Lead nurturing must-have customer journeys

The modern customer is in complete control and no longer wants to be “sold” to, especially in today’s digital age. Instead, they want to take their time to evaluate their situation, find solutions to their problem, and compare alternatives before they even make their first contact with your business. For this reason, 73% of your leads are not quite ready to buy when they first hand over their contact details to your business (Marketing Sherpa).

What many businesses tend to do to nudge these leads to a purchase is to employ aggressive sales tactics. Unfortunately, they do nothing except to turn leads these off; as a result, they’re less likely to want to do business with you. Instead, your business must identify ways to nurture those leads until they’re ready to buy. This process is known as lead nurturing.

Why your business needs a lead nurturing strategy

79% of leads never convert to sales — and this is due to the absence of a lead nurturing strategy in the business (Marketing Sherpa). Lead nurturing helps you build a relationship with potential customers and accelerate their buying journey. By educating and informing your customer, you’re creating trust and developing a relationship with them — and as a result, you’re more likely to move them from the top of the buyer’s funnel (when they’re not quite ready to buy) to the bottom of the funnel. By staying in touch regularly, you ensure that your brand comes to mind when they’re ready to buy.

A lead nurturing strategy will also enable your business to be present on the channels where your customers are present, allowing you to better engage with them and increase their chances of starting a relationship with your business.

If your business doesn’t have a lead nurturing strategy, your competitors probably do — and you will lose sales and market share to them. Don’t risk being left behind; it’s time to get your lead nurturing strategy up and running. To help you get started, we’ve compiled our top 3 lead nurturing must-have customer journeys for you to use today.

Despite social media’s status as the darling in every marketer’s toolkit, email marketing is still one of the best ways to communicate with your leads. In addition to being the most direct way to get specific content to a lead, email marketing has an ROI of 4,300% (Direct Marketing Association)!

Furthermore, it’s extremely difficult to assess audience engagement on social media, let alone find leads to nurture. In comparison, Autopilot allows you to not only create lead nurturing email newsletter journeys to drive meaningful conversations with your audience, it also tracks every single instance of engagement your leads have with your emails including opens and click-through rates. By using Autopilot to uncover your most engaged leads, you will then be able to focus your lead nurturing efforts on them — and be ready to move them down the funnel.

In our lead nurturing newsletter journey below, new subscribers are sent a friendly welcome email as well as a newsletter every 10 days. Highly engaged leads are identified as those who click on all 4 of the emails in this journey. These leads are automatically qualified and routed to sales via Pipedrive for follow-up. By this stage of the journey, your leads would have the chance to learn more about your business so they’ll be more ready to take action when they get the sales follow-up.

To see this journey in action, watch the video below.

2. Customer onboarding journey

Customer onboarding is a process your customers go through when they either subscribe to or purchase your product or service. The onboarding process is crucial because it defines your relationship with your new customer. A well-designed onboarding journey is likely to delight and retain your customers, making them less likely to hit the “cancel” or “refund” button. However, if your customer doesn’t believe they are getting real value with your product, they’ll simply leave and move onto the next thing.

Creating a contextual, helpful, and personal customer onboarding experience is one of the best ways you can set your customers up for success. A typical customer onboarding journey typically begins with a warm welcome email to help your customers take steps in that direction. From then on, a series of emails are sent, teaching them how to solve their problem by using your solution. A drip email campaign explaining product features, use cases, and other educational content can help your customers become more comfortable in using your product in its entirety.

Our customer onboarding journey below shows you how you can set it up. For those customers whose MRR meet a certain threshold, a personal check-up call by one of our team is scheduled via Pipedrive.

To see this journey in action, watch the video below.

3. SMS lead nurturing journey

Lead nurturing isn’t just restricted to emails. With an estimated 23 billion text messages being sent worldwide in 2019 (SMSeagle), it’s no wonder why text messaging is seen as a big deal in the marketing world. What does this mean for lead nurturing strategies? That you shouldn’t shy away from using SMS as part of your lead nurturing strategy if your leads prefer to communicate with you via text SMS — after all, the success of a lead nurturing strategy relies on your business reaching your customers using their preferred channel.

If you’re planning to nurture leads using SMS, here are some tips to ensure it’s properly done:

Keep it short and sweet: an SMS is not a newsletter, or even a two-paragraph email. Thus, your SMS needs to be brief and to the point. You want to acknowledge your lead without overwhelming them.
Ask for permission: just like your email newsletters, your text messages should be something your leads subscribe to.
Stay on top of mind: due to the immediate and frequent nature of SMS communications, they can be sent more frequently than emails. As a business, you will need to decide what and how much is the right amount of interaction.

The following Autopilot journey shows you how an SMS lead nurturing journey can drive positive customer behavior. When a customer texts ‘hello’ to a specific number, this simple action serves as an opt-in and triggers the journey, where they are sent follow-up SMS messages asking them a series of questions. Those that respond are automatically qualified (after all, they’re interested enough to engage via SMS) and routed through Pipedrive for further follow-up. These qualified leads are also sent an email, inviting them to sign up for a product trial or to register for an interactive live demo — or both!

To see this journey in action, watch the video below.

Want to see more lead nurturing customer journeys?

Simply visit our template library to browse our extensive collection of free lead nurturing customer journey templates here. Whether you want to learn how to nurture a first-time customer who has booked a class or event with you or tackle a 90-day lead nurture real estate journey, our lead nurturing customer journey templates can be used as they are or easily modified to suit your goals.