Blog Series Part III: Lead Nurturing Strategy and Best Practices
In the first part of this blog series, I have covered: “lead nurturing meaning and how to set up lead nurturing campaigns. In the second part, I covered the benefits of lead nurturing. This is the third and concluding part of the blog series. I will cover winning lead nurturing strategies that work.
Inbound marketing campaigns help businesses to generate leads regularly from multiple sources. But businesses cannot increase the number and value of orders only by focusing on generating more leads. In addition to generating leads regularly, your business must focus on nurturing every lead in the most effective way. You can easily increase the volume and size of orders by keeping in place elaborate lead nurturing strategies.
Lead nurturing can be defined as the process of communicating and engaging newly generated leads at every stage in the sales process or sales funnel.
According to Business2Community.com, “Aligning content with a prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey can boost conversion rates by 72%.”
You can implement a lead nurturing strategy to convert leads into customers by sending relevant and personalized content according to their position in the buyer’s journey.
The lead nurturing tools help you to segregate leads, focus on sales-ready leads, and send personalized messages without deploying additional resources. But you must remember that lead nurturing is an ongoing and long-term process. You cannot drive sales simply by investing in the right lead nurturing system. In addition to choosing the right lead nurturing solution, your business must implement effective lead nurturing strategies and lead nurturing best practices.
Lead Nurturing in Digital Marketing
Lead nurturing in digital marketing is the strategic process of building relationships with potential customers through personalized and automated communication. By leveraging email campaigns, retargeting ads, and content marketing, businesses can engage leads at every stage of the buyer’s journey. A well-structured lead nurturing strategy helps brands stay top-of-mind, guiding prospects from initial interest to conversion. Digital marketing tools like CRM systems, AI-driven chatbots, and marketing automation platforms make it easier to deliver timely, relevant messages based on user behavior. When executed effectively, lead nurturing not only increases conversions but also strengthens customer loyalty, ensuring long-term business growth in a competitive online landscape.
13 Lead Nurturing Strategies and Best Practices to Drive Sales Conversion
Bridge the Gap between Marketing and Sales
In most organizations, marketing professionals generate leads and salespeople follow up the leads. But you cannot nurture the leads effectively without aligning marketing and sales seamlessly. You can easily bridge the gap between marketing and sales by adopting an account based marketing (ABM) approach. Unlike conventional marketing approaches, ABM emphasizes collaboration between marketing and sales teams. The marketing and sales professionals can nurture the leads as a unified team by launching campaigns that are both personalized and targeted.
Track Every Customer Interaction
You cannot nurture leads properly without storing all business interactions with them in a centralized location. Your business can easily collect, aggregate, and organize real-time customer data collected from various sources using a customer relationship management system (CRM). The CRM will create a customer profile for each lead. You can access the customer profile to find key information like location, occupation, industry, most visited site pages, most downloaded content, and preferred communication channel.
It is very important that your CRM needs to support marketing lists and marketing automation activities. I would strongly recommend the use of Hubspot CRM for this purpose, it will enable seamless integration of other amazing products like Hubspot email and landing page builder and make your lead nurturing process super smooth.
Create Buyer Personas
As a semi-fictional representation of a consumer, a buyer persona helps you to understand the needs and expectations of consumers clearly. While creating the buyer persona, you must cover the key attributes of an ideal consumer – age, gender, location, needs, expectations, pain points, and budget. You can refer to the buyer personas to answer important questions like how to influence the buying decision of the lead. You can seduce the lead to place the order by sending him content to address specific problems or meet specific needs.
A lead behaves differently in each stage of the sales funnel. You cannot convert a lead into a customer without sending personalized and targeted content according to her current position in the buyer’s journey. You must prepare an elaborate customer journey map as part of the lead nurturing strategy. Also, you can refer to the customer journey map to understand what product/service the lead is looking for, what problems the lead is facing, what affects the lead’s purchase decisions, and what prevents the lead from placing orders. The information will help you to communicate effectively by sending highly targeted content according to the current position in the buyer’s journey.
Assign Scores to Each Lead
As a key aspect of lead nurturing, lead scoring helps you to identify and segregate sales-ready leads by assigning scores from 0 to 10 to each lead. The lead scores will help you remove dormant leads from the database and focus only on highly qualified leads. Also, you can differentiate between the leads who are ready to place an order and the leads who are interested in your product or service. Hence, you can easily drive sales conversion by sending highly targeted content only to sales-ready leads. Likewise, you can influence the purchase decisions of interested leads through regular and timely communication.
