7 effective lead nurturing activities you can set up in a day

Does the prospect of managing all your inbound leads leave a pit in your stomach? Does the idea of creating intricate and lengthy nurture journeys make you hang your head? It doesn’t have to be that way.

We don’t want you to miss out on the opportunities that inbound leads give you. So in this blog, we’re looking at seven effective lead nurturing activities that you can set up in just one day.

This article is based on one of our popular webinars. View the video and download the slides.

Why is lead nurturing important?

Inbound marketing is an efficient way to generate contacts. But just because someone fills in a form on a website, it doesn't mean they’re ready to buy.

Inbound marketing is about building relationships. It’s about taking that lead and nurturing it towards the buying phase. You want to deliver content that keeps you front-of-mind. This way, when a prospect is ready to buy, they buy from you.

But it takes a lot of touchpoints to move people into that buying phase.

Research from Rain Group shows that it takes an average of eight touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversation) with a new prospect. Also, keep in mind that not all meetings are guaranteed opportunities. The process is ongoing. And what you do following a meeting is just as important as the nurturing required in the build-up to it.

Anyway, enough on the challenges of lead nurturing. Let’s look at how you can win here and now.

7 quick-win lead nurturing techniques

1. Say hello on LinkedIn

How long does it take to drop a quick LinkedIn message saying hello? About two minutes, right? We find this is a friendly way to kick off a relationship with a new prospect. For bonus points, you can personalise your message. These two minutes could be the start of a wonderful business relationship.

If you’re lucky enough to be dealing with large volumes of inbound leads, automation platforms can come to the rescue. A CMS such as HubSpot Sales Pro can help you automate and trigger this action when a new lead drops in.

2. Drop into their inbox

You probably already have a basic email sequence that’s triggered when someone joins your newsletter or downloads some of your content. Where this becomes really powerful is when you build fleshed-out, multi-step email sequences.

We recommend using email templates and boilerplate drafts that are short, sweet and actionable. Give your emails a very clear call-to-action (CTA) to encourage next steps. Our only word of warning though — don’t jump the gun and rush into a sales pitch. Remember, this is about nurturing. Offer informative, relevant content to build trust with a prospect.

3. Send a postcard

When was the last time the postie brought you anything other than a bill or a heavy-handed marketing flyer? Wouldn’t it be nice to receive a thoughtful “hi” from someone instead?

A postcard can make you stand out here. There are various cost-effective platforms that let you design branded and personalised postcards in a matter of minutes. Ideally, handwritten postcards will make the biggest impact. But if you’re working at-scale, you can integrate direct mail with a platform such as PostGrid.com to streamline the process.

4. Be curious

People love to benchmark themselves. So, asking for interaction from your inbound audience is a fantastic way to encourage more engagement. We recommend some short surveys asking prospects about their needs, experiences, and pain-points. You can do this via LinkedIn or email.

Consider asking just a couple of valuable questions that genuinely enquire about the prospect. This should be something the prospect is readily willing to share. But also something that is actionable on your end and triggers a follow-up or a conversation.

Add an extra personal touch by thanking them for their time and sending them the results of the survey.

5. Share your insights with webinars

Webinars sit in the middle of the engagement funnel and strike a great balance between asking prospects about their problems and telling them directly about buying your solution. If you’re opening with questions and ending with answers, then middle funnel content (such as webinars) is the discussion that goes on in between.

Live webinar engagement is great, but there’s a whole audience out there who might have wanted to attend and couldn’t. After all, people often want to consume content in their own time.

A simple form on your master webinar landing page will allow sign-ups to have the content delivered directly to their inbox to consume whenever they want.

Repurposing content is also worth considering. We upload our own webinars to social media and share them in our newsletter. We even turn them into blogs (like this one) for a reading audience.

6. Spread your most valuable words

You put a lot of time into your blog. After all, it’s where you share your deepest industry insights. So reaching the widest audience is essential. To ensure prospects in your nurture sequence receive all of the content you have to deliver, sign them up for your blog newsletter.

This lets you continue to deliver content to prospects indefinitely. So if you’ve exhausted all of your other touchpoints, maybe your blog post can do the job further down the line.

This can be done with an automated RSS email that goes to your email list whenever you publish a blog. And you only have to set it up once.

7. Plant a forest

Environmental awareness is (and should be) a hot topic for all businesses looking to offset their carbon footprint. Organisations such as Ecologi.com allow you to provide a “bonus” for your prospects, For example - whenever someone signs up for your newsletter or fills in one of your forms, you can automatically have Ecologi plant a tree on their behalf.

At Articulate, we’ve planted over 10,000 trees from this initiative. Thanks to Ecologi’s API, the setup is fairly straightforward and painless.

Bonus tip: unleash your inner Spielberg

For the less camera-shy out there, all of the above can be linked with personalised videos. As well as (or instead of) an introductory written message, a short video can make you stand out. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy — just a 30-second recording on your phone will do.

This personalised touch is both different and achievable.

What next?

Have we whetted your appetite and filled your marketing brain with a plethora of fantastic lead-nurturing ideas? Excellent!

We’re all about inbound marketing here at Articulate. It’s the difference between ‘random acts of marketing’ and a well-engineered, data-driven, on-brand campaign. Our inbound strategy helps you build trusted relationships with potential clients. We create remarkable content that is too good to ignore.

Contact us to see how we can breathe new life into your inbound marketing strategy.