Nurturing leads is one of the most essential elements of an inbound marketing campaign, even though it requires numerous steps to make it thorough. You can’t expect to nurture a prospect in a flash, and certainly not all by yourself. While it’s possible to do some tasks on your own, you could make mistakes if you attempt to take on a nurture campaign solely.
Lead nurturing with marketing automation is the answer to this problem so you don’t end up losing prospects because of errors or slipshod content.
Using automation, you’ll be able to nurture prospects at just the right times with the right content and using the right steps. Without any B.S., here’s a guide to your first nurture campaign in five specific steps.
1. Questions Prospects Ask Your Sales Staff
If you’re going to properly target specific leads, you need to know how to answer their most pertinent questions. Plus, this works in reverse, requiring questions your sales staff should ask your prospects.
First, you need to create personas of your prospects and see what kind of products they want. The deeper you dig into their personality traits, the better the answers you can form for questions they’ll likely ask.
To ask better sales questions, you’ll want to ask for permissions, start with broad questions, then build on previous responses. Also, keeping questions simple is imperative to avoid confusion.
Automation programs can help generate these questions for you in different content forms.
2. Writing Simple, Short Emails With Answers
Thanks to automation, you can send marketing emails at times when you know prospects are going to read them. Since you’re sending emails to different time zones and countries, you have to automate to assure prospects don’t ignore what you send.
As your second step in nurturing prospects, you’ll want to write short and simple answers to the questions you know they want answered. This might include short videos demonstrating what your products do, or an infographic providing educative information.
The New York Times proved several years ago how effective answering customer questions is in any marketing process.
3. Making a List of Quality Content You Have Now
What kind of content do you have available now you can use in your emails or website? A first-time nurture campaign is going to mean finding content you know your prospects prefer. Again, creating personas can help you scope out what kind of content they like, whether it’s video or just ebooks.
Using automation, you can post this content on different channels, including social media. Some automation tools even help generate content, though it’s better to create it yourself than lean heavily on a program.
Media like videos do well to generate interest. However, it’s important to create videos that fall in line with where the prospect is in their buying journey.
4. Short Simple Emails Featuring Different Content
Once again, simple emails always do best to convey a message. What’s most important is to choose the most appropriate media in each email so it logically fits the theme.
Language plays a major part here in enticing someone to keep reading. Using terms like “Are you struggling with this problem?” can lead them to read on or watch your content for an answer. As long as you convincingly prove you can answer the prospect’s pain points, you’ll keep the lead interested to the end and perhaps convert them.
5. Keeping Your Emails Ongoing
You’ll find automation particularly useful when you want to continue your 
email campaign over a period of time. Drip campaigns are always a good plan, and Kissmetrics points out all email workflows bring 20% more sales opportunities.
Keeping your prospects interested in other email content means further sales from them, or another sales opportunity if they didn’t convert before.
Don’t forget to do follow-up sales calls as well, something possible through automation tools. Plus, by using automation in your CRM, your sales team knows when leads click on your emails for clarity in your marketing metrics.
Visit us at SalesNexus.com so we can help you with marketing automation through your next lead nurture campaign.