Follow up on Every Lead in a Timely Way
The lead nurturing tools help you to communicate with a large number of leads. But you cannot influence a lead’s buying decision without sending the right message at the right time. You can easily convert a prospect into a customer by sending a timely email or making a timely phone call. Unlike cold calling, lead nurturing helps you to understand a lead’s needs and expectations precisely. Personal information will help you to create sales opportunities by choosing and sending the right content. However, you need to ensure that the content is delivered to the lead in a timely way.
Create and Send Highly Targeted Content
Highly targeted content is the key element of lead nurturing campaigns. You cannot drive sales conversion by sending the same content to every lead. You have to create targeted content for each buyer person based on important attributes like needs, interests, and objectives.
Also, you need to create content by keeping in mind the lead’s position in the sales funnel. For instance, while creating content for the top-of-the-funnel leads you must focus on answering their common questions. The information will make the lead shortlist your products or services while doing pre-purchase research. You can find a good example of this below:
Many businesses these days nurture leads by sending automated emails. But you must remember that customers these days interact with a business through multiple channels of communication. You can easily influence a lead’s buying decision by communicating with her using her choice of communication channel. While implementing a lead nurturing strategy, you must emphasize delivering timely and personalized messages to the leads through commonly used communication channels like emails, text messages, in-app notifications, social networks, and PPC ads. You can further drive sales conversion by running re-targeting campaigns.
Personalize Every Message
According to SmartInsights.com, “72% of consumers say they now only engage with marketing messages that personalized and tailored to their interests.”
In addition to sending highly targeted content, your lead nurturing strategy must focus on sending personalized messages to each lead. You can easily impress and engage the leads by mentioning their name at the top of the message. At the same time, you also need to customize the email content according to important attributes of the buyer persona like interests and needs. The leads will become customers only after believing that your information will help them to solve specific problems.
Send Content in Multiple Formats
According to Hubspot.com, “32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, with blogging in second (27%).”
Many customers these days prefer watching or hearing information instead of reading information. You cannot engage leads without combining textual and visual content. You can easily influence the buying decisions of leads by conveying the targeted content in the form of video clips. The video clips will help you to interact with the leads by responding to the comments posted by them. Also, the comments make it easier for you to understand the needs and expectations of customers.
Focus on Multiple Touches
A buyer’s journey differs across businesses and industries. The same buyer’s journey also differs according to the nature of products or services. You cannot convert a lead into a customer without sending at least 10 touches through the buyer’s journey. Your lead nurturing strategy must help the lead progress through the buyer’s journey by providing the right information at the right time. Hence, you must communicate with the lead throughout the buyer’s journey by sharing a variety of content – blog posts, FAQs, podcasts, videos, whitepapers, and social media posts.
Monitor and Optimize Lead Nurturing Programs
The performance of a lead nurturing program varies based on a slew of factors. You cannot increase sales conversion simply by keeping in place a lead nurturing strategy. You must assess the performance of individual programs using important metrics like the number of messages sent, delivered, opened, and bounced. Also, you need to fine-tune the lead nurturing programs regularly to generate higher ROI.
Don’t Ignore Post-Sales Nurturing
You must not forget that lead nurturing is an ongoing process. In addition to nurturing the sales-ready leads, your business must continue nurturing the leads after receiving orders or closing sales deals. The post-sales nurturing will help you to understand customer needs and expectations as well as improve customer satisfaction. Also, post-sales customer communication will help you to discover opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling of products.
Your business can easily drive sales by complementing lead generation with lead nurturing. The lead nurturing tools help you nurture and manage leads efficiently without putting in extra time and effort. It’s also important to review your lead nurturing strategies at regular intervals. You need to keep an eye on lead nurturing best practices and refine your strategies accordingly.
In the first part of this blog series, I have covered the basic question: “What is lead nurturing, and how to set up lead nurturing campaigns. In this blog, I will cover the benefits of lead nurturing. And in the third part of the blog series, I will cover winning lead nurturing strategies. Your business can generate leads from many sources by launching digital marketing campaigns. But you cannot drive sales conversion without complementing the lead generation efforts with a lead nurturing strategy. The term lead nurturing refers to the process of engaging with the leads throughout the sales process by sending the right information and content through the right communication channels.
The latest statistics and trends posted on Invespcro.com suggest that businesses that focus extensively on lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Also, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. At the same time, lead nurturing increases sales opportunities for businesses by 20%.
