Lead nurturing is a strategic approach businesses use to develop relationships with potential customers at every stage of the sales funnel.

However, lead nurturing will fail to move your prospects closer to converting without a solid strategy.

Below, we wrapped up 5 best lead nurturing strategies to implement today.

What is the Lead Nurturing strategy?

A lead nurturing strategy is a systematic approach designed to engage with potential customers by providing them with relevant information and personalized interactions that address their specific needs and pain points throughout the buying journey.

This strategy aims to build trust and maintain a connection with leads until they are ready to make a purchase decision.

A solid lead nurturing strategy improves the overall conversion rates from leads to customers.

This strategy involves carefully crafted campaigns using various channels like email, social media, and content marketing, and employs techniques such as segmentation, personalization, and automated follow-ups to educate and influence potential customers.

How to build lead nurturing strategy? 5 Expert Tips

Here are five expert tips for lead nurturing, from building it to implementing it into the daily workflows of your sales reps.

1. Identify your target audience.

Clearly defining who the target customers are, what their needs are, what their pain points are, what they value, and how they make purchasing decisions is the first step in building a lead nurturing strategy.

Targeting all buyer personas will not lead to more conversions and can cause a higher bounce rate.

Make sure your product or service targets your ideal customer profile, and build the strategy around them.

Gather as much information about your ICP as possible in the early stages of lead nurturing.

Make sure that you know their:

Industry and nice
Team size
Current solution they use
Main struggles they’re facing right now
Their fears and concerns
Their budget
Their decision maker
The current stage of their business

2. Invest in valuable content.

Creating and distributing relevant, valuable, and consistent content is crucial in attracting and engaging a defined audience.

The types of content you choose to go for are completely up to you: they can be anything from educational blog posts, informative newsletters, white papers, real-life case studies, videos, and more.

Each content category has to be tailored specifically to stages in the buying process.

This strategic alignment helps in moving leads smoothly along the funnel, addressing their changing concerns and decision-making criteria as they progress.

It builds trust as the potential customer receives consistent, helpful information precisely when needed.

Overall, content is key because it positions your brand as a reliable solution provider. The likelihood of converting leads into customers is many times higher when you deliver the right content at the right time.

3. Adapt multi-channel nurturing.

Long gone are the days when sales reps only did cold calling or cold emailing. Today, leads are targeted on all channels simultaneously.

This approach is known as multichannel nurturing and it’s very effective because it keeps your business on top of your contact’s mind.

Engaging leads across multiple platforms, such as email, social media, blogs, mobile messaging, etc., reach your prospects better because they prefer and actively use at least one of these mediums.

4. Score your leads.

Even when you have your contact list up and rolling, you don’t just target all leads simultaneously.

Some leads are more valuable than others because they’re one step away from converting. And it’s not just relevant for lead conversion.

Just like lead conversion, which is the last stage of the buyer’s journey, lead nurturing should rely on lead qualification and lead scoring.

Implement a clear system to score leads based on their interaction with your nurturing efforts, like:

the content you share
the newsletter you send to them (and if they opened it/or engaged)
the surveys they fill in
the webinars they join
their position in your sales pipeline

These scores show how likely these leads are to convert at a given moment. This helps prioritize leads and customize follow-up strategies so you don’t waste your time on leads that still need some time to warm up.

5. Plan your follow-ups.

Follow-ups are the backbone of lead nurturing, but many sales reps struggle to find the right time to follow up.

You don’t want to push the leads to annoy them in the early days when you have just begun to nurture them, but you also don’t want to leave them hanging and miss another sales opportunity.

So, when is the best time to send a follow-up email? As a rule of thumb, we suggest waiting:

2 days between 1st and 2nd follow-ups
2 days between 2nd and 3d follow-ups
3 days between 3d and 4th follow-ups

Another important thing sales reps want to know is how many follow-up emails to send to your leads.

Different case studies provide different answers:

For a typical campaign: between 2 to 4 follow-up emails

For a sales campaign: usually 4 follow-ups (but A/B test it yourself)

For non-business related objectives: between 2 to 3 follow-ups

To make sure your follow-ups are well planned, we suggest using automation tools like lemlist. It will ensure that your messaging is customized, relevant, and consistent with your previous follow-ups.

lemlist reminds your leads to reply to you using different methods, so you don’t appear too pushy, which enables you to create better relationships with them.

You can also space out each follow-up campaign step. It leaves your leads enough time to get back to you when it’s the most suitable to them.

As a result, you can be sure you won’t look like a spammer or desperate for their attention.

