Lead Nurturing - the New Turbo for Your Performance Marketing

1. What is Lead Nurturing?
2. The Lead Nurturing funnel is strategically aligned to not only win new contacts, but step by step to turn them into customers.
3. Sales Funnel
4. Along six steps to the lead nurturing funnel, you will learn where the focus should be, where you save money and time, and how you can successfully implement a lead nurturing campaign even with a small budget:
5. , a clean tracking, good content and last but not least data protection.
6. Almost all vintage car owners want to know how much their or a vintage car is worth. For this purpose, OCC has developed a vintage car value calculator in cooperation with Classic Trader, in which the vehicle value is determined with few details. The dispatch of the calculated value takes place in a certificate to the email address of the users. Ideally, the CRM would directly recognize whether the lead is already a customer or not.
7. The KPIs in a Lead-Nurturing-Funnel might look like this:
8. You have made the entry for your users into the lead nurturing funnel simple and only ask for the email address? Well done! Because now you can collect more information in a targeted way. You can simply ask questions or measure which content your users respond to or not. There are several reasons to identify the persona or customers only limited over socio-demographic data. Instead of gender and age, you should focus on behavior, values and preferences and address these specifically in the course of the lead nurturing process.
9. In short: Lead nurturing is for advanced users and is useful for both B2B and B2C target groups. Lead nurturing is a complementary measure and marketing departments should first do their homework in performance and content marketing.
10. Fazit zum Lead Nurturing 

When the marketing engine stalls, it's time to ignite a new turbo. In this article, you will find out what lead nurturing is, how it can be used and what you should pay special attention to.

Why should companies be interested in lead nurturing and deal with this topic? With the help of lead nurturing, companies are able to identify the right leads and thus convert prospects into customers. You can learn more about this from our guest author Daniela Friedrich.

Daniela Friedrich informs you how you can cleverly use lead nurturing even with a small budget, and why lead nurturing in Performance Marketing is an important building block.

What is Lead Nurturing? 

Lead Nurturing consists of the common term Lead - i.e. contact - and Nurturing, which means care, promotion or also editing - in the sense of targeted further development. However, translating Lead Nurturing with "Lead Editing" does not go far enough. Lead Nurturing is rather a process that complements the Marketing Automation and Marketing Funnel exactly as well as the

Sales Funnel

with another entry.

The Lead Nurturing funnel is strategically aligned to not only win new contacts, but step by step to turn them into customers.

In this article, you will learn why it is worth setting up a Lead Nurturing funnel and permanently using it as a complement to performance marketing in both B2C and B2B sectors.

What is the Lead Nurturing funnel and Lead Nurturing process?

Lead Nurturing is a method from performance marketing and closes the gap between non-purchasing, but potential customers and ready-to-buy leads through a structured and guided process. This process can be measured and optimized.The lead nurturing process captures all the users you collect across all channels who have not yet decided to buy from you. This process can be adapted for any product and target group.In the following, the terms Softlead and

Lead

differ. Here, a softlead are users who are stuck in the lead nurturing process.

The lead nurturing process is divided into six steps, which look like this from the user's perspective:

1. Step of the Lead Nurturing Process:

In the first phase, users land on your website for an attractive offer through SEO, content campaigns, your community or an external newsletter. Which entry point is the right one for your softlead depends on strategy, brand, product and budget. Examples and more on this can be found further down in the text.

2. Step of the Lead Nurturing Process: The users are interested and want to take advantage of the attractive offer - they enter their e-mail address in return. The offer could be a checklist, a whitepaper, a webinar, or even an e-book. The users receive the document through a

Double Opt-in

and are now a softlead - an email address in the lead nurturing process.

This is where the first challenge for a brand or company lies: For this, absolute customer centricity is a necessity. Because you have to first find out what is so interesting for your potential customers that they enter their email address to receive the desired item.

3. Step of the Lead Nurturing Process:

From softlead to qualified marketing-lead: The softlead receives the coveted digital material after entering the email address. Here in the third phase is the first chance to impress the users positively. The content, design and usability of the digital gift should be excellent. With such a surprise effect, you can create a lasting impression along the customer journey.

4. Step of the Lead Nurturing Process:

• In the fourth phase, the actual lead nurturing process begins: the gained and positively surprised leads are now ready for processing. With the digital gift, you have fulfilled a need of the lead and demonstrated your expertise. The lead is open to further emails from you. These could contain other valuable information from the cosmos of the users. It's about tips, tricks and genuine added value for the users.
• You are still at the start of the conversion process and need confidence-building conversion levers such as ambiguity aversion, social proofing or authority signals. By the way, you are collecting information about your softlead:
• What interests exist?
• When is the newsletter likely to be opened?