The lead nurturing tools help your business to evaluate, categorize, and nurture leads without deploying extra resources. But your business must implement a solid lead nurturing strategy to boost sales, improve customer satisfaction, promote customer loyalty, and reduce the cost per lead. Also, a proper and well-thought-out lead nurturing strategy will help your business to get all possible benefits of lead nurturing as a powerful tool to get the best value out of your leads.
Benefits of Lead Nurturing: 12 Reasons Why Your Business Must Keep in Place a Lead Nurturing Strategy
Facilitate Regular and Timely Communication
In the age of digital communications, businesses cannot drive sales without maintaining a relationship with customers and leads. The lead nurturing solutions help you to build and sustain a relationship through regular communication and interaction. The sustained and regular relationship helps businesses to convert more leads into customers. You can even use lead nurturing as a robust marketing tool to produce sales-ready leads.
Share the Right Information with the Right Lead
Unlike email marketing, lead nurturing does not focus on delivering information about products or services to a large number of customers and prospects at once. Instead, it emphasizes delivering the right information to every lead in a personalized way. The relevant, timely, and personalized information influences the buying decision of leads effectively. That is why; lead nurturing helps businesses to increase both the number and value of orders.
You can easily convert a lead into a customer by responding to their inquiries in less than 5 minutes. The lead nurturing tools enable your business to connect and communicate with a lead automatically and immediately. In addition to being the first company to respond to a lead, you can influence the lead’s buying decision by sending personalized information and content.
Use as a Lead Generation Technique
In addition to boosting your lead generation efforts, lead nurturing helps your business generate more leads. Most customers these days share useful information and content with their friends, coworkers, and family on various digital platforms. Many leads will share the valuable and personalized information shared by your business during the lead nurturing process. Word-of-mouth information sharing will help you to generate more leads through referrals.
Discover Opportunities for Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
Along with acting as a lead generation tool, the lead nurturing system also created opportunities for your business to upsell and cross-sell. The relevant and timely information shared by your business will help the customer understand your products or services broadly. Also, the information will persuade leads to place orders of higher value and buy complementary products. Hence, lead nurturing will help you to increase both the number and value of orders.
Achieve Higher Click-Through Rates
According to a study conducted by Hubspot, “Lead nurturing emails have a significantly higher CTR than more generic email blasts. In fact, lead nurturing emails generated an 8% CTR compared to general email sends, which generated just a 3% CTR.”
Hence, you can easily reduce the budget for email marketing campaigns by implementing an elaborate lead-nurturing strategy. The reports generated by the lead nurturing systems will help you to boost sales by focusing only on sales-ready leads.
Identify and Segregate Sales-Ready Leads
While implementing a lead nurturing strategy, you can differentiate between dormant leads and sales-ready leads using lead scoring systems. The lead scoring system will boost your lead nurturing strategy by addressing each lead using the right parameter – behavior, interest, and buying score. You can use the lead scoring system to identify and separate highly qualified potential customers simply by giving higher scores.
Re-engage with Dormant Leads
While nurturing leads, marketers often focus only on identifying the sales-ready leads. They drive sales conversion by sending the right information to the most qualified leads. But your business can use lead nurturing as an effective tool to reconnect and engage the dormant or out-of-touch leads. The lead nurturing solutions capture the information required to reconnect with out-of-touch customers. You can leverage the information to rejuvenate relationships with the leads by sharing the right content.
Deliver Better Products and Services
Lead nurturing emphasizes both building and sustaining relationships with leads. You can easily sustain the relationship with both customers and prospects through regular and timely communication. Regular communication will help you assess and improve the quality of your products or services by understanding what customers want and what challenges customers face. The information will help you to add the right features to the product and deliver high-quality service by eliminating customer pain points.
No Need to Invest Extra Resources
You can automate the lead nurturing process end-to-end simply using a reliable software solution. The lead nurturing tools come with features to track each newly generated lead, assign lead scores, and send automated communication. You can track and review the lead nurturing process by generating elaborate reports based on real-time data. Hence, your business can implement a lead nurturing strategy without deploying additional resources or escalating operational costs.
Build Credibility and Trust
The lead nurturing tools create opportunities for your business to become trusted advisors for customers. You can help B2B customers to address new challenges and resolve common issues by sharing the right information at the right time. The relevant content and personalized communication will make the customers trust your business or brand while making purchase decisions. You can project your business as a thought leader by focusing on nurturing the leads efficiently.
