Today, customers interact with products and services via multiple channels, and keeping track of their customer journeys is essential to provide them with personalized customer experiences. In today’s customer-driven market, where customers are willing to pay more for personalized CX, keeping them gripped to your company can happen only if you’re ready to go the extra mile.

Deriving valuable insights from customer journeys across multiple channels to provide an in-depth, single customer view can help companies deliver an enhanced customer experience. This, in turn, can aid them in coming up with effective lead nurturing strategies to keep the customer interested.

How Important are Customer Journeys in Lead Nurturing?

What happens when you’ve got a customer interested in your product or service? Is he now contemplating purchasing while doing his research in the background? How can you enhance the customer experience for this qualified lead to catalyze the purchase process?

Lead nurturing is the answer to all the above questions. Coupled with relevant data derived from customer journey insights, companies can now enhance their customer experiences for a smoother purchase experience.

Per a Salesforce study, “67% percent of marketing leaders say that creating a connected customer journey across all touchpoints and channels is critical to the success of their overall marketing strategy. But only 23% of marketers are “extremely satisfied” with their ability to leverage customer data to create more relevant experiences.”

This means that building a single customer view using essential insights derived from diving into omnichannel customer journeys can give companies leverage over their competitors. While many B2B companies today have already realized this, others are still adding it to their to-do list.

Drawing insights from the customer journey comes from closely studying customer behavior. This helps in implementing effective content and marketing strategies to nurture and qualify your leads seamlessly. This helps sales reps convert high-quality B2B leads from the top of the sales funnel, increasing ROI.

3 Types of Customer Journeys That Help in Lead Nurturing

Did you know that 73% of your customers aren’t ready to buy when they’re handing out their contact details? Today’s tech-friendly customers don’t want to be just ‘sold’ to but instead weigh all their options before making the final call. They like to take their own sweet time to research and come across all alternatives before purchasing.

As they interact with your products and services via multiple channels, you must have a smooth and free-flowing content and marketing strategy to keep them engaged. Here are three customer journeys that can provide relevant customer data to keep your lead nurturing strategy on top -

B2B lead nurturing using emails and newsletters

As most B2B companies implement their strategies to focus on customer engagement through social media, gathering in-depth customer intent data can be very difficult. On the other hand, tracking click-through rates and opening rates via email marketing is easy and economical for companies.

Sending out newsletters and reminders through emails can help you judge if the customer is interested and build engagement coupled with high-quality content. It helps you assess the customer’s intent and move them through different sales funnel stages using personalized customer experience enhancement strategies.

B2B lead nurturing using customer onboarding insights

Customer onboarding essentially refers to the process that the customer goes through after subscribing or purchasing your product. A well-designed, engaging onboarding process can decrease the chances of your customers hitting the “cancel” or “refund” button.

Start the customer’s onboarding process with a warm welcome mail to increase engagement. With that being the first step towards the method, mails taking the problem-solving approach can be an effective lead nurturing strategy. For instance, give your customers solutions to the problems they might face in the emails you send out. This keeps them interested in your product/service and makes the onboarding process more personal.

Strategies like drip email campaigns explaining product features, use cases, and other educational content can help you speed up the purchase process by clarifying product usage.

B2B lead nurturing using SMS

With approximately 23 billion text messages being sent worldwide in 2019 (SMSeagle), B2B companies today must not restrict their lead nurturing strategies to just emails and social media. Today’s technology-friendly customers must be given an option to choose from their channel choice while interacting with your company. Personal messaging customers is a much easier and faster way of communication; hence, companies must adopt new lead nurturing and management strategies for effective conversion rates. In fact, many B2B companies today use business accounts on applications such as WhatsApp to cross promote their products and send out product demos for faster responses!

To succeed in the SMS marketing space, B2B marketers must keep in mind to: generate short and crisp message content, interact the right amount and ask for permission before signing the customer up. For instance, once a customer texts back saying “hello” to your message, he can be sent product descriptions and more information once he’s subscribed to your company.

Let Numbers Talk

Today’s sales cycles have become significantly longer, and implementing the right lead nurturing strategies is the only way to keep customers interested in your product/service. With such a rapid increase in competition, companies today are losing customers to their competitors if they fail to keep them engaged.

Customers are looking for a personalized digital experience across all platforms, and a failure to deliver this can cost companies a lot of money. To keep up with the rapidly changing needs of the customers, a single view of the customer journey is vital for companies to develop effective strategies.

From lead generation to conversion, B2B companies must keep the customers engaged at all levels of the sales cycle. For this, B2B companies today must turn to market automation to boost their lead nurturing tactics. Here are a few reasons why companies are rapidly adopting effective lead nurturing strategies -

• Lead nurturing helps in effective lead conversion. Numbers show that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Marketo).
• Lead nurturing motivate larger purchases. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group).
• Lead nurturing motivates customers to buy. Seventy-nine percent of marketing leads never convert to sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause for poor performance (Marketing Sherpa).

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Gaurav Rehani Head, CRM | Altudo

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