Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring Concepts

In the last section, we understood key lead generation stages and how marketers need to handle and develop each individual who might just be a casual visitor become a serious buyer. The process of this conversion involves two major elements which need to be understood in detail—lead nurturing and lead scoring.

Lead Nurturing

It involves the series of steps marketers need to execute as a well-defined program to continually reach out to and build relationships with targets and qualified leads, and influence them throughout the consumer decision journey till they become a customer. The concept also covers present clients, who can be truned into loyal customers and subsequently influencers facilitating cross-sell and up-sell of other related products and services.

The need for lead nurturing arises from the fact that post the ‘intent’ and ‘awareness’ stages in the funnel, there are a large number of potential targets who might be interested in the product or some of its key attributes, but do not yet have either a strong emotional connect or a benefit-based understanding of product features. The job of the marketer then is to think of specific steps which would help these targets develop a regular connect with the brand and its core attributes.

Elements of Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing as an exercise is based on the concepts of engagement or permission marketing, where the targets are not bombarded with irrelevant marketing messages, but communication is tailored specifically for different types of leads and shared in a relevant conversational manner with an implicit permission from the target to accept and act on it. Any lead-nurturing exercise should typically have the following elements built into them:

1. Be permission lead: Lead nurturing should be engagement lead wherein the brand at each stage has the requisite permission from the targets to follow them.
2. Include educational elements: Marketers should not only provide information but aim at educating their prospects on key brand attributes through novel educational aids.
3. Create moments of conversation: Rather than trying to impinge the lead with push messages, brands should try to create multiple moments of conversation with targets.
4. Follow a natural progression: There should be a logical flow to lead nurturing with each next message being in perfect natural progression of engagement as in real life.
5. Measure regularly: All marketing efforts should be measured regularly on pre-decided metrics with messaging, channels and nature of communication needing to be regularly revised with new inputs.
6. Multi-channel interactions: Marketers should not just look at a single channel for lead nurturing but develop a multi-channel interactions program.
7. Develop interactivity: All lead-nurturing activities should have an interactive element wherein leads have an opportunity to respond back where their views can be captured.

Types of Lead-Nurturing Campaigns

Different firms depending on their needs, resources, and nature of leads for their specific products, engage in multiple types of nurturing campaigns. Marketo defines the following types of lead-nurturing campaigns that firms can deploy:

1. Incoming lead-processing campaigns: It involves making the first touchpoint with the lead to create a positive impression in the mind of the individual towards the brand/product. It is important that marketers have a good understanding of the needs, intent, and present funnel stage of the various buckets of leads before developing introductory campaigns.
2. Stay-in-touch campaigns: These campaigns are typically developed to regularly connect with leads who are still not open to engaging with the brand. The idea here is to share interesting, engaging, and educational material about the product to build acquaintance and trust with the company. With these efforts, the brand aims to develop top-of-the-mind recall with the lead who would have the brand image built in his/her mind whenever he/she plans to buy a similar product in the coming times.
3. Accelerator campaigns: This next level of campaigns are designed for individuals who have shown a keen interest in the brand and would likely convert if pursued aggressively. It involves studying specific interactions which the prospect has with the brand and creating customized campaigns to address specific needs arising from those touch points.
4. Lead life cycle campaigns: These types of campaigns are built for leads who might not be interacting at all to multiple messages and would typically be termed as stagnant or lost leads. Campaigns here are built to make sure that leads are not completely inactive. The three important stages of lead life cycle campaigns include: Lead Handoff, Lead Recycling, and New Customers.
5. Buying stage campaigns: This includes campaigns which follow leads across their buying journey with targeted content developed to influence customers during each action of their buying process. These campaigns should ideally be mapped to key personas or lead buckets within the buying stages.
6. Interest-based campaigns: It involves developing campaigns that build on a specific interest which the customer has responded to and sharing content or executing activities similar in nature to their interaction. Typical examples include:
   • Prospects browsing specific content on the company’s blog
   • Responding to social media posts regularly
   • Downloading marketing material/attending webinars on specific areas of interest

With some interesting examples of nurturing campaigns shared earlier, it should also be reiterated that firms need to look at their specific lead clusters, understand their interactions and buying cycles, before selecting a mix of the above or other innovative nurturing techniques.

With an understanding of the key lead-nurturing techniques, let us look at the other important area for lead generation, which is lead scoring, and which involves qualifying the importance of a lead.

Lead Scoring

It is a method used to rank prospects to understand the importance and relevance of following up with each lead in relation to the firm’s investment. With the help of lead scoring, marketers are able to bucket their leads to invest time and effort in order of priority.

Advantages of Lead Scoring According to a survey by CMSwire (one of the popular web magazines on customer experience management and digital marketing), typical benefits gained by a website from their lead-scoring implementation includes:

• Measurable RoI on lead generation program
• Increased conversion rates from qualified lead to opportunity
• Increased sales productivity and effectiveness
• Shortened sales cycle
• Better forecast and pipeline visibility
• Better alignment of marketing and sales efforts

Lead Scoring Execution Following Marketo’s methodology, there are three aspects to a lead scoring exercise, as defined by them:

1. Lead fit: Firms should first see whether a particular lead fits in their description of who they would want to nurture. It involves looking at information shared through an online form/registration process and also gathering other demographic, psychographic, behavorial information on the lead. Scoring should also be done for negative demographic fit to exclude entries that are not authentic or worth following.
2. Lead interest: The next step, which is also known as implicit lead scoring, involves measuring the level of interest the prospect has in the firm’s product or service. This can be gauged by analyzing the lead’s interactions with the firm/brand across various touchpoints to understand lead buckets in more depth.
3. Lead recycling: Post lead-nurturing efforts, some of the leads might not be ready for the purchase stage and need to be sent back to the lead-nurturing cycle, which is also known as lead recycling. With additional information collected on the lead through previous interactions, marketers can activate a very specific lead generation program, knowing the key areas which the lead might respond to positively in future.

With an understanding of input-based lead-nurturing and lead-scoring techniques, let us now look at the outcome of digital marketing operations which is about conversions at each stage of the funnel. This would begin with looking at how conversion as a concept has evolved and is moving from websites to landing pages to the most recent marketing apps.