Beat Competition
Lead nurturing helps you to identify the needs and expectations of customers through regular and timely interaction. The information collected during the lead nurturing process helps you to meet customer expectations and boost customer satisfaction. Also, your business can leverage real-time customer feedback to assess and forecast the demand for a new product or service. Hence, you can easily beat the competition by launching innovative products or adding out-of-the-box features to existing products.
Quantifying the Impact
Numbers speak volumes, and lead nurturing delivers measurable ROI. Companies that implement automated nurturing workflows see up to a 20% increase in sales opportunities, thanks to more effective lead qualification and segmentation. By tracking metrics like email open rates, click‑through rates, and lead‑to‑MQL conversion, marketers can attribute revenue directly to nurturing campaigns. This data-driven approach enables continuous optimization—testing subject lines, offers, and send times to squeeze out incremental gains. In an era where every marketing dollar is scrutinized, having concrete performance figures is the difference between guesswork and strategic investment.
Benefits for B2B vs. B2C
While the core principle of lead nurturing—building relationships through relevant content—applies across industries, the specific benefits differ for B2B and B2C audiences. In B2B scenarios, nurturing helps manage longer sales cycles by delivering in-depth whitepapers, ROI calculators, and case studies that address multiple stakeholders’ concerns. This keeps your solution top of mind during protracted evaluation phases. Conversely, B2C lead nurturing leans heavily on emotional triggers, flash sales, and personalized product recommendations to drive impulse purchases and repeat business. Recognizing these nuances ensures your campaigns speak directly to the motivations and timelines of your unique audience segments.
Expert Opinions
Marketing luminaries agree: lead nurturing is no longer optional—it’s table stakes. Neil Patel emphasizes the necessity of delivering consistent, valuable touchpoints, while Ann Handley underscores the power of storytelling to humanize your brand. Integrating expert insights not only bolsters your authority but also enriches your SEO footprint through associated long‑tail keywords. By quoting or paraphrasing respected voices, you lend weight to your arguments and demonstrate thought leadership. This expert‑driven approach reassures skeptical readers that your recommendations aren’t just theory—they’re proven best practices.
How to Leverage These Benefits
To fully unlock the advantages of lead nurturing, integrate it into a cohesive, multi-channel strategy that aligns content creation, marketing automation, and sales follow‑up. Begin by mapping your buyer personas and identifying the key questions they ask at each stage of the funnel. Develop tailored content—blogs, emails, webinars, and social posts—that answers those questions and nudges leads toward the next step. Use a robust CRM or automation platform to trigger workflows based on behavior, score leads automatically, and hand off only the most qualified prospects to sales. By continuously measuring outcomes and refining your tactics, you’ll turn lead nurturing into a reliable engine for growth rather than a one‑off campaign.
To get the benefits of lead nurturing, your business must complement lead generation with lead nurturing to drive better sales conversion. In addition to influencing the buying decisions of leads, the strategy will help your business to meet customer expectations, improve customer satisfaction, and promote customer loyalty. An effective lead nurturing strategy will make it easier for you to generate more sales-ready leads while reducing cost per lead.
Saurav, One of my good friends, who has recently set up his own startup, called me last Friday evening and asked me “Hey, I have started working on my 2024 marketing plan. We have a robust email marketing plan ready. Can you quickly tell me what are the other ways to generate B2B leads”. My answer to him was “It Depends. It all starts with your products, target customers, what are the problems they are facing, what kind of problems are solved by your products, and also, the price points of your products. Based on that you will need to create multiple touchpoints for your target customers to influence their purchase decisions and create your B2B lead generation strategies”.
Your business can easily collect leads from various sources by running inbound marketing campaigns. But you must nurture the leads effectively by sending the right information at the right time to drive sales conversion. As a key step in the lead nurturing process, lead scoring helps you determine the worthiness of prospective customers by assigning a numeric score to every lead. In addition to assessing the worthiness of individual leads, lead scoring helps you to identify and segregate the highly qualified or sales-ready leads.
Digital marketing campaigns help your business generate open leads regularly from multiple communication channels. But every open lead may fit your ideal customer profile or become a paying customer. You must filter and evaluate open leads based on their purchasing potential. The lead qualification process helps you identify leads that will make an actual purchase by evaluating open leads using a slew of frameworks and parameters.
“Only 1 in 5 leads ultimately becomes a customer. This means that for every new customer you get, there are four who were not persuaded to use your products or services. That’s a lot of time and money lost, but smart lead qualification can minimize this concern.”
