10 Best marketing automation lead nurturing practices

There was a time when maximum outreach was the best strategy among marketers, and the idea was to capture the attention of as many users as possible and see how many of them will convert into customers. But the problem was the amount of wasted effort and time was so high, with studies showing that 80% of new leads never convert. 

So marketers began to spend more time, energy and focus on current users or leads. Lead nurturing became more popular and it proved to have a huge impact on the result of generated revenue in different ways. For example, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.

In addition other studies show targeting users with relevant content yields 73% higher conversion rates. But the question is, how can we take care of our leads and provide relevant content for them? The answer is marketing automation lead nurturing.
In this article, we will show you how to generate more revenue with your current leads.

• Let’s talk about the customer journey
• What is lead nurturing?
• How can marketing automation help lead nurturing?
  • Effectively categorize your target leads with segmentation
  • Personalization to show value and relevance
  • Increase availability in case of need
• Best practices of marketing automation lead nurturing
  1. Display a coupon popup when a product page is visited
  2. Display a discount popup for the first purchase
  3. Greeting new leads with a welcome email
  4. Encourage leads to purchase on special occasions
  5. Re-engage inactive leads with win-back emails
  6. Notify them about your progress or new product/service
  7. Offer giveaways to be remembered
  8. Follow up with cart abandoners
  9. Show personalized landing pages with dynamic keywords
  10. Add testimonials to improve trust
• Analyze and improve
• Final words

Let’s talk about the customer journey

To understand who our leads are and nurture them we should first learn something called the “Customer Journey”. In order to earn money or increase revenue, you should connect with your customers at any stage or touchpoint of their interaction with your website or business so they don’t leave. Rather, you hope the leads will be satisfied and decide to purchase your product or service and hopefully repeat the purchase in the future. Marketers plan and design different presumable scenarios of those interactions, which is the idea behind the customer journey. Although it may sound easy, it’s not easy at all to implement and manage, especially without automating tasks.

In order to understand customers, digital marketers model the behavior of different user personas in four stages to provide different communication strategies in each stage. These stages are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Purchase

Leads are users from the consideration stage onward.

Marketers try to improve the customer experience at every stage to help users move forward and drive purchases. That can be achieved through two main steps:

1. Discover the funnels on your website to identify the most and least successful to help find the right segments to target.
2. Equipped with this information, we can work to improve each funnel, making them as effective and welcoming to users as possible.

What is lead nurturing?

Put simply, any marketing activity you do to set up, improve or maintain your relationship with your leads is called “lead nurturing.”

Most of those activities involve providing useful and relevant content that your leads need at every touchpoint. This will not only help them understand your product or service better but also empower your brand loyalty and trust and finally convert leads into customers.

How can marketing automation help lead nurturing?

In the lead nurturing process⁠—as in almost all marketing activities⁠—there are a lot of tasks that should be done at the right time and sometimes immediately. It’s hard to imagine a person (or even a full team) managing to pull this off correctly and effectively.

The best way out there today is automated personalized cross-channel marketing for a successful lead nurturing strategy.

Marketing automation enhances lead nurturing via three main steps: segmentation, automation and personalization.

Effectively categorize your target leads with segmentation

The backbone of a good marketing strategy is proper user segmentation. User segmentation means dividing and categorizing different users based on their behavior, location, loyalty, demographics, etc. When you have different groups of users instead of a giant one, then you can tailor your marketing content based on each category and customize your message to speak to each targeted group of users easily.

Personalization to show value and relevance

In almost every airline, there is a category of seating that is called “first-class.” Along with providing more space, the airline asks for the customer to indicate their preferred food or beverage. Plus, since there are fewer seats, each passenger gets more individualized attention and service from the flight attendant. As a result, travelers feel more valuable and satisfied and the chances are high that they will try that airline again. Personalization creates the same feeling for your leads and can increase the chance of converting them into paying customers. Leads can see relevant content, personalized messages and information that has a direct relationship with their satisfaction and conversion rate.

Increase availability in case of need

All of us have had the experience of asking something from a salesperson, not getting a response and simply giving up on that store. Do you think your users (and leads) behind their monitors are any different? The answer is no.
Automation enables you to be available every time so that you don’t neglect your leads.

Best practices of marketing automation lead nurturing

Here are some of the best-known examples of lead nurturing using marketing automation.

