Most business owners are aware that it's easier to retain existing customers than to generate a new customer. Forbes states that it can cost up to five times more to generate one new customer compared to the cost of retaining one existing customer. With that in mind, it becomes obvious why it is crucial to spend more time and effort working to retain all existing customers. One of the best methods of retaining your customers is through lead nurturing tactics.

Lead nurturing is the process of developing and maintaining relationships with prospects and customers at every stage of the sales funnel. Hubspot shared that businesses see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads. On top of that, Hubspot also shared that companies that excel at lead-nurture strategies generate an average of 50% more sales at 33% less cost. Now that you understand the importance of including lead nurturing tactics in your overall marketing strategy, let’s dig into which types of lead nurturing tactics are proven most successful.

Lead Nurture Strategies That Work:

• Email Marketing
• Multiple Touchpoints
• Timely Follow Up
• Personalization
• Lead Scoring
• Loyalty Programs

Email Marketing

Growth Hackers states that email marketing is recognized as the marketing channel with the highest ROI. This is in part due to the typically affordable overhead cost of running email marketing combined with the ability to automate touchpoints and engage leads on what feels like a personalized human to human level. 

Frequency of your outbound emails is the key to ensuring you are best utilizing your outbound touchpoints in a way that will cause leads and customers to convert. On average, it is recommended to engage all your leads and customers at least once a week. Utilizing outbound emails to targeted and specific groups of leads/customers allows your business to stay top of mind with all your leads/customers who are most likely to close and generate revenue. 

Multiple Touchpoints

In our overstimulated world, we are all constantly being bombarded with ads, offers, and opportunities. It becomes difficult for any one business to get their message across to their target audience and ensure that that message stays top of mind. To combat this, it is recommended to utilize multiple touchpoints, particularly those triggered based on engagement. 

According to Salesforce, it takes an average of 6-8 touches before a lead is likely to convert. This is exactly why it is so important to continually engage your existing leads and customers regularly to ensure you can create truly sales qualified leads for your sellers. Your multiple touchpoints can consist of a mix of emails, triggered content, as well as social posts/ads, targeted ads, push notifications and other digital channels. 

Your multiple touchpoints are a great place to take advantage of email automation and utilizing account-based marketing strategies dependent on each user’s interaction. This type of marketing allows for a seemingly personalized experience by creating different series of content to trigger to different users based on which actions they take on your site or based on data you have previously collected regarding that user. Thus, the user is continually fed additional content to ensure they continue to move down the sales funnel. 

Timely Follow Up

Hubspot informs us that the odds of a lead entering the sales funnel or become sales qualified are 21 times greater when that lead is contacted within five minutes as opposed to 30 minutes. Connecting with your leads the moment that they engage with your marketing content is crucial in ensuring your seller has the highest likelihood of closing that lead. 

If sellers are unable to contact the lead moments after that lead engages, then you can implement triggered automated emails to help ensure all leads are touched immediately after they convert through your digital content thus keeping those leads ‘hot’. 

Personalization

Utilizing personalization strategies can also help ensure that your leads/customers are constantly being nurtured and feeling valued as they receive content that helps serve their business. No one enjoys those long phone calls when you get trapped in a loop talking to a robot who can’t exactly meet your needs, answer your question or get you connected with a real human who can help. Avoid that sentiment by ensuring all your touchpoints, even your automated emails based on engagement, feel as if they were created specifically and only for that one lead or customer. This is personalized content. 

Experian carried out a study which discovered that personalized emails generate up to six times higher revenue per email compared to non-personalized emails. Combining personalization with account-based marketing strategies to small and specific target audiences allows your business to ensure it will retain a higher percentage of leads and past customers.

Lead Scoring

Leveraging lead scoring is a great method to enhance your lead nurture strategy and to deduce who should receive which touchpoints. Lead scoring is the process of assigning a particular score per each action, engagement or data point to all known leads and customers. This provides a rating system that allows you to prioritize leads and better determine who is a hot lead versus a cold lead. Understanding your prospects, their past actions and their needs based on their score ensures you are improving the likelihood of closing deals.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a combination of several proven lead nurturing tactics. You can utilize lead scoring to deduce which leads and customers are your key accounts that are most likely to convert. With those contacts set as your target audience, you can then provide a personalized touchpoint providing a special offer to this small group of key accounts. 

Since 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers, understanding and utilizing successful lead nurturing tactics is vital to a company’s profitability. With a healthy database and lead scoring in place, you can utilize the above strategies to ensure that all your leads and customers are continually nurtured and engaged throughout the sales funnel to ensure you keep closing the most deals possible.