliers that master customer experience. -
Deloitte 2021

Lead nurturing addresses the gap between when a prospect first interacts with
your brand, right through to when they’re ready to make a purchase. But how do
you do it and where do you start?

Nurture programs allow marketers to communicate with buyers across multiple

channels throughout the sales cycle. This guide will show you how to harness
the data in your CRM so you can transform those cold engagements into sales-
ready leads.

Creating your lead nurture strategy. It’s no longer about focusing on one channel,
like email, to nurture your leads. You’ve got to be thinking about all the different
places your prospects are and how you can touch them at every point so your
brand stays front of mind. After all, consumers move quickly and seamlessly
between digital and offline channels.

At the heart of all this is your CRM, because the data it holds will help you
determine where your potential customers are, how influential they are within
their organization, and what stage of the sales cycle they’re at.
A cross-channel approach is crucial to stay front of mind with your prospects.
6 key channels to incorporate:
Email:
This channel remains one of the best ways to
speak with your prospects and customers one-
to-one. Thanks to advanced segmentation and
personalization, you can use the data in your CRM to
target relevant messages to specific people with pin-
point accuracy.
Our Hitting the Mark Report found that many
companies failed to take advantage of user data
for personalization — only 27% used name-based
personalization in email subject lines, passing up an
opportunity to grab the recipient's attention.
Social networks:
First, you need to work out which social networks
most of your audience are using. This will form
the basis of the social media arm of your nurturing
strategy. For example, if you’re going to focus on
LinkedIn you’ll need to tailor your messaging for
this channel compared to what you’d say on Twitter.
The two social networks are different in terms of
audience, features and tone.
Website personalization:
If you know who’s coming to your website when they
land there, this is your prime opportunity to harness
the information you hold to serve up a relevant web
experience. Whether it’s a homepage with content
targeted at warm engagements, or an offer banner
aimed at sales-qualified leads, personalization could
be key to helping you close a sale.
Retargeting ads:
Retargeting ads tailored to what people look at
on your site are a good way to tempt potential
customers back. They’re a great way of keeping your
brand front of mind as your leads go elsewhere on
the internet. However, be aware that ad blockers are
on the rise and this could affect the reach of your
campaign.
Events:
A bit of face-to-face interaction can work wonders
when it comes to building relationships with your
prospects. What’s more, events are an opportunity to
get your key organization leaders showcasing your
company’s expertise and product, while also being
on hand to put any burning questions to bed there
and then.
This is a great way to target specific people with
pertinent content, depending on where they are in
the sales funnel. You can also utilize webinars to
target a wider geographical audience.
In store:
If you’ve got one, your store is yet another point
where customers interact with your brand. Therefore,
a consistent customer experience is something
you’ll need to consider. What does your website say
about your product versus what your sales people
are communicating? Consistency is essential when
you’re at the trust-building stage.
The 7 dos:
1 Targeting one-to-one
If a lead has downloaded a couple of pieces of content from a
company with a product that could overcome a business challenge
they’re facing, they’re likely to consider that business when looking
for a solution. When offering downloadable content be sure to ask
information such as the name of the business and the lead’s job title.
This allows you to know who is interested in your content, and allows
you to then target them with this insight.
This information is the Holy Grail when it comes to building and
segmenting your nurture programs. As we mentioned earlier, email
is one of the strongest marketing channels to allow you to speak to
your potential customers at a one-to-one level.
2 Timing
When it comes to nurturing your leads, timing can be the difference
between pushing prospects further down the funnel or losing them
completely. You should test at which points you communicate with
your prospects, and the frequency at which you communicate with
them. For example, if you’re sending a series of brand-building
emails, when are they most likely to be read and how often is too
often?
You don’t want to hammer leads with emails every waking hour, but
you also stand a better chance of your brand staying front of mind
if you send regularly. You should be taking the one-to-one approach
here. If you’re collecting the right information on your leads in your
CRM software, you have the ability to determine exactly where they
are in your sales cycle. Have they requested pricing information
via your site and spoken to one of your salespeople on the phone?
Perhaps it’s time to use this information to target your prospect with
a personalized piece of content or special offer to close the sale.
3 Supporting content
If you’ve not heard the saying ‘content is king’ before, where
have you been? Content marketing is a key component of many
marketing teams’ strategies. It’s no longer just media outlets and
publishers who produce and distribute content; brands are becoming
publishers, too. But what you produce must be relevant to your
audience, otherwise it’s a wasted effort.
There are a number of ways that you can find out what your
prospects are interested in consuming. This could be based on
search insight within your sector from Google, internal searches
made on your website, or insight from your sales team after
speaking with potential clients about challenges they’re facing.
Therefore, creating content that answers the challenges of
businesses puts your brand in a position of authority within your
field.
Great, relevant content can set you apart from the rest as our recent
report showed that barely a third (35%) of brands used editorially-
driven emails to increase their value to subscribers.
A blog post that appears in search results when
someone’s looking for tips or advice could be
the first opportunity to expose your brand – and
expertise – to a prospect.
A whitepaper designed to inspire CMOs to
change the course of their strategy, with your
product at the heart of it, might make them think
“I must speak to these guys”.
An event or seminar showcasing the USPs of
your product, without standing client success
stories, could be enough to get prospects
fighting to speak to a salesperson at the end.
4 360° customer profiles
Ever been presented with an online form that had enough fields
to make you want to bounce and run? It’s a catch-22 situation for
marketers; you want to collect and enrich as much data on your
contacts as possible so you can make your marketing relevant and
targeted, but at the same time you don’t want to overwhelm users.
That’s where 360° profiling comes in.
This concept means you collect information on your leads over time
by displaying new form fields as they interact with you during the
sales cycle. In due course, not only will you build a solid profile of
your potential customer in your CRM, but you’ll see an improvement
in engagements, ROI and better results overall. If you’re also
utilizing Single Customer View (SCV) in your marketing automation
platform, you are able to target customers and leads with excellent
accuracy and relevancy, leading to higher conversions.
5 Data hygiene
Customers are increasingly wary of handing over their data. People
want to know what you need their data for, how secure it will be, and
if you’re planning to sell it on to a third party. Ensure that your terms
and conditions for customers’ data are clear and honest.
You should also demonstrate why sharing data is mutually
beneficial. Of course from a marketing point of view targeting leads
with relevant content increases your conversion rates, but this is
also a benefit to the recipient as it means they’re only receiving
content they’ll be interested in. In a world of crowded inboxes,
customers will unsubscribe from a brand which is sending them
content they feel is irrelevant.
Ensure that you are utilizing the data you capture. If you’re asking
leads for lots of information, but then seemingly not using it, they’re
going to be cautious about why you’re asking. Have a clear data
capture that feeds into your CRM which in turn speaks to your
marketing automation platform so that you can use this data to
create tailored communications that benefit both sides.
6 Automating lead hand-offs

