Today’s buyers are more empowered than ever before. Contrary to the passive role played by the buyers of yesteryears, buyers today play an active role in the buying process, completing two-thirds of their buying journey before interacting with a sales prospect.

Lead nurturing enables you to create relationships with your prospects throughout their journey and helps you to build trust with them.

It is important to realize that not every prospect of yours would be at the same stage of the buying process. Additionally, not every customer engages with you at the same stage. Hence, it becomes imperative to break the buying journey into different parts and plan separate lead nurturing campaigns for each.

Here are some of the types of lead nurturing campaigns which you can plan for your prospects:

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Welcome campaign

Welcome campaigns are used when new prospects interact with your business for the first time by downloading your content or engaging with your online campaigns. Since these prospects have just started to interact with your business, they should be treated differently than the ones that have been with you for weeks or months.

You should start providing them with light educational content to build awareness and engagement with them. Over them, as the interaction with your content increases, you should introduce your prospects to your company, product, or service.

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Re-engagement campaign

Welcome campaigns are used in scenarios when your leads have become inactive at some point during the sales process. This enables you to maximize the number of opportunities from your existing leads. The goal should be to re-engage with your leads until they become sales-ready.

Since these leads have already interacted with your company, they need much more personalized attention. Hence, your emails to these leads should seem personal and re-engaging.

You should try sending a new whitepaper, a successful case study, or a helpful blog post to these prospects to re-engage them and re-enter them in the conversion process.

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Product-focused campaign

Product-focused campaigns are used when your prospects have crossed the initial stage of the buying process and are now seeking product-focused content to identify which product can address their pain points.

Here, you should focus on your prospects’ pain points and how the key features and benefits of your product/service can enable you to address those pain points. For this, you should use case studies, customer testimonials, data sheets, free trials, and long-form content like webinars, whitepapers, and eBooks.

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Industry expertise campaign

As your prospects move closer to the decision stage, it becomes necessary to reinforce that your company is the right choice. At this stage, they are looking for trust factors to make the right decision.

Hence, at this stage, you should send case studies, customer testimonials, industry reports, certifications, etc., to your prospects to build trust and credibility with them.

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Post-sale campaign

Once your prospect engages in a transaction with you, you have developed that sense of trust and credibility with them. However, you must continuously engage with them to reinforce that credibility and find cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

For this, you should continuously send them helpful blog posts, new research, company updates, thought leadership content, etc.

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Conclusion

As we have seen, lead nurturing helps you to build relationships with your prospects at all stages of their buying process. The old batch and blast email model is in the distant past – you should look for ways to engage with your buyers with personal and relevant communication.

This will help you to build trust and credibility with your buyers, re-engage with them, close the deal and ultimately develop a long-term relationship.

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Ready to nurture your leads effectively? Explore the 4 different types of lead nurturing campaigns. Need help following these campaigns? Contact us to enhance your lead nurturing strategy!