What is a nurture campaign?
A nurture campaign is exactly what it sounds like – a campaign to nurture prospective leads along their movement through the sales cycle. Nurture campaigns are driven by prospect behavior and rely on personalization in order to have the biggest impact. They’re widely used and can be effective inbound marketing tools when executed well. You’ve probably been part of a nurture campaign without even realizing it. Have you ever gotten an email from a business you recently visited or inquired about? The email’s contents may have been related to your specific inquiry or another similar topic, specific to what your connection with the business is. Congratulations, you’ve been part of a nurture campaign! Nurture campaigns don’t always have to revolve around email though. They can also include ads and direct mail.
Why should you develop a nurture campaign for your business?
People don’t build relationships over night, and neither do businesses. It takes time and effort for relationships to grow and become more meaningful. The time will pass no matter what. If you want to have something to show for it, it should be an easy decision to commit to nurturing your leads.
Developing a nurture campaign of your own can boost your inbound marketing success and deepen the connections you make with prospective clients. One of the reasons nurture campaigns can be so successful is that they are more lead-centric than drip campaigns. Drip campaigns are similar in that they also deliver fresh content to leads; however, drip campaigns are based on scheduled releases of content and aren’t catered or personalized to the lead’s interest or latest interaction with the business. All leads receive the same content at predetermined times, regardless of where the leads are in the sales cycle. Drip campaign content usually revolves around what the business wants to promote rather than what individual leads are seeking. Nurture campaigns are based on lead behavior, so prospective clients are given different content depending on where they fall in the sales cycle and the content arrives at varying schedules depending on the lead’s engagement level.
None of this is to say that you should abandon drip campaigns or be hesitant to create content that speaks to your business needs. Drip and nurture campaigns are commonly used in tandem to balance lead-centric and business-centric content. If you are currently using a drip campaign, you can step up its game by supplementing it with a nurture campaign. When nurture campaigns are performing at their best, they forge bonds with customers that create customer loyalty, shorten the sales cycle, and ultimately increase your sales.
How is a nurture campaign created?
Before you can nurture your leads, you have to know about them. Realizing leads and pinpointing their place in the sales cycle is done by lead scoring, or assigning values to leads in order to rank them in order of their sales readiness. Once your leads have been ranked, you need to divide them into target groups. Each group’s nurture campaign will be slightly different, so the more you can segment your leads, the more relevant their group’s nurture campaign will be. For example, if you group your leads into those whose lead scores are 0-50 and 51-100, you’ll need to create two nurture campaigns. However, a lead with a score of 0 will receive the same content as a lead with a score of 50, and it will be difficult to create content that addresses both of their needs. Instead, you could segment the leads by score intervals of 25. That will require more nurture campaigns, but both lower scoring and higher scoring leads will get content catered to their level of engagement.
Next, you have the difficult task of generating content for each group. Consider each group’s specific needs and create content that will capture their attention. A lead that is very early in the sales cycle won’t be drawn in by the same content as a repeat customer, so knowing the differences between your target groups is key to developing successful nurture campaigns. The behavioral data used to assign lead scores are good indicators of what each group wants. Where do new customers spend most of their time on your website? Which blog posts are most popular with repeat customers? Which group is most engaged on social media? The fuller the picture of each target group, the more effective your nurture campaign can be. It’s a good idea to have new customer and repeat customer campaigns, as well as a re-engagement campaign for leads that are at risk of regressing in the sales cycle. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can create post-purchase campaigns or even multiple campaigns for the same group. This can help you compare how effective different content is within one target audience and give you a better idea of what your leads prefer to see in each stage of the sales cycle.
Why should you trust Carefully Crafted’s marketing team to develop your nurture campaign?
Nurture campaigns are heavily dependent on lead scoring. If you’re already scoring leads and tracking where they are in the sales cycle, developing a nurture campaign based on that data is the next logical step to improve your inbound marketing strategy. If you aren’t scoring your leads and tracking where they are in the sales cycle, imagine how many sales could have been closed if those leads were realized and nurtured more effectively.
Perhaps you’re further along and have already implemented different campaigns but you still need help accomplishing your goals. Maybe you need to give your drip campaign a little extra boost and supplement it with a nurture campaign, or maybe you’re already using a nurture campaign but you’re unhappy with its performance. We can help there too. If you’re not seeing the level of engagement you want from your current campaigns, we’re happy to take a look and offer our best solution. No matter where you are in your nurture campaign implementation, we’re able to measure the campaign’s performance and make necessary adjustments to help you achieve your sales goals.
