What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing follows lead generation. After capturing new leads, sales and marketing teams must engage, educate and guide them toward becoming loyal, paying customers. Lead management and marketing automation tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize customer interactions and offer valuable content with the goal of building trust and strong brand loyalty.

The integration of an AI command center in a sales operation is already paying off. Sales executives forecast a 25% higher volume growth rate by using AI for lead generation and lead scoring, according to a report from the IBM Institute for Business Value. C-suite leaders are recognizing AI’s transformative role, with over half of executives reporting positive performance outcomes due to AI-powered workflows.

Through effective lead nurturing a business’ marketing team and sales team can work together to keep a brand top-of-mind and offer a unified customer journey that resonates with the target audience.

Prospective customers might not be ready to buy on the spot. However, many end up purchasing within weeks or months, possibly from a competitor. To stay top-of-mind when prospects are ready to buy, businesses must nurture leads consistently with timely, relevant content tailored to each stage of the customer’s journey and decision-making process.

Lead nurturing efforts ensure that no revenue opportunity is missed, regardless of where the prospect is in the buyer journey. It targets high‑scoring contacts in the marketing database with tailored marketing strategies that match their interests and stage in the sales funnel. This process builds relationships, educates prospects about the business’ solutions, and shows them how those solutions can address their specific needs.

Before getting into a lead nurturing process, there are essential steps a business should take to understand its customers and sales cycle. Gaining clarity on buyer personas, typical decision-making timelines and key challenges allows marketers to craft more relevant and effective content that resonates throughout each stage of the funnel.

A prospect doesn’t become a customer through one email campaign. Lead nurturing should be viewed as a multistep workflow or lead nurturing campaign. Each step of the process is purposeful with clear, concise objectives.

Before getting into lead nurturing processes, establish the brand as a credible leader in the industry. Share valuable content on social media and professional networks like LinkedIn to showcase and lay the groundwork for engagement. Use content marketing as a way to bring in lead nurturing strategies and apply them continuously. Building brand authority takes work to retain and is an ongoing effort.

An important part of lead nurturing is segmenting customers into groups with similar characteristics. This approach helps personalize communication efforts and deliver more high-quality call to actions and email marketing campaigns that resonate with a specific buyer persona. Use buyer personas to tailor emails and campaigns to specific interests, avoiding generic messaging.

The focus of sales and marketing teams should be on the customer first. Stronger conversion rates depend on understanding and addressing customer needs. A business should use customer relationship management (CRM) software to identify engagement drivers and challenges in the buyer’s journey. Then, teams can personalize each customer interaction, including lead nurturing emails and overall lead nurturing programs, according to specific customer drivers.

By lead scoring, a business can determine which leads are most likely going to turn into paying customers. The process is a ranking system that assigns a numerical value to each lead based on predetermined characteristics and behaviors. It helps sales teams prioritize efforts on the most promising prospects and streamlines the sales process.

Leverage marketing automation to manage personalized communications at scale. Automation tools can manage click through rates, open rates, pricing, and manage follow-ups—all while freeing up your team to focus on high-impact conversations. Free up sales reps and marketing employees to focus on more pressing issues that might require human touchpoints.

Before lead nurturing efforts, a business should build buyer personas—detailed profiles of ideal customers based on data. These profiles should include demographics, occupation, interests, pain points and preferred communication channels.

For example, a marketing leader often engages on social media through a video or blog post rather than an emailed white paper. The more that an organization understands its buyers, the stronger its lead nurturing strategy is.

Understanding the length of the sales cycle for a business is a crucial step to take before building out a lead nurturing strategy. The business should understand how long it typically takes for a lead to move through the sales funnel from first contact to a closed deal. Knowing this timeline helps align your nurturing process with prospect preferences and buying stages.

A business should try out different content formats across multi channels to see what type of campaign works best for the buyer personas. Outreach must align with the sales cycle and integrate into the broader marketing strategy. Possible formats include:

• Video marketing

• Personalized email campaigns

• SMS messages

• Webinars

• Podcasts

• Social media content

• Interactive chatbot engagement

Segment leads based on their interests, behaviors and demographics. This approach allows the business to tailor its marketing efforts and provide personalized content that appeals specifically to each group’s needs or pain points.

Map out the typical buyer journey in their industry. Identify all stages from initial awareness through consideration and decision-making and understand the information and interactions required at each stage. This helps align their nurturing content with the prospect’s evolving needs.

Develop a range of valuable, relevant and consistent content tailored to each lead segment. This approach often includes blog posts, white papers, webinars, case studies or emails. The goal is to provide information that educates, solves problems or offers insights, which helps build trust and credibility with potential customers.

Design a detailed plan for how leads move through each stage of the buyer journey. Detail what content is provided at each step, how it addresses the prospect’s needs and the intended actions to move them closer toward a purchase. This plan should also outline the handoffs between sales and marketing teams.

Implement a marketing automation platform to streamline and optimize lead nurturing communications. This software allows the business to schedule and trigger emails, social media posts or other forms of content based on lead behavior or action, ensuring timely and consistent communication without manual effort.

Track and analyze the performance of lead nurturing efforts. Use key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and sales cycle length. Regular analysis helps identify what’s working and what’s not, enabling adjustments to the sales and marketing teams’ strategy for continual improvement.

Lead nurturing can lead to higher conversion rates over time. Non-nurtured leads are less likely to turn into customers, especially for B2B marketers. Nurtured customers are also more likely to make large purchases that result in higher sales levels¹. By homing in on qualified leads, businesses make more sales-ready leads, which can lead to lower cost-per-lead and boost the return on investment (ROI)².

Strive to produce and deliver valuable, personalized content to customers. The delivery should be consistent across channels and customers, establishing the business as a trusted authority. Better understand and address the challenges and needs of prospects and help create authentic connections with the customer base. Once that base has been built and an initial relationship has been made its much more likely that the relationship becomes long-lasting.

By implementing marketing automation capabilities, a business can run and manage lead nurturing campaigns in the background. Give time back to sales reps from having to manually run a campaign and instead focus on the key long-term relationship building with customers with the highest buying intent. Make a highly targeted campaign that includes blog posts, paid retargeting, CTAs and newsletters that deliver the right information at the right time.

Through marketing strategies, prospects and existing customers should have regular communication that keeps the business top-of-mind. Whether the customer hasn’t purchased in quite a while or no longer fits a buyer persona, ensure that prospects think of the business when they are ready to make the purchase.

Traditional lead nurturing strategies have typically involved creating batches of content, sending blanket emails, and hoping for engagement. However, these methods lack the personalization needed to capture attention and foster meaningful connections in the modern world.

A report from IBM Institute for Business Value found a vast majority (85%) of executives believe that their workforce relies on AI agent recommendations. The decisions span the customer journey, from segmentation to ongoing relationship management.

• AI’s predictive analytics: By analyzing historical data, AI can forecast future behaviors, such as which leads are most likely to convert.

• AI-powered chatbots: Chatbots have revolutionized lead nurturing by providing instant, interactive and personalized customer service. They can engage leads around the clock, answer queries, provide product recommendations and even guide them through the sales funnel.

• Dynamic content creation: AI tools can generate personalized content at scale, adapting text, images and even tone based on individual customer data. This approach ensures that every interaction is relevant and appealing, significantly boosting engagement rates.

• Complement, not replace humans: AI cannot replace human intuition and empathy. AI excels at processing data and identifying patterns, but humans bring creativity, emotional intelligence and the ability to build genuine relationships. The most effective lead nurturing strategies blend AI’s analytical power with human insight and connection.