Place of residence?

Which life events are coming up soon?

What is relevant, you decide in advance in your strategy planning and lead this research into the automated emails that you send. Here the so-called scoring can (but does not have to) start, about which you will learn more in the section on the prerequisites for lead nurturing.

Identify in advance either through a scoring or a simplified form of it characteristics of the lead that make him or her from the so-called qualified marketing lead (QML) to the qualified sales lead (QSL) and ready for the next step.

5. Step of the Lead Nurturing Process:

In the penultimate phase, the lead has gained trust and increasingly clicks on content from your lead nurturing route, showing you that he or she is ready for the purchase or transfer to the sales department. If a lead is ready for the conclusion according to your logic, he is called a qualified sales lead. What happens next depends on your sales structure.

Either the gained contacts are played out into a telephone list and called, for example, or classic sales levers such as offer and scarcity can be used digitally and automatically, or further conversion-enhancing methods can be used to move the lead to a conclusion online.

6. Step of the Lead Nurturing Process:

The lead is saturated with the necessary trust in your brand and your sales levers work to a high degree. The customers have made a purchase decision and are ready to buy your product now in the last phase.

Sales Funnel 

Depending on the product type or need, this process can take days or even months, sometimes even years. If you position yourself as a partner with expertise far ahead of the buying impulse alongside your potential customers, they are much more likely to become customers.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of Lead Nurturing?

The advantages of lead nurturing are primarily the strategic and targeted processing of acquired email contacts, which leads to better qualified leads, runs automatically and increases ROI. The trust in the brand and the competence of the company grows in the lead nurturing process, making the conclusion easier. This leads to a higher Conversion Rate (CR) in all funnel steps.

Also, so-called immature leads with interest from the milieu of typical customers, but without existing need, can already be played with content before buying impulse until maturity signals in the lead nurturing process indicate that customers are ripe for the purchase. Lead nurturing closes the gap between potential customers and actual customers and ultimately leads to a purchase decision.

Another advantage of lead nurturing is that a cross-media deployment is possible: for example, trade fair visitors could be offered a special gift that they receive when they leave their email addresses. Even the classic competition is a good starting point for the lead nurturing process.

But even a QR code on a print ad or a radio spot can thrill for an e-book and attract users across media. You should take all such touchpoints into account in your strategy for setting up your lead nurturing process.

Last but not least, Lead Nurturing diversifies your marketing. With pure performance marketing, you are dependent on players like Google, Facebook and Co. With Lead Nurturing, you are enriching your own distribution list and making yourself gradually independent of the major traffic suppliers.

• Seasonal effects that make performance marketing expensive, for example in the Christmas business, you can soften with lead nurturing by using your collected leads for your campaigns in these times more and more.
• Advantages of Lead Nurturing summarized:
• More leads, relieving the sales or the sales staff
• Your leads are better qualified
• Strategic and automated processing of potential customers
• Increase in ROI
• Contacts develop early trust in your expert status
• Conversion rates in the entire funnel increase
• Closes data-driven the gap between potential customers and customers
• Cross-media use possibilities

Diversification in Performance MarketingSistrixMitigation of costs in expensive season times (e.g. pre-Christmas business)Google Keyword PlannerThe disadvantage of lead nurturing is the rather elaborate process when setting up the campaign, which requires a lot of preparation. The knowledge about potential customers must be as extensive as possible and depict a clear picture of typical customer needs, ideally tested personas. The technological requirements are also not undemanding. It requires in the first step analysis of search terms, as it succeeds well with

or .Examination of existing traffic with Google AnalyticsWebsite Analysis Tools like , a website with the connection to an EmarsysEmail Marketing SolutionCleverReach with automation functions like Brevo (ehemals Sendinblue), , " or ", " or to a ", "CRM solution ", " like ", " or ", ", which can also process the leads orderly. In addition, lead generation tools like can help you reach the right people at the right time.Salesforce Sales CloudLast but not least, it requires employees or agencies with a high understanding of online marketing methods. In short: Lead Nurturing is for advanced.HubSpot CRMDisadvantages of Lead Nurturing summed up:Ocean.ioSetting up a lead nurturing campaign is complex and costs a lot of time

It requires a lot of knowledge about potential customers or a lot of research effort

