So your business is raring to go, and your marketing plan is all set. You’re ready to capture those all-important leads and dazzle them with everything your product has to offer. However, once you have finally gotten the attention of your ideal customers, what then?
As strange as it may seem, some businesses never fully develop that critical next step. Getting a prospect’s attention is only the beginning of a long road toward transforming your fresh leads into the loyal customers and promoters of your business that you so sorely need for success (read more about that in the SaaS Marketing Journey). This is precisely where lead nurturing campaigns for SaaS kick in.
Leading Your SaaS Down the Path
Whenever you’re put in the position to coax action out of prospects, you need to establish and heed a very specific directive. Lead nurturing campaigns effectively leverage primarily email to develop opportunities for growth, building your business’s thought leadership along the way.
The benefits of lead nurturing continue to be well-documented, and the psychological importance of such an ongoing connection to leads cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, it’s a delicate process that requires certain crucial steps are taken to achieve optimum results.
If you’re not careful, lead nurturing can come off as pushy, undesirable, and at worst “spammy.” Nobody wants their inbox overflowing with multiple emails a day from a company that can’t spell their name right or vomits out useless information.
Email can be incredibly effective if done well, but it can also be incredibly damaging if you don’t follow best practices.
Here are a few important tips to keep in mind when kicking off a lead nurturing campaign.
1. Isolate the “who” and the “why.”
From the outset, you need to develop customer profiles to gain a full understanding of the audience your campaign will target. While that might seem like common sense, some businesses find themselves jumping into some form of lead nurturing without doing their due diligence first. Knowing who you’re serving will naturally lead you to insight into why they would choose to engage your business in a more meaningful way.
2. Include some valuable content.
Consumers nowadays are wise to so many common marketing efforts that they are becoming more immune to sales pitches and CTAs. However, if you offer some content that carries with it perceived value -- eBooks are a particularly popular choice -- your emails are far more likely to entice them to dig deeper, and hopefully, the message therein is strong enough to prove your worth in their eyes.
3. Stagger your email delivery.
If your email campaign starts to flood a lead’s inbox, there’s a good chance your messages will end up ignored and/or deleted. So don’t bombard your prospects with constant messages, as even the sharpest campaign will backfire if it’s overdone. No consumer wants to feel pressured to connect. You’d be surprised how much a more measured approach will benefit your business and your audience. Staggering also gives you the opportunity to test the most effective times and days for your email campaigns. National stats can be helpful but the best data is always your own because it is reflective of the uniqueness of your audience.
4. Engage in email segmentation.
Personalization has become far more central a facet of smart business in recent years, and your lead nurturing campaign is no exception. Add value to your emails by using workflows to connect with leads more intimately via email segmentation. If you break your leads into well-defined groups and then craft messages tailored to their needs, you’re far more likely to receive engagement.
5. Keep optimizing your campaign.
No matter how successful your initial campaign may be, pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. Different verbiage, other kinds of content, and shifts in your email delivery system (I can’t recommend automation enough) can often greatly improve your results. Be willing to make drastic changes to attract leads, and implement testing analytics to keep your lead nurturing efforts in a state of constant optimization.
Nurture for SaaS-cess
Though acquiring leads may be the first step towards building your business, it’s important to note that simply activating a lead nurturing campaign isn’t the end-all-be-all solution to keep your customer base thriving. In fact, a great deal of balance is necessary to properly implement such an effort.
To take leads into the next steps as trial users of your product, you need to be careful not to overwhelm your target audience with too much or too frequent content. Otherwise, you may face an adverse effect that causes customers to unsubscribe from your campaign altogether. Some trial and error may be involved in finding what works for you, but once you identify the right combination of content for your SaaS business, we’re confident that your lead nurturing campaigns will soar.
Lead nurturing is just part of the SaaS marketing process. For more tips like this, check out our eBook, Strategic Marketing Tactics for SaaS Companies. Be sure to take care of your SaaS!
