If the watering can replaces “drip irrigation” for individuals, and an irrigation system replaces the watering can on the side of large-scale operations, that is probably not without reason… Cultivation and livestock farming, like lead nurturing, are reasoned and pragmatic sciences. So anyone wishing to nurture their prospects must, like any good farmer, have reliable and effective tools, notably to save time… even if it goes far beyond that.
No, this article is not going to continue with a long agricultural digression (although it could, given how obvious the parallel is), but rather with a few marketing strategies that energize your strategy for nurturing your prospects. Thus, if we had to briefly recall what is meant by “lead nurturing” or lead management, we could quote Bertrand Berthelot to emphasize that it is “a procedure consisting of maintaining or strengthening a marketing relationship with prospects who are not yet ready for a sales action”. The notion of growing and tending the seeds that have been sown is therefore clearly not far off… But let’s move on and see why, in this context, it is necessary to use a Marketing Automation tool.
Nurturing: for shorter sales cycles.
By definition, the Inbound Marketing technique consists of attracting, nurturing (by delighting them), and converting prospects into customers. In this sales cycle, lead nurturing is the common thread that makes it possible to move from suspect (converted into prospect) to customer. Lead nurturing therefore takes place in this more or less long “belly” of the persuasion period leading to the sale.
The time factor alone, which can range from a few days (in the case of reactivating an abandoned cart on an e-commerce site) to several months (in the case of selling products or services in B2B), is one of the reasons for using a Marketing Automation tool. So whether it is a matter of being very responsive to encourage a prospect who has abandoned their cart to complete the purchase: “To maximize their conversion rates, it has been shown that a first follow-up email should be sent 1 to 3 hours after cart abandonment. If it is followed by a second email 24 hours later, the conversion rate is more than doubled and reaches 50%” (according to codeur.com). And unless you are sitting behind your back office 24/7, it is hard to do better than a Marketing Automation tool!
Guiding the message to delight prospects…
This time factor is also essential in a long sales cycle… For several reasons:
- Learn, always learn, and identify the prospect’s areas of interest… Through tracking their browsing behavior. What are they interested in after downloading this or that ebook or case study? How often do they revisit, and which topics are they revisiting (page tags)?
- Integrate them into a delight process, by assigning them the nurturing marketing campaign best suited to their specific challenges.
- Industrialize the relationship to reduce human costs by adapting processes for “raising” the prospect so as to bring them to such a level of maturity that, when handed over to sales, the sale happens quickly and painlessly.
To draw an obvious parallel, just imagine for a few moments how much time teams would have to devote to nurturing prospects if all processes had to be carried out without Marketing Automation…
Consistent branding…
That is without forgetting that these elements, developed upstream and embedded in a Marketing Automation tool, make it possible to demonstrate the company’s consistency to prospects. And consistency implies seriousness… A seriousness that will be reflected across all channels: social networks, emails, SMS… with the right message, arriving at the right time, to the right prospect. Who can do better?
To date, let’s be honest, it is hard to do anything more effective if we consider the ratio between the acquisition and usage cost of the marketing automation tool and marketing effectiveness in terms of conversion. In other words, all professionals who are convinced of the importance of lead nurturing techniques can only also be convinced of the importance of using a Marketing Automation tool.
