Lead nurturing is a common marketing practice used by businesses to maintain open lines of communication with their leads and existing customers. This serves to make sure that the business remains top of mind with the customer whenever the sales cycle comes around again.
Business to business (B2B) marketing, just like any other type of marketing, requires for there to be continued nurturing and strengthening of client relationships, except in this case these clients just happen to be other business rather than a single consumer.
There is really no difference between lead nurturing for B2B relationships than any other business-client relationship. Any lead nurturing process should consist of regular messaging and communications being send to recipients following an initial interaction with the business, and it does not matter whether these recipients are individual consumers or other businesses.
Here are a few B2B lead nurturing best practices and tips that will help your business finesse your B2B nurture campaigns and build strong relationships with your business customers.
B2B Lead Nurturing Best Practices
Centralized contact management
As a business, you likely have a large number of contacts that you need to manage your relationships with. Contact management is an important part of the lead nurturing process, because you want to be absolutely certain that you have all the correct contact information you need when you need to reach out.
This is why it is best practice to use a contact management solution such as a CRM that is able to help you keep track of your leads and customers in an intuitive way. A CRM can help organize your contacts by business, track your interactions with them through individual profiles, and leverage pipeline functionality to help you easily see where your leads are in the sales cycle.
Lead nurturing tip: Connect your online forms to your contact manager for an easy way to gather information about new leads and update existing profiles.
Pre-created message templates
Your B2B lead nurturing process should include the sending of messages on a regular basis. More often than not, these messages will be of the email variety. Manually creating and sending these messages can cost your business a lot of time and effort, which is why an email marketing solution should be implemented that allows you to create a series of message templates that can be used to send to all your contacts at once!
Email software helps you create sophisticated emails with a bunch of different styling elements, from images to CTA buttons and social media. Stylized and aesthetically pleasing emails invite more engagement from recipients than regular, text-only emails.
Lead nurturing tip: Leverage personalization techniques to really make your emails stand out. Email software can help pull relevant information from contact profiles and insert it automatically into your email message templates to ensure your emails are targeted and even more engaging.
Automated workflow creation
Even if you have your email templates all set up and ready to be sent regularly as part of your B2B lead nurturing process, this still requires you having to remember to send them out on the right days at the optimal times. This is where automated workflow software comes into play. Workflow software lets you create your email templates and connect them to each other in a flow that includes delays to make sure you are not sending them too often.
You can even set up your workflow to include manual check-ins with your business contacts at certain points throughout the lead nurturing process. As your contacts progress through the email nurture campaign, perhaps at the halfway point you can include a “pause” element where your team will be automatically notified that they should reach out to these contacts manually before restarting the automated process. This helps to make sure that there is still that personal touch involved and your contacts feel valued.
Lead Nurturing Tip: Use different decision-based triggers to create branches in your automated workflow based on different actions your contacts have (or haven’t) taken. Send reminder messages to contacts who haven’t opened or interacted with a certain number of emails, or send loyalty rewards to your most highly engaged contacts.
Regular metrics review
What’s the point of a B2B lead nurturing campaign if you have no idea how well it is working?
By using various automation software to send your communications to your contacts, you can leverage the reporting tools that are included to view your total sends, your email open rates, as well as any unsubscribe information for each of the emails in your nurture campaign – all very important metrics that can be used to determine whether your campaign needs to be optimized or tweaked to achieve a higher performance.
Reviewing your metrics regularly can help ensure that you are constantly improving your email content and your engagement efforts with your leads and customers, which in turn will go a long way to building those coveted B2B relationships that will stand the test of time.
Lead Nurturing Tip: Web tracking tools provide even more insights on your lead engagement by showing you how leads interact with your emails and allowing you to track their journeys on your website. This helps you gather more vital information about their particular interests without you having to ask for that information.
Use an all-in-one B2B lead nurturing solution
All of these B2B lead nurturing best practices can go a long way to making your lead nurturing campaigns more efficient and more effective. However, you may be thinking that it will be a lot of work to implement every little thing that was mentioned, and to do so will require the purchase of multiple pieces of software.
Luckily, this is not the case at all! SimplyCast has built an automated lead nurturing solution that allows you to reduce the number of manual tasks in your current process using automation and strengthen your B2B relationships through regular, targeted, and automated messaging.
Would you like to learn more? Be sure to click the button below to request a demo from our knowledgeable team to see how your business can improve your lead nurturing processes and boost productivity today!