If you use cross-channel unified marketing automation tools such as Growmatik, you’ll be able to create them all with just one tool.

1- Display a coupon popup when a product page is visited

By offering a discount on a particular product page you can encourage leads to purchase the product they are looking for. Let’s say a user visited a product category page of your website and then clicked on a product to see more details about the product. Here is a great chance to offer your discount via popup, but don’t do it immediately because it might bother the user. Instead, it’s better to show the popup after 5 seconds or even 10 depending on the type of product you are selling.

In Growmatik you can set a time or scroll condition to display your popup.

2- Display a discount popup for the first purchase

This is an effective and proven way to nurture your new leads and a good gesture to welcome them. It motivates them to place their first order and become a customer more easily.

3- Greeting new leads with a welcome email

If you want to create a good first impression on your arrival leads then a welcome email can come in handy. In welcome emails, you can address your leads by their name and provide some information about your brand or explain how they can contact you in case they need some help. It’s recommended to add a CTA and direct them to your website in the welcome email as well.

Using Growmatik, you can also add links to popular articles or blog posts to attract them to the content of your website.

4- Encourage leads to purchase on special occasions

Every time I receive an email on Christmas or my birthday that celebrates those events and offers me a special gift or coupon, I become interested and in most cases try to use that coupon or gift. Additionally, I’m not likely to forget that brand easily after that. Send emails to your leads on special occasions with some offers and you will see the result.

Here is a good example from Subway that offers a free cookie on a customer’s birthday to bring them to the restaurant and increase the chances of them buying another food.

5- Re-engage inactive leads with win-back emails

To detect and categorize your inactive leads⁠— that is, users that haven’t had any interaction with your website for quite some time⁠—you can filter them with Growmatik from the People page.

This way you can send them personalized win-back offers or explain the value you can bring to their lives or businesses.

6- Notify them about your progress or new product/service

Always have a list of your website or service improvements and send it to your leads so they know how you are moving forward. Also, if you add a new service or product to your website, send an update about it to the relevant segment. This tactic will trigger the fear of missing out (FOMO) bias in your leads and will increase your conversion rate.

In Growmatik we notify our leads and customers whenever we update our software.

7- Offer giveaways to be remembered

People love free stuff. Depending on your business, you can provide something for free and relevant for your leads. E-books or statistics are the most well-known giveaway items in e-commerce, but you can give physical things such as a mug with your brand on it as well. This way, your customers will remember your brand whenever they use it.

Here is a great example from a kids book about.

8- Follow up with cart abandoners

Track leads who abandoned something in their cart and don’t give up on them. Unfortunately, this means tracking a huge segment⁠—in 2020, about 88.05% of online orders were abandoned worldwide, so your own rate is most likely not less than that.

Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to track your abandoned cart users with Growmatik:

Just go to People, select All leads and add the filter shopping activity > Has abandoned cart as yes

Now you can send them an email and try to bring them back to your website to complete their purchase.

9- Show personalized landing pages with dynamic keywords

As we mentioned earlier, personalization will make your leads feel special and important so the chances of conversion will increase. Welcome and address them by name in the homepage or show their intent in a landing page by adding their UTM source somewhere in the content. Also, this technique can improve the relevancy of the page with their intention and the chance of conversion will increase.

10- Add testimonials to improve trust

It’s clear as day that trust plays a major role in your lead’s journey from interest to purchase. Adding testimonials from real customers is a great way to improve that trust. You can add this on the webpage or to your emails.

Here is a testimonial section from datacamp homepage.

Analyze and improve

Marketing automation itself cannot determine if it’s doing something wrong or ineffective and change or modify its way to improve the outcome⁠—at least not yet. It’s critical to monitor and measure the performance of marketing automation with proper metrics to check the engagement and generated revenue.

Growmatik provides in-depth analytics reports for each marketing action on your website and for each user type (guest, leads, and customers) separately.

Here is an example of the report of a specific marketing action (displaying a popup) that you can look at generated revenue, converted users, CTA clicks and other useful metrics.

Final words

In this blog post, we’ve explained how important lead nurturing is and showed you some practical examples of marketing automation lead nurturing to help you make the most out of your lead nurturing efforts.

Growmatik identifies your leads and allows you to categorize them depending on your business model. Do not hesitate to try one or more of our suggested practices or any other way you think is fit for your website and business as soon as you can⁠—the more you wait, the more money you lose!