For anything to grow, it needs to be nurtured. This is true for plants and animals, but also for teams. For marketing departments in particular, that idea comes up when dealing with leads — to get from first contact to a sale, it’s essential to perfect your lead nurturing.
If common-sense intuition isn’t convincing enough, this pans out in the data. Statistics aggregate SmallBizGenius reported that companies with strong lead-nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at two-thirds the cost — and in a world where 80 percent of leads don’t translate to sales, that’s a significant increase in success.
A marketing team that develops ironclad methods for lead nurturing is going to see its business tower above the rest. For Sarah Lilly, marketing and communication generalist at Choozle, that strategy revolves around listening to the data.
“Knowing how your campaigns are performing and where your audience is responding is the best way to optimize a successful lead nurturing campaign,” said Lilly. Trends and technology change frequently in marketing, but by listening to the data when testing potential changes, Choozle keeps its lead nurturing cutting-edge.
Lilly elaborated on Choozle’s data-driven lead nurturing in her conversation with Built In Colorado, sharing specific ideas and examples of this strategy.
From your experience, what’s the secret to a successful lead nurturing campaign?
Leverage your data. The data will tell a story for you over time, and you have to be willing to trust your data when it doesn’t fall into the narrative you imagined — and optimize your campaigns to best fit the trends you’re seeing.
How has this strategy improved the success or efficacy of your lead nurturing campaigns?
Letting our data drive our strategy has allowed us to understand where to best funnel our efforts towards the goal we are striving for. As an example, after testing out various strategies with our email outreach campaigns, we’ve found a way to leverage other strategies within our full-funnel approach to support those efforts: creating a web of efforts that all support each other. Essentially, a single strategy doesn’t live on its own. Providing consistent and valuable information to prospects through various channels has allowed us to stay top-of-mind when they need a solution. Using an education-first approach has been extremely successful for us.
You have to be willing to trust your data when it doesn’t fall into the narrative you imagined.”
With digital marketing evolving so rapidly, how do you stay on top of best practices when it comes to nurturing leads?
As a marketer, staying up to date with digital marketing best practices has always been tough. Information doesn’t have a long shelf life, which has always been an interesting challenge. Staying in touch with industry resources and trends is a great way to stay on top of day-to-day changes, especially surrounding Google algorithm updates or changes to GoogleAds. But when it comes to evolving and optimizing your approach, I’ve always found that it’s best to lean on your data. If it’s time to make a change, run tests to find out what will work moving forward and go from there. While changes might be happening in the greater industry, it might not always be relevant or beneficial to your business.