Technical requirements for a CRM or email marketing solution

• Research effort for possible search terms is high
• The effort for the necessary content creation is high
• How can you use lead nurturing with a small budget?
• Lead nurturing can be very complex and expensive. If you go through all the steps in perfection, set up a perfect funnel and prepare the contents with a lot of effort, your lead nurturing will be successful - and time-consuming as well as costly. But you can also start in a simple variant.
• Lead-Nurturing-light:

Along six steps to the lead nurturing funnel, you will learn where the focus should be, where you save money and time, and how you can successfully implement a lead nurturing campaign even with a small budget: 

1) Traffic and attractive content:

a) Focus and rely on what is available. Firstly, concentrate on one or two personas or customer groups that ideally have a great potential. Use a product that you already have. In an online shop, you could use an existing offer and offer it for free in exchange for an email address.

b) Use existing communities and distributors as traffic providers

. You could initially reach potential customers with your lead nurturing campaign, who can be found in your existing distributors or communities. Play your campaign initially here. Alternatively, you could now build up SEO measures

and reach potential customers in a few weeks or months. Forums of your target group are a wonderful and free research place for the needs of your customers and keywords. Faster it goes with paid traffic: on sales portals, where your customers like to move, special interest news sites, blogs or also cooperations with influencers of your industry are effective methods to quickly generate relevant traffic for your campaign.2) Technical Requirements:Ideally, you create your own landing pages for your lead nurturing campaigns, or integrate the offer into existing content pieces. Here, technical requirements and implementations may be required, which may cause costs and take time. At first, all you need is the email address field, a checkbox for the privacy policy, and a connection to the CRM or the email program.3) Traffic to Softleads make:

Keep the hurdle here as low as possible. At the start of lead nurturing, the query of the email address is enough. The fewer your contacts have to specify, the better the Conversion Rate.

4) Strategic and operational preparation for automated emails:

This step also requires no budget, but probably the most time in preparation. You need an e-mail client or a CRM that can send automated emails - ideally in multidimensional routes. However, you could first build your campaign very simply:

a) Double Opt-In

b) Sending the coveted gift

c) Concentrate on one, maximum two personas or groups from your target group

d) Keep it simple:

Start with a simple route with few forks and expand them step by step. This minimizes the effort and costs.

Sales strategy for qualified Sales Leads: For B2B it is particularly important that the sales department is included in the

Lead-Nurturing-Strategy from the beginning. That way, important information about the lead can be gathered during lead nurturing that makes it easier for the sales department to generate the deal. For B2C campaigns, you can rely on learnings from previous newsletters.

• Track sales: In e-commerce, a technical solution is needed for this step, which however can be implemented easier than you might assume at first. In sales models with personal advice, in the simplest case, the maintenance of a common list or, thought further, a CRM is necessary. Do not forgo this final step in the lead nurturing funnel.E-Mail RouteWhat requirements do you need for Lead Nurturing?
• Various requirements are already apparent from the above sections. Pay particular attention to

Customer Centricity

, a clean tracking, good content and last but not least data protection.

Requirement 1: Customer Centricity in Lead NurturingThe most important requirement for a successful lead nurturing campaign is absolute customer centricity. This starts at traffic generation and goes through the attractive bait to the lead nurturing funnel. Easier said than done. This is achieved with agile methods, which by their structure contribute to repeatedly placing customers at the center of your work. In addition, testing on customers is your best friend to verify your product for customer centricity.Requirement 2: Tracking in Lead Nurturing

To track the lead nurturing process, a tracking concept is useful. However: Keep it simple! Initially, measure the traffic and the number of registered users. You do not initially need click events if you keep the introduction simple. In addition, a email marketing solution is necessary for lead nurturing, which can be either a own client or a CRM. This tool needs to be able to send automated and ideally multidimensional routes. Within these programs, you can also find numerous ways to measure the behavior of your qualified marketing leads and gather information.

Requirement 3: Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing

Last but not least, you need good content. Good content helps you to bring free traffic to your website in a sustainable way. But for the lead nurturing campaign, even paid traffic is a good method to fill the funnel. It is important to build an Engagement Cycle that offers the right content at the right time. The Engagement Cycle is a defined process in which a user receives meaningful information to interact with the brand.

New customers initially need to build trust, need information about the company and the way of working or manufacturing. Only then are customers ripe for further interaction with the brand. And for this you need good content. Without content, you will not succeed in transforming the qualified marketing leads in the lead nurturing process to qualified sales leads.

