Is lead nurturing a costly investment of time and money? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes. According to a Gleanster Research study, programs that incorporate lead nurturing tactics can generate 50% more sales-ready leads than those that don’t. They’re effective because they provide highly relevant educational content to potential buyers, building brand preference early in the buying process. But as a marketer, just because you know how wonderful your lead nurturing program is doesn’t always mean upper management has the same confidence.
In order to justify your company’s investment, you must be able to measure your program’s results to prove its value. However, because lead nurturing programs focus on KPIs like brand reach, awareness, and customer engagement, it isn’t always an easy task to determine your program’s effectiveness. But there’s hope. Here are some of the ways you can prove lead nurturing program success:
- Create a lead scoring system. This allows you to assign values to users’ actions and set a threshold for sales-ready leads. Lead scoring requires you to carefully consider who your target audience is and track your customers’ typical buying behaviors.
- Segment your leads. The efficacy of lead nurturing is highly dependent on how well you’ve segmented your leads. Comb through your analytics tool to see if there are any problems with your list segmentation by looking at click through rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate metrics. These metrics are surface-level and one-dimensional, however, and only tell you whether people are interacting with your content, not the level at which they’re engaging. The latter is much more useful for measuring a program’s performance. To get really valuable insight into your campaign’s success, use a combination of the above metrics.
- Construct a suite of relevant metrics. Utilize time to customer conversion (the length of time it takes for a lead to become a customer) and cost per customer (the marketing cost of acquiring a new customer) metrics. These are unique in that they consider your target audience and monitor your program based on your company’s unique attributes. With these statistics, you’re equipped with the necessary information to tell your bosses the exact costs and benefits of each lead.
These measurement strategies are a good starting point, but remember to craft your strategy carefully. Keep in mind that inaccurate results often do more harm than good. When developed with program goals and consumer characteristics in mind and a measurement strategy in place, lead nurturing programs can be tangibly successful. Happy nurturing!
What tactics have you developed to determine the success of your lead nurturing programs? Share in the comments below!
