Our Senior Marketing Manager, Danielle, shares her take on the most overlooked stage of the marketing funnel, and why fixing it could be the easiest win in your marketing.
Most business owners and marketers pour their energy into the top of the funnel, chasing new leads, running ads, and growing the list. But that’s often where the effort stops. The real opportunity, and the one most businesses neglect to take, is nurturing those leads once you’ve got them. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Forrester) and once you have a lead nurturing system in place, it keeps working in the background.
The Three Stages of the Funnel:
TOFU (Top of Funnel) – the Awareness stage.
At this stage in the journey we’re targeting a larger audience to gain awareness and generate engagement.
MOFU (Middle of Funnel) – the Consideration stage.
Your leads or engaged audience are now actively considering their options, taking further steps to find out more information if necessary and checking out the competition too.
BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) – the Decision stage.
Those that have gone through the consideration stage are now ready to make a decision, whether that’s purchasing a product, booking an appointment, or sending an email to enquire.
In this post, we’re focusing on MOFU as the key stage of nurturing your leads obtained at TOFU.
How to nurture your leads
Both B2C and B2B businesses benefit from nurturing leads and it can look different for every business. We’ll focus on one of the most effective and accessible tools available: email marketing.
Email automation
Nearly every company collects email addresses from potential customers, and unfortunately many companies aren’t putting it to use. Email marketing and automation works across various industries and can easily be tailored to your product or service. Here are some of the most effective approaches:
Welcome Emails
A welcome or onboarding series sets the tone for your brand and starts the relationship between business and customer. Some companies use a welcome discount to help encourage a sale or service booking. Your business might prefer to give a background on their company to help lay the foundations of their brand.
Educational Drip
Rather than bombarding email subscribers with lengthy emails, break down informative pieces to digestible regular updates that drip feed your audience with genuinely useful insights. By providing reliable advice you’ll position yourself as an expert in your field and build a positive reputation with your audience.
Re-engagement for Cold Leads
It’s not unusual for leads to turn cold, but if you’re serious about converting leads you can’t afford to let them stay cold. A good email marketing platform will allow you to select those who haven’t engaged in recent emails, or if you’ve connected it to your CRM, even those who haven’t purchased or used your service in a while. Re-engagement emails can offer a fresh incentive, ask for feedback, or simply remind cold leads why they signed up in the first place.
Connect to Your CRM
A common mistake is running your email marketing and CRM as separate silos. By combining their data it unlocks far more options for personalisation and segmentation and depending on your CRM or email marketing platform depends on what data you’ll have access to. The more data you have access to, the stronger your targeting and messaging can be.
Personalisation is Key
Blanket email marketing is the most simple approach in marketing, and where most businesses start. One message for their entire audience means they’re getting out their message but they may not be getting the most out of their audience. Personalisation, and segmentation is key.
Do you have a group of subscribers that open your emails without fail? Recognise their loyalty with a reward or increase your email frequency, because you know they’ll open it. How about a group of customers who purchased a specific product? They’d probably be interested to hear about the latest version, or complementary products.
By personalising your approach it makes your email communications much more relevant and therefore far more enjoyable and engaging for your customers. You can often find data built into your email marketing platform, or as recommended, you can integrate your CRM for additional customer data.
Your Step-by-Step Plan for Lead Nurturing
- Audit your current lead capture – where do leads go once you’ve collected their information?
- Review your lead data and define key audiences you want to nurture
- Connect and optimise your CRM and email marketing platforms.
- Setup automations, layered with personalisation and measure results.
Our work
We work with a variety of clients in many diverse sectors, managing and carrying out their marketing strategies. Take a look at some examples of our work.
Get started
Ready to start nurturing your leads? Book a free 30-minute consultation with one of our marketing experts to discuss your needs.