Requirement 4: Data Protection in Lead Nurturing

The topic of data protection in lead nurturing is of course also an important requirement. Here, transparent information and representation of the lead nurturing process in your privacy policy applies. For lead nurturing, you should also avoid statements like "free" or "free of charge", because users leave their data in exchange. That's not free. Follow the principles of the General Data Protection Regulation in Germany.

How could a Lead Nurturing campaign look like?

Here is the example of the specialist for vintage car insurance OCC Assekuradeur:

The company OCC Assekuradeur GmbH has been selling vintage car insurance since 1984 and acquires its customers both through an end-customer business with an online route and through the broker and mediator distribution. For the end customer business, we have set up a lead nurturing campaign for OCC. The entry into the campaign is made through the question of all questions for vintage car owners: How much is my vintage car worth? For this question, OCC has written search engine optimized articles, but also alerts on Facebook, Instagram and in the vintage car ads on mobile.de as well as on the largest online marketplace for vintage cars in Europe, classic-trader.de.

Almost all vintage car owners want to know how much their or a vintage car is worth. For this purpose, OCC has developed a vintage car value calculator in cooperation with Classic Trader, in which the vehicle value is determined with few details. The dispatch of the calculated value takes place in a certificate to the email address of the users. Ideally, the CRM would directly recognize whether the lead is already a customer or not.

OCC has waived this step to keep the technical requirements low. From that moment on, the leads are played with a multidimensional route, with the aim of assigning the lead to a persona and then playing out increasingly more targeted information and finally leading to the insurance conclusion online. Currently (as of September 2022), over 600 contacts are in this lead nurturing funnel from OCC, who are played with a simple content path and led to the digital OCC application route when purchase signals appear.

How can the success of Lead-Nurturing campaigns be measured?

For Lead-Nurturing campaigns, the same KPIs apply as for classic marketing funnels. Each funnel step can be measured and evaluated via a Conversion Rate. At the end, the total costs can be set in relation to the gained customers and a ROI can be calculated. The challenge is certainly the tracking concept and a technical implementation of the tracking.

Nurturing campaigns will enrich your performance marketing and you will gain new customers.

The KPIs in a Lead-Nurturing-Funnel might look like this:

Quantity of Traffic/ Number of users

Number and rate of registrations as Softlead

Number and rate of DoubleOpt-Ins

• Open and Click Rates of the emails from the following routes and cancellations
• Number and rate of qualified Sales Leads
• Number, rate and ROI of transactions
• Once set up, it is recommended to continuously optimize the individual funnel steps through
• A / B-Testing
• and user tests.

How does customer centricity work in lead nurturing?You're wondering now how you can develop an offer for which your customers are ready to leave their email address in exchange? Try agile creative methods like the crazy eight or a design sprint. In a design sprint, you also benefit from the fact that you have a tested prototype of your campaign at the end and the chances of success increase significantly. For this preparation you do not need budget, but time. Invest here enough of it. At this point in the lead nurturing funnel, your customers decide whether they find the offer so exciting that it is worth an email address. Here the effort and the acquisition of new methods are worth it.How do you gain more information from users throughout the lead nurturing process?

You have made the entry for your users into the lead nurturing funnel simple and only ask for the email address? Well done! Because now you can collect more information in a targeted way. You can simply ask questions or measure which content your users respond to or not. There are several reasons to identify the persona or customers only limited over socio-demographic data. Instead of gender and age, you should focus on behavior, values and preferences and address these specifically in the course of the lead nurturing process. 

Conclusion on lead nurturing

In short: Lead nurturing is for advanced users and is useful for both B2B and B2C target groups. Lead nurturing is a complementary measure and marketing departments should first do their homework in performance and content marketing. 

The Sales Funnel should stand and the website should ideally offer attractive content for SEO users. Only then is Lead Nurturing the turbo to take Performance Marketing to the next level.

Fazit zum Lead Nurturing 

Kurz gesagt: Lead Nurturing ist etwas für Fortgeschrittene und sowohl für B2B- als auch für B2C-Zielgruppen nützlich. Lead Nurturing ist eine ergänzende Maßnahme und Marketingabteilungen sollten erst einmal ihre Hausaufgaben in Performance- und Content-Marketing machen.

Der Sales-Funnel sollte stehen und die Website sollte bestenfalls attraktiven Content für SEO-Nutzer*innen bieten. Erst dann ist Lead Nurturing der Turbo, um Performance-Marketing auf das nächste Level zu heben.