With lemlist, you can easily stop the nurturing campaign based on leads’ activities. For example, if your leads reply or book a meeting, your follow-up steps stop automatically.

Our tip is to think about your sequence as a story, since using consistent storytelling throughout the emails will make create better connection.

Another little tip is to keep your subject line empty in lemlist; your follow-up emails will go under the same thread and have the same subject line as your first email in the sequence.

And lastly, don’t just take but be ready to give! When your goal is to remind your prospect about your previous email, send them even more value, such as:

valuable tips
entertainment
useful info
special offer

Top 5 lead nurturing strategies that bring prospects closer to buying

Your go-to lead nurturing campaign is based on a few criteria:

your lead’s current place in their buyer journey
the channels you choose for your lead nurturing

The goal of all lead nurturing strategies is to push leads further down the funnel and closer to making a purchase decision.

Below, we listed 5 top lead nurturing strategies that have been proven to be the most effective:

1. Email marketing

Email marketing is the most common way to connect your leads.

To nurture your leads through email marketing, we suggest:

setting up automated emails based on lead interactions
make your messaging personalized
reach out by bringing value and information to your lead

If you got a direct email address from a lead, the chances are you will turn them into customer easier.

That doesn’t mean that outbound lead generation doesn’t work. You can get leads’ emails from lemlist’s People Database, which has over 450 million active contacts, qualify these contacts, divide them into segments, and start targeting them with the most highly scored leads.

Moreover, email campaigns are hands-down the most successful and reliable lead nurturing strategy because you deliver content directly to highly qualified leads.

In these emails, keep the leads in the loop by delivering industry news, new features, educational material, or promotions. Promotional offers with personalized solutions are great because they create a sense of urgency.

2. Social media

68% of marketers say social media marketing has helped them generate more leads. No wonder that social media is the most popular lead nurturing strategy.

When using social media for your lead nurturing, make sure you:

stay in your customer’s social media feeds
use both social media posts and paid ads for maximum impact
customize your social media campaigns for specific lead groups

Social media campaigns are an excellent strategy to reach high-quality leads that are still cold, which means they don’t know about your brand just yet.

3. Content marketing

As mentioned in this article, you can’t create an effective lead nurturing strategy if you neglect the content.

When leads are early in their buyer’s journey, they’re just browsing. They keep their options open, and want to get as much information about the product or service solutions as possible.

At this point, you want to make them want to explore your solution instead of the competitors.

The best way to do so is to invest in creating content about:

detailed product reviews
industry news and trends
product comparisons and vs. articles
lists of the best products according to certain criteria
case studies
success stories
top-of-the-funnel content that explains key terms in your industry
ebooks
white papers

Moreover, when done right, content marketing builds your business’s credibility and your website’s authority.

The content proves that you have expertise and knowledge of the field and that you can be trusted.

Showcase your company’s expertise with well-researched, thoughtful content, and leads will be more likely to trust your brand.

If your content stands out, the leads will return to your company’s site and blog and automatically get closer to buying.

4. Sales calls

Sales calls, or cold calling, are one of the oldest ways to nurture leads. These days, sales reps do most of the work with cold emails, but sales calls are still pretty common.

A sales call stands out from other lead nurturing strategies because it creates a personal connection with the lead from the first encounter.

Conversely, sales calls require specific skills and preparation, so they’re most commonly executed by experienced reps.

5. Direct mail marketing

Direct mails that land in your leads’ posts may seem like an old-fashioned way of nurturing leads.

In the digital world, more and more businesses stop using this method.

However, when combined with digital emails, direct mail can be a very powerful strategy.

Statistics show that this combination increased the response rate by 63%, website visits by 68%, and leads by 53%.

Moreover, 71% of consumers feel that direct mail is more personal than online digital communication. So, there are still people out there who prefer to get mails delivered to their door.

This, however, only applies to a few industries. If you’re in the SaaS software industry, the chances are that direct mail marketing will not be the best lead-nurturing method for you.

Key takeaways

A lead nurturing strategy is a comprehensive approach businesses use to engage potential customers by providing personalized and relevant information throughout their purchasing journey.

The strategy aims to build trust and maintain a connection with leads, which increases the likelihood of converting them into customers.

These are the essential components of a lead nurturing strategy:

identifying the target audience,
creating and distributing tailored content at different buying stages,
utilizing multiple communication channels,
implementing lead scoring
prioritizing follow-ups and timely interactions
tracking lead responses
automating follow-ups

Lead Nurturing Strategy: 5 Ways to Move Prospects Closer to Buying