You can implement a lead qualification strategy to identify the open leads who match the buyer persona created by your business. Also, you can differentiate sales qualified leads (SQL) from marketing qualified leads (MQL). But you can identify MQLs and SQLs accurately only by making a lead qualification checklist. In addition to making lead qualification a multistep process, the checklist will make your salespeople ask the right questions at the right time.
Lead Qualification Checklist for Identifying Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)
Buyer Persona/Ideal Customer Profile
Salespeople identify the target audience for a product/service based on the buyer persona or ideal customer profile created by your business. The buyer personas are created by combining real and market research data.
Hence, salespeople can use buyer personals as a powerful tool to qualify leads using a slew of parameters – business type, business location, business size, annual revenue, and job role. They can disqualify leads who do not match the ideal customer profile easily and early.
Intent and Interests
Salespeople can identify MQL only by understanding the intent and interests of a lead who matches the ideal customer profile. While understanding the lead’s intent, they must check if the lead has visited your website multiple times.
Likewise, they understand the lead’s interests based on the information collected by her about the product/service and the case studies and tutorials accessed by her while visiting the website. The MQL must be interested in your product/service, along with matching the ideal customer profile.
Lead Qualification Checklist for Identifying Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)
Needs, Issues, Concerns, or Pain Points
The sales qualification process often starts with the identification of problems, issues, concerns, or pain points. The salespeople must ask relevant questions to understand the lead’s concerns or needs clearly. The understanding helps them recommend the appropriate product/service. Also, they can leverage the information to customize the solution according to the lead’s precise needs.
Long-Term and Short-Term Goals
B2B leads always look for products or services to meet specific goals. But your product or service may meet the lead’s short-term goals, long-term goals, or both. Salespeople must ask several questions to understand the lead’s short-term and long-term goals. The answers will help them to customize or extend your solution according to the lead’s goals by adding the relevant features.
Trials and Experience
Many leads these days look for alternative or new solutions after using a solution or investing in resources. The salespeople can influence the lead only when they measure the time, effort, and resources spent by the lead in solving the issue. They must ask questions to identify the pros and cons of the solutions used by the lead. Also, they can leverage the information to provide different and superior alternatives to the lead.
Expectations
B2B leads often look for solutions to beat the competition or outperform competitors. Salespeople must ask specific questions to understand what makes competitors score over the lead. Likewise, they need to understand the expectations of the lead from a brand or business. They can leverage the information to present your product or service as a superior alternative to overcome the lead’s shortcomings and surpass competitors.
Brand Perception
As the lead has collected a variety of information from your website, she must have formed a perception about your product, service, or brand. She may like some features of your brand and may not like specific features. Salespeople can influence the lead’s brand perception by focusing on the positive features. Also, they must change the brand perception by clearing misconceptions and doubts. Salespeople must ask specific questions to know what the lead thinks of the brand.
Budget
Unlike large companies, small businesses and startups often lack the budget required to avail of cutting-edge solutions. The salespeople must know the lead’s budget by asking relevant questions. They further need to know the lead’s budget in the early stages of the sales qualification process. You can make it easier for salespeople to close the deal by adjusting the price according to the lead’s budget.
Decision Making Process
In most organizations, B2B purchase decisions are made by a committee of decision-makers. The salespeople cannot close sales deals without establishing relationships with multiple decision-makers. While qualifying leads, they must ask specific questions to understand the decision-making process and know the number of decision-makers involved in the process. The information will help them to build relationships with the right managers.
Timeframe
Some leads look for quick solutions, while others look for long-term solutions. Hence, the timeframe for closing sales deals varies across organizations. Salespeople must ask relevant questions to the lead to know when she is planning to place the order. The information is crucial for salespeople to plan lead nurturing activities and decide the lead qualification time.
Solution
After understanding the lead’s needs, expectations, and goals, it is time for salespeople to present your brand as a solution. However, they must ask questions to know what prevents the lead from completing the deal or placing an order. The lead may not close the deal due to a variety of reasons – inadequate budget or lack of authority to close the deal. Salespeople must ask specific questions to identify why SQL is not closing the deal. Also, they must work on the issues to convert the SQL into a customer
You can make a lead qualification checklist to make your business’s lead generation and lead nurturing strategies more impactful. But you must focus on using the checklist as a tool to make lead qualification a multi-step process. However, it is also important to keep the lead qualification checklist flexible enough to include new points and criteria.
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