B2B industries want long-term relationships, yet they fail to move their buyers to action. Impatience? Yes. And an underinvestment in the necessary tools.
“People are moved to action by how a speaker makes them feel.”
HBR, The Art of Persuasion Hasn’t Changed in 2,000 Years.
Whether one’s selling a service or putting forth their point of view, influencing others has become a business imperative. And it’s become rooted in our daily lives.
Beneath the mechanical blocks of the B2B marketing processes, marketers are talking to people – those with their ambitions and fears. So, what moves them a step ahead isn’t just logic, it’s resonance – what they feel.
Lead nurturing is a significant driver for this.
The sales cycle can be looked at as an emotional arc. At every touchpoint, brands must build familiarity and reduce friction through emotional appeal. This is why across B2B buying, every marketing and sales role involves convincing prospects to take a desired action – one that’ll push them closer to the purchase.
But the modern buyer is skeptical and ridden with hesitation. This stems from years of unmet promises and recycled messages.
It’s one of the crucial reasons personalization has become paramount. The prospective buyer needs to believe in the brand – you’ll back your words with action. And if a brand fails to do this, it loses credibility and weakens the proposal.
So, for a buyer to actually consider purchasing your solutions, you need to keep this modular framework in mind:
- Illustrate credibility: Why should the customers trust you?
- Deliver a logic (data and evidence): Why should your audience care about your marketing messages?
- Leverage the art of storytelling: Move prospects through emotions.
- Turn the intangible value into tangible benefits: How will your solutions help the brand?
- Start with your strongest point: What does your brand do differently?
In marketing and sales, remember that less is always more. In this economy of snackable content, attention slackens almost everywhere but at the beginning. So, your teams have minimal time to grab the prospect’s attention and consequently, transform their perspective.
As much as marketing is about persuading prospects to buy, it’s also about changing their perception of your brand. Once the lead is captured, these processes follow until the final conversion.
But there’s one nurturing mistake even modern marketers continue to make: Not analyzing prospect behavior across multiple touchpoints. Most leads are tech-savvy and intelligent, so they conduct their research and study solutions across several online platforms.
Although a rampant disjuncture, savvy marketing teams are determined to learn and innovate. So, they’ve embraced one solution – lead-nurturing tools.
What are Lead Nurturing Tools?
These tools help marketers guide leads along the buyer’s journey and convert them into active buyers. While this is something lead nurturing actually tackles, software solutions focus on the intricacies.
Most often, there’s a vital lack of a lead-nurturing strategy. How does the nitty-gritty work efficiently without a strategic implementation plan?
So, lead-nurturing tools instill a framework around free-floating ideas. While the original ideas around nurturing leads are retained, the tools help marketing teams curate a strategy. There has to be an in-and-out map for building and maintaining client relationships for a long, consistent period.
What is implementation without a strategy? A failed attempt.
So, lead-nurturing software helps. They monitor leads, examine their behavior, and cultivate a relationship with leads, functioning irrespective of where the leads are in the funnel. This allows leads to move through the buying journey at their own pace, while SDRs work on trimming unnecessary steps in the sales cycle.
This only becomes successful through underlying instruments to drive marketing and sales, lead-nurturing tools, and strategies.
Necessary Features of Lead-Nurturing Tools for Informed Consideration
While there are particular trends that even marketers aren’t exempt from, investing in these tools should prove valuable for your business.
Given the significance of this step, the software you adopt has to entail features that enhance and support your strategies. Remember, not everything works or is one-size-fits-all.
1. Email Marketing Automation
For creating drip campaigns that send emails (targeted content) to leads based on where they are in the funnel. Then, depending on their engagement (response), moves them up or down a stage.
The emails are sent periodically to retain lead interest. Like, when someone subscribes to your newsletter, marketing automation tools ensure they receive a welcome email on time.
This elevates engagement with existing customers and establishes brand awareness for new visitors in the long run.
