What is Lead Nurturing and How Does it Relate to Inbound Marketing?

What is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is a dialogue with potential customers, at any point in the sales funnel, that provides them with relevant and consistent information. The goal of lead nurturing is to take a lead and convert them to a customer. To put lead nurturing into context:

Internet search→ landing page → submitting a form→ lead generation→ lead nurturing→ sales

Lead nurturing is the process by which you take a lead from information submitted on a form to a customer.  The first step in this process is understand who your customers are. Lead nurturing requires a personal touch, and to do that effectively you need to know who you are reaching out to. Having a clear picture of your customers is important for many reasons, but when it comes to lead nurturing it is crucial. If you are marketing to teenagers your lead nurturing emails and offers would be, at the least, worded very differently than if you were marketing to small business owners.

Once you have a customer profile and have had a lead fill out one of your forms, the lead nurturing process can begin. The next step is often an automated email generated when a form is completed. This automatic email should give specific follow up information to the reader. For example, you would say "Thank you for filling out our form. Please follow the link below to read the report and take a moment to read our blog post on the topic." rather than the vague, "Thank you" with a link underneath it. Your lead knows exactly what steps to take and you are offering them more content that is relevant to them.

Once you have reached this point you can do a number of things. You can use the information on the form to begin a phone conversation with the lead. You could also use the information to generate a series of emails with relevant content or offers to draw them deeper into your sales funnel. At the very least  you should be using your forms to build a lead nurturing library. Your library of leads is where you will compile information about leads and use it to target leads with white papers, research reports, blog posts, offers, newsletters, or other content.