Before we dive into the details of building a lead nurturing program, let's take a look at why you should embark on this marketing strategy. After all, having a plan will only increase your chances of success. A survey by Ascend2 found that 53% of marketers believe that increasing lead-to-customer conversions is a top challenge they face. Improved personalization of marketing efforts is not far behind at 44%. These prospecting conversions, along with the many smaller conversions throughout the buyer's journey, usually don't happen on their own, no matter how good your marketing message or branding is. Often, they need your help to get a prospect to build a relationship, earn your trust, and realize value before becoming a customer. A marketing automation platform helps to better understand the behavior of prospects as well as existing customers. Lead nurturing leverages this intelligence to deliver targeted marketing messages and content at the right time to impress and delight — and move people down the sales funnel. It is a noble but achievable goal. Here are some tips on how to successfully develop and execute your own lead nurturing program:Benefits of lead nurturing Simply getting someone to convert on a marketing activity is not enough to propel a prospect to sale. Sure, a new lead is a small win, but the big prize is a new customer. Lead nurturing helps move leads down the funnel to a sale, because sometimes that journey needs a little nudge. The benefits of good lead nurturing include. Automated follow-up: By setting lead nurturing capabilities in your marketing software to Employee Email Database initiate specific campaigns and emails based on lead actions, you can drive people down the path. funnel with much less work, then hand them over to sales at the right time. Immediate engagement: upon receipt of an email, contact form, phone call, text message or response on social networks from a prospect, lead nurturing allows you to respond immediately, establishing a connection when your new prospect has you in mind. Lead Analysis: Automated lead nurturing tracks every interaction, touchpoint and decision a lead makes - and tracks even when leads aren't interacting. The resulting data informs strategy with individual leads as well as overall campaign tactics. Expertise: Prospects who see the thought leadership you demonstrate in blog and eBook content are increasingly impressed, especially when you send these resources out at the right time. Perhaps the biggest benefit of a lead nurturing program is its effect on the bottom line. Converting more leads translates to more sales; delighting more customers drives them to buy from you. Using automated lead nurturing to achieve both of these results results in increased ROI: you consume fewer resources to reach and convert more people. Moreover, this success gets worse over time. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure the effectiveness of lead nurturing and provide precise insight into which channels are most effective in attracting leads that turn into customers - and what you're doing along the way to move them forward in the funnel. Some of these important KPIs include: Visitor-to-lead conversion rate MQL to SQL rate Click-through rate Churn rate Landing page conversion rate Returning customers Setting goals Lead nurturing is not a random marketing activity – you shouldn't not send emails just for the fun of sending them. Realistic and specific goals should inhabit your lead development program so that every campaign developed has a goal, every email sent represents the natural progression of how the lead interacts with your channels, and every action can be tracked and measured. . You've probably heard of the acronym SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely goals. While these five adjectives are all important, perhaps the specific matters most to lead nurturing. As each development activity is geared towards the next conversion, you need to determine how many of each you need to eventually produce your sales target. Consider these hypothetical, connected goals: You want a campa