Did you know that 79 percent of marketing leads never convert into sales due to the lack of lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is vital to any purchasing journey and it’s important for marketers to understand the difference between Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing.
Lead generation is the process of generating excitement around specific products and services in order to bring potential new customers into the sales pipeline. This can be done by way of inbound or outbound marketing, including your website, calls to action, lead forms and digital ads.

Lead nurturing is understanding your leads and knowing where they are in the purchasing process and staying with them until they’re ready to buy.

Lead nurturing involves gaining the trust of your prospects by demonstrating that you understand their needs and are speaking specifically to them.

This nuanced process includes:

1. Segment: Ensure your messaging is segmented properly by personas, industries, demographics, etc.
   a. Define your ideal personas and:
       i. How your offering satisfies their needs
       ii. How /where/how often they buy
   b. Segment your leads lists by using filters in your CRM
   c. By knowing what each segment wants, educate them and help them to see your value
   d. Ensure all of your content is focused on solving your prospects’ problems
       i. Build your nurture campaigns to encouragement engagement by providing helpful, personalized, problem solving messaging
   
   
2. Goals: Set goals for each segment and determine a lead score
   - Provide a numerical value to each lead based on their past behavior and establish minimums for sales actions
   
   
3. Focused messaging – Relevance and personalized messaging will help move prospects from the top of your funnel into the purchasing processing. A recent study by Experian states that personalized emails generate revenue six times higher than non-personalized emails.
   Several means for accomplishing this include:
   a. Encourage followers or newsletter subscribers by creating engaging value offers like a new subscriber discount
   b. Create a welcome email list with highlights your value and offers while relating to their industry or specific needs
   c. Ensure messaging is relatable and includes introductions and powerful storytelling
   
   
4. Clear call-to-action (CTAs): One, clear CTA on a personalized message will alleviate confusion and keep your prospect close to your sales cycle by encouraging them to take action
   
   
5. Grab their attention: Create a personalized, attention grabbing opening line or subject line
   
   
6. Provide meaningful and valuable industry specific content: This can include ebooks, guides, blogs, tutorials, top-10 lists and webcasts to name a few
   
   
7. Run A/B Tests: Run two parallel campaigns with strategic differences and then measure
       i. Lead inflows and outflows at each stage of the sales funnel
       ii. Review bounce rates, click rates, open rates and unsubscribe rates
   
   
8. Review your data and analytics: Tools like Google Analytics, let you see who your prospects are and how much time they spend viewing your web pages and assets. 
   Incorporating this data along with your CRM sales interactions and marketing automation email and social media analytics helps you to have a holistic view of your prospects’ actions and digital behavior. You are able to understand their past interactions, preferred digital channels and relevant interests. This enables you target them digitally via social media ads, email and even SMS
   
   
9. Nurture: Proactively provide leads valuable and personalized follow-up resources and touchpoints to keep them engaged during your nurture cycle
   a. Examples include emails that highlight the ROI of purchasing your offering with a testimonial and data
   b. Comparisons between your product/ratings vs. a competitors
   c. Industry tips and tricks, sharing insights, instructional empowerment, trends