65% of businesses say that generating traffic and leads is their biggest challenge. But 96% of the visitors who come to the website, are not ready to buy. And this is even more worrisome: 80% of the new leads never translate into sales. So, what’s the solution? Well, the answer is lead nurturing. Many businesses pour their heart and soul into generating leads, but it is astonishing to know that a lot of them still have not adopted lead nurturing practices in 2025. So, I decided to write the first blog series in my blog: lead nurturing meaning. In the second part of this blog series, I will cover the benefits of lead nurturing. In the concluding part of the 3 part blog series, I will cover the winning lead nurturing strategies.
Also, as a business leader, you need to understand that you cannot drive conversion rate simply by focusing on lead generation. In addition to generating relevant leads, you need to focus on building and reinforcing relationships with the leads at the six important stages in the sales process or sales funnel – awareness, discovery, evaluation, intent, purchase, and loyalty.
Lead Nurturing Meaning: What is Lead Nurturing
Let’s understand the lead nurturing meaning. Lead nurturing refers to the process of building and sustaining relationships with customers throughout the buying process by sending relevant content and personalized messages to newly generated leads. Your business can easily translate leads into sales by keeping in place an elaborate lead nurturing strategy.
Companies good at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads.
Deals closing with nurtured leads receive a 47% higher order value.
In addition to boosting your lead generation efforts, lead nurturing will help you increase conversion rate and order value consistently. You can easily nurture existing and newly generated leads using the right lead nurturing tool. The tool will automate and streamline lead nurturing campaigns by following a series of steps.
How Does Lead Nurturing Work?
Assign Scores to Every Lead
The lead scoring process starts with the segmentation or categorization of leads. You cannot deliver relevant and timely information to leads without understanding in which stage of the sales funnel they are in. You can easily evaluate and categorize leads by assigning lead scores.
The tool will assign positive or negative scores to every lead based on important parameters like location, pages visited, content downloaded, frequency of visits, and willingness to receive email communication. You can add customized parameters to the list to assign accurate scores to each lead.
Identify the Sales-Ready Leads
The lead scoring mechanism will help you to identify the sales-ready leads and differentiate them from dormant leads. In addition to removing dormant leads from the database, you must focus on nurturing the sales-ready leads. You can easily nurture these most qualified leads by linking them with the right buyer persona. The buyer persona will help you to map and personalize the content for every lead.
Implement a Lead Nurturing Strategy
Your business can influence the buying decision of a lead by sending a variety of content – blog posts, whitepapers, case studies, podcasts, and webinars. The lead nurturing tools help you to deliver the content to every lead through multiple channels of communication. But you cannot convert a lead into a customer without sending the right information in the right way and at the right time.
You must implement a lead nurturing strategy that focuses on delivering the right content to a lead regularly. Instead of implementing a single strategy, you must run targeted lead nurturing strategies that are mapped to the buyer persona based on important criteria like location, job function, industry, and buyer cycle.
Launch Lead Nurturing Campaigns
After gathering the information required to nurture the leads, you need to launch targeted lead nurturing campaigns. The lead nurturing tools enable you to automate the lead nurturing campaigns end-to-end. You can monitor the lead nurturing campaigns simply by generating reports based on real-time data.
But you cannot make the lead nurturing campaigns effective in driving sales conversion without focusing on a slew of important factors – driving the target audience into relevant segments, sending valuable and personalized content, automating lead nurturing email delivery, and closing the sales transaction.
Monitor and Fine-Tune Lead Nurturing Campaigns
In addition to launching targeted lead nurturing campaigns, you must monitor the performance of individual campaigns continuously. You can easily evaluate the performance of individual campaigns using email open rates and click-through rates. However, you must use important parameters like the percentage of nurtured leads that place orders and the amount of time a lead requires to make the purchase decision.
The parameters will help you to evaluate the performance of a lead nurturing campaign and identify the troubled areas. After analyzing the campaign results, you must fine-tune the lead nurturing process by sending new types of content to the leads and switching to new communication channels. Hence, you must remember that lead nurturing, like lead generation, is an ongoing process.
The Importance of Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the backbone of a strong inbound marketing strategy. With buyers doing most of their research independently, brands need to stay top of mind without being intrusive. Effective nurturing campaigns help you qualify leads, reduce sales cycle length, and improve conversion rates. More importantly, they allow you to provide real value to leads before they even speak with a sales rep. This trust-building process ensures that when prospects are ready to buy, your brand is the first they consider.
Real-Life Lead Nurturing Examples
To see lead nurturing in action, consider a software company using automated email sequences based on user behavior. A lead who downloads a whitepaper might receive a follow-up email offering a relevant webinar, followed by a case study featuring similar customers. Another example is an e-commerce brand sending cart abandonment emails with personalized product recommendations. These tailored experiences increase engagement and drive conversions. Including such examples makes the concept tangible and shows how different industries can implement nurturing successfully.
Success Stories & Lessons Learned
Companies that nail lead nurturing often share one thing in common: they prioritize customer understanding over aggressive selling. For example, HubSpot implemented behavior-triggered email campaigns that led to a 200% increase in qualified leads. These success stories highlight the long-term benefits of nurturing, not just short-term gains. By analyzing what worked (or failed), marketers can learn to fine-tune their approach and avoid common pitfalls. Lessons learned from the trenches are invaluable, especially for teams just starting out.
Building a Lead Nurturing Campaign
Creating an effective lead nurturing campaign starts with clear goals and a deep understanding of your target audience. Begin by segmenting your leads based on interests, lifecycle stage, or demographics, then develop content tailored to each segment. Use automation tools to schedule messages and track engagement metrics. A successful campaign flows naturally, guiding leads through the buyer’s journey with helpful, non-salesy touchpoints. The goal is to educate, not push — ultimately driving conversions through trust and relevance.
Tools and Automation
The right tools can make or break your lead nurturing efforts. Email and marketing automation Platforms like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, or Mailchimp offer powerful automation features that help marketers schedule emails, score leads, and trigger workflows based on user behavior. CRM integrations allow for seamless communication between sales and marketing, ensuring leads don’t slip through the cracks. Using analytics tools, you can monitor campaign performance in real time and adjust tactics accordingly. Automating repetitive tasks frees up time to focus on strategy and creative content.
Common Challenges in Lead Nurturing
One of the biggest challenges in lead nurturing is balancing personalization with scale. Generic emails won’t convert, but hyper-personalized campaigns can be resource-intensive. Many businesses also struggle with aligning sales and marketing, leading to inconsistent messaging. Data silos and poor segmentation can further hinder progress. To succeed, marketers must invest in the right tech stack, ensure clean data, and continuously test and optimize their campaigns.
Conclusion
Your business cannot drive sales conversions simply by adopting lead generation best practices. You must complement the lead generation strategy with a lead nurturing strategy to increase both the number and value of orders. It is always important to keep in place a solid lead nurturing strategy to convert newly generated leads into sales-ready leads.
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.