2. Lead segmentation
Segmenting your contact list based on particular factors affords a structure to your strategies. When the accounts are segregated based on their interests, preferences, pain points, demographics, etc., it’s easier to engage with them.
This simplifies the process for your marketing team – tailoring and delivering content becomes straightforward. A commonplace marketing principle is underscoring how to send the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Your ICP wants content that resonates with, not recycled messages that seem like a template.
3. Lead scoring
Assigning scores has become an efficient way to qualify leads. This process gauges their purchasing intent and spotlights the relevant ones.
However, lead scoring has become too static. Businesses adopt scoring systems that don’t fit their requirement or overall working model. If scoring is done right, it can bring several benefits to your sales teams.
If your SDRs are aware of which leads should be prioritized, they can appropriately streamline their nurturing and communication tactics. Colder leads may require more persuasion, while hot ones may need resources that push them to the final stage.
So, lead scoring facilitates more personalized interaction between your team and potential buyers.
4. Behavior tracking
The modern buyer spends the majority of their time researching potential solutions to their pain points.
Think of the B2B buying committee. You cannot factor in the engagement patterns of just one decision-maker in the group. It signifies nothing. So, with the evolving consumer behavior, it’s become necessary to track the behavior of the entire committee, especially across multiple touchpoints.
The collected data from multiple touchpoints offers a more accurate idea of the lead’s intent level. This helps develop a basis for your strategies and highlights the most effective communication channels.
5. Integration with CRM
Lead-nurturing tools don’t function in isolated environments. To gauge its maximum potential, the software is integrated with CRM systems.
Lead-nurturing tools that allow seamless integration also facilitate more space for your business’s expansion. It works in synergy with existing infrastructure (not replacing it), improving lead management.
So, before executing the tool, ensure it has agile integration capabilities and can work in synergy with existing marketing and sales platforms. If correctly done, it can streamline and magnify lead data to better align marketing and sales.
6. Campaign performance
An effective lead-nurturing tool should offer a comprehensive set of functions around leads.
There are multiple channels and leads with different intent levels – how will you know what works and what doesn’t? With campaign management features in your lead-nurturing software, you can outline this.
Lead-nurturing tools offer a comprehensive view of your campaigns, helping you monitor and track them.
The nurtured leads must move through the funnel – either they drop off, move ahead, or stay stuck. This spotlights the communication strategies and channels that are actually working for you and that aren’t. The campaign’s performance analysis also affords you an answer – whether this tool is working for you.
Top 5 Lead-Nurturing Tools for Any Business
Each business has distinct working models and objectives. Following the trend will get you nowhere, but with the right software, you can reach the stars – leads nurtured to become active customers.
But how do marketers gauge which ones are the best in the market, and do they actually work?
This depends on your brand and its requirements.
But according to us, there are 5 lead-nurturing tools that have proved their worth across the marketplace, and irrespective of your nuances, can deliver optimal results for you.
1. HubSpot
Pricing: Free for up to 5 users. Paid subscription begins at $15 for every user/month and is billed annually.
Source: HubSpot Blog
HubSpot’s lead-nurturing software solution has one crucial edge: cross-departmental alignment.
To an extent, sales, marketing, and customer service indeed rely on each other. And HubSpot’s tool makes it possible to streamline this practice. It allows the teams to collate customer data and curate hyper-personalized and targeted experiences.
It helps teams focus on what actually matters by automating routine tasks and saving email templates for the future. The platform entails autoresponders, offers personalized email sequences, and holds robust integration capabilities.
Through this, you can track the campaign’s effectiveness and monitor the conversion rates.
Moreover, one of HubSpot’s top features is its intuitive interface. So, it can be seamlessly adopted across sales, marketing, and customer service, simplifying customer management.
2. Brevo
Pricing: $9 per month.
Source: Brevo
Brevo, an email marketing and CRM solution, is adept at running and managing multichannel campaigns. It allows marketers to automate emails to deliver them to the right audience at the right time.