While the timing of your communications during the nurture

process is important, it’s also essential that you pass over those
ready-to-convert leads before they go cold. This is important if
you’re in B2B as you don’t want all of your hard work nurturing
leads to lead to nothing. In the not-for-profit space it’s crucial for
follow-up teams to be able to communicate with leads whilst
they’re still engaged.

If you’ve got a constant flow of data entering your CRM, it’s a

time-consuming task to analyze that information and then have
to keep handing it over to your sales team. So what’s the answer?
Automated hand-offs. If you’ve built up great data in your CRM
then your team is in a great position to know the tact in which they
should approach prospects. You can utilize lead scoring here.
Set up so that once a customer’s actions have hit a target, your
marketing automation can automatically hand them on to the next
stage, whether that’s a sales rep, fundraising team etc.
7 Testing, optimization and measurement
Like any kind of marketing, it’s imperative to measure the success of
your campaign or program throughout its life. After all, you might find
that something’s working so well that you want to replicate it in another
segment of your nurture program. Or, of course, something might be going
horribly wrong and you’ll want to fix it as soon as possible.
Test don’t guess
The key to testing is to take small steps. If you try and test too many
variables at once, you won’t be able to understand what it was that
people liked or didn’t like. Therefore, a test on two different subject
lines or, indeed, a set of two different colored buttons would give you a
clearer result. Remember that if your strategy spans multiple channels,
you’re going to want to try different things to see what’s best for each.
For instance, testing different messages on different email segments or
creating two or more display ad creatives.
Optimize it
You’ve run a test and the version that used personalized content
performed better by 10%. The next step is to document it and use this
insight to optimize the components of your program that include this
option, and then create another test using the winning version and
something fresh. That way you’re continually testing, learning and
optimizing.
Measure it
If you’re taking a cross-channel approach, you need to have visibility
across your whole nurture program. If you’ve created a piece of persona-
specific content and you’ve distributed it to a segmented email list, you’ll
want to see how many people have opened the email and what they did on
your site after they read it. It’s worth noting that you might never discover
the full impact of your program if the prospect was persuaded by your
nurture program, but went on to convert in store.
Once leads sign up to your email marketing, it’s vital that you
nurture them over into a conversion. To make sure you’re
doing this effectively, ensure your CRM system is set up
to record and manage all of the data that you gather, and
communicates seamlessly with your marketing automation
platform. You can then utilize these insights to influence your
campaigns and deliver an impactful nurture strategy.

The steps covered in this guide will set you up with a great
base to nurture your leads, whatever your business. The next
step is to test and continually optimize your journey to create
the perfect formula for your brand to get a strong conversion
rate from your nurture series.
Convert with Dotdigital
No matter your business or sector,
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experiences that convert. Utilize reliable
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and an intuitive drag and drop builder to
deliver beautiful, impactful campaigns to the
right people, at the perfect time.

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