With 61% of B2B companies focusing on creating high-quality leads from their website this year, lead nurturing is big. Bigger than ever before. If lead nurturing is something you are looking at developing this year, there are a few best practice methods you are going to need to know.

What is lead nurturing in 2016?

Despite popular opinion, lead nurturing is NOT a drip campaign or a full on marketing automation process. Different email campaigns target different results, so it’s important not to mistake one for the other. A lead nurturing campaign itself looks at warming up cold leads until they are sales-ready.

It’s worth noting at this stage that not all website leads will be interested in your business, so it’s unrealistic to expect a 100% conversion on website visitors to customers. However, with reports indicating half of your website traffic is interested in your business, successful lead nurturing has seen businesses improve their conversion rate by 50% at 33% less cost than other leads.

Which lead nurturing methods work best?

It’s no good sending an intense whitepaper if your lead is merely browsing your website for the first time. That’s why it’s important to know where your leads are in the buying journey. Some software systems offer combined lead generation, lead scoring and lead nurturing programmes. This combined approach allows you to track where your website visitors go, give them a score based on their user journey on your website and send them material relevant to how interested they seem to be in your business based on their actions.

Nurture them by providing the right content

No single buyer journey is the same. Every single one of your leads will interact with your marketing campaigns differently. One might come from a PPC advert, one might come from a sponsored social media post. Wherever they come from, you need to nurture them with the right, relevant information in order for them to continue through the sales pipeline. With an automated lead nurturing process, you can pop new leads into custom nurturing campaigns, allowing them to see the content they might otherwise have missed. You can even place your current CRM customers in an upsell nurturing campaign!

If you have too many leads to keep track of, then you might need a more robust email marketing process. In which case, we would recommend a full marketing automation suite. But only if you wanted to make your life really easy.

For more on this and free lead nurturing template campaigns check out our Marketing Automation Cookbook.