Teams can streamline and manage SMS, email, and transactional messaging with a single account. The organization’s platform efficiently handles automation, lead segmentation, and third-party app integration.
Brevo’s lead-nurturing platform allows 24*7 connection with prospective customers – track, automate, and schedule meetings.
The platform also facilitates seamless lead management, offering a comprehensive view into marketing and sales interactions with potential customers. This decreases the need for additional apps, allowing you to engage prospects in real-time.
3. Pipedrive
Pricing: $14 per user/month
Source: Pipedrive
Pipedrive’s automation platform has one objective: to help sales close more sales. It entails customizable sales pipelines and real-time insights into ongoing deals.
The platform helps marketing and sales streamline and visualize leads’ progression through the pipeline. This way, it’s easier to track leads and optimize workflows, ensuring each lead is given the appropriate priority.
Additionally, it allows SDRs to refine their nurturing strategies through its unique and intuitive reporting features – lead segmentation and activity reminders. The intelligence interface with drag-and-drop options makes organizing and updating deal status straightforward.
Different departments can sync their data through robust integration and enhance their productivity.
The best feature? Pipedrive’s app integration works across all funnel stages. For example, once the deal is won, sales can use the tool to curate an engaging email instantly and send it off as a follow-up.
4. Omnisend
Pricing: $16 per month
Source: Omnisend
Omnisend‘s marketing platforms are popular for their minimalistic interface. It’s built for experts and beginners alike with easy-to-use features that require no learning curve.
Its lead-nurturing platform allows marketers to create aesthetically pleasing and compelling marketing campaigns and personalize the message. The tool hosts all the required features to nurture relationships with potential clients – track engagement, timely follow-ups, advanced segmentation, and automated workflows.
Omnisend has a partner program in place that allows freelancers and marketing agencies to close more deals and enhance their retention rate. It doesn’t require much focus and enables sales to automate most of their tasks, from post-sales follow-ups to reactivation emails.
Additionally, it aids in developing email newsletters by leveraging a drag-and-drop email builder, ready-made templates, and a built-in email list cleaner feature.
Omnisend is a simple choice for lead nurturing. Its best feature? In-depth analytics with heat maps and intelligent segmentation.
5. EngageBay CRM
Pricing: $13.49 to $89.99 per user/month
Source: EngageBay CRM
EngageBay CRM is a comprehensive marketing, sales, and customer support software solution. It integrates email automation, lead generation, CRM, and social media engagement.
This platform allows users to acquire, nurture, and close potential clients through:
- Automating the distribution of email newsletters
- Maintaining client relationships through the in-built CRM system
- Design, execute, and manage marketing campaigns
- Comprehensive customer segmentation for hyper-focused targeting
- Creating custom web forms and landing pages for client websites
- Maintain contact lists and store engagement history
- Offer visibility into the pipeline and track leads
EngageBay allows marketing and sales to manage relationships and guide them seamlessly through the pipeline – all of this through a single platform.
The marketing tool considers your brand’s requirements and extracts meaningful insights from each client communication. This helps businesses seamlessly convert website visitors into active buyers.
Lead Nurturing Tools Add an Edge to Your Communication Efforts
Nurturing leads is a crucial but easily ignored component of the conversion process. Most marketers who struggle with increasing their conversion rates often skip this step or don’t offer it much significance.
It’s an error that could cost them a punch.
Not gauging the full potential of lead-nurturing strategies can be detrimental to your marketing efforts. So, if you haven’t climbed aboard yet, it’s time.
Lead-nurturing tools offer the right channel to hook your potential customers and communicate your brand’s value. It’s a true marketing treasure trove, allowing you to keep the leads engaged until they are persuaded enough.
These software solutions aren’t merely a way to streamline your nurturing processes, but an instrument to deepen customer relationships. What actually matters is – a value-driven connection with buyers, keeping your pipeline hot, and brand growth consistent.
