How to Nurture B2B Leads for Best Results in 2024

As the buying journey changes, shoppers are doing more research on their own and waiting until they gather substantial information before making a business purchase or signing up for a business account.

According to Forrester Research, potential customers wait until they are 65% to 90% of the way through their journey before making a purchase. This shift has significant implications for how companies need to reach and engage other businesses when they attempt to nurture B2B leads.

By using effective B2B lead nurturing tactics and maintaining good communication with customers, you can keep them interested in your product or B2B service and increase the likelihood of recurring purchases. 

You are probably already using CRM software to communicate with your leads and customers, but email-based lead nurturing is not enough to get the results you want anymore. As a matter of fact, most digital marketing channels are reaching a point of diminishing returns.

Integrated marketing automation

By integrating Postalytics direct mail tools into your marketing automation workflows, you can create personalized multi-touch campaigns that effectively target B2B leads at different points in their customer journey. This is much more effective than mailings alone, as the response rate for direct mail is 3.7% compared to just 0.1% for email.

Therefore, direct mail as part of a lead-nurturing campaign is the B2B marketer’s secret weapon. In this article, we will show you how to put together an effective workflow in 8 steps to turn your B2B lead-nurturing process into an effective conversion engine.

To learn more about automated direct mail lead nurturing solutions, check out the demo from Postalytics and discover how our direct mail for agencies solution can help you if you are a marketer working in the B2B space.

Step One: Define your business goals

Lead nurturing involves building and maintaining relationships with potential customers through marketing automation and sales automation. This allows your sales and marketing team to better target leads that are likely to convert into customers, rather than wasting time on email blasts or chasing leads that will never materialize.

To set up a successful lead nurturing campaign, you first need to establish your goals. Once you have a clear idea of your objectives, you can create a plan of action based on each lead’s position in your sales funnel and your company’s offering. By tailoring your approach in this way, you’ll maximize the chances of success for your lead-nurturing efforts.

Your sales goals should be achievable and relevant to your company or department. For example, you could set goals focused on increasing annual revenue and profit, increasing the number of customers, or targeting qualified leads while reducing time spent on unqualified leads.

Step Two: Define what a business lead is

Lead nurturing is a dynamic process that changes with each lead. The content you offer them needs to be adapted as they move through the buying process. The best way to do this is through a lead scoring strategy. A lead scoring system is a way to score your prospects based on specific criteria. These might include age, location, income, and even the pages they have visited on your website. By assigning (or subtracting) points for different variables, you can develop an overall score that helps you determine how likely they are to make a purchase.

Step Three: Create targeted lead nurture content

By taking all of these factors into account, you can create more detailed and accurate buyer personas that will help your sales team better understand your target audience. This way, you can create more customized and engaging offers that are likely to be of interest to the leads you have acquired through a lead generation campaign. The leads you score can be categorized according to their likelihood to buy. 

This allows businesses to target their marketing efforts better, resulting in higher conversion rates. For example, those who fall into the “cool” category can be invited to a webinar, while those who fall into the “hot” category can be sent an offer.

Step Four: Consider which (channels and combinations of channels) you will use for lead nurturing techniques

If you are planning a lead-nurturing campaign, you may be wondering which channel(s) to use. Our advice is to take a cross-channel approach to improve retention rates and brand awareness, create a more complete customer journey, and strengthen the customer-buyer relationship. With automated marketing campaigns, you can deliver a range of content tailored to your customers’ preferences over a period of time. 

In the past, lead-nurturing strategies were mostly limited to email drip campaigns with generic content. But today, B2B marketers are using more sophisticated tactics and technologies that go beyond email. With powerful marketing automation platforms like Postalytics, they can execute multi-channel lead nurturing strategies with ease.

Adding direct mail lead nurturing to your marketing mix does not have to be a lot of work. With Postalytics, you can set up a campaign with little effort. If you can set up an email drip campaign, you can also use Postalytics to execute a direct mail lead nurturing sequence. Our platform integrates with your CRM and the rest of your tech setup, so you can easily combine email and direct mail to complement one another. Thanks to our triggered-drip solutions, you can create, design, print, and send your direct mail materials from your computer and automatically insert them into your lead nurture workflow.

Step Five: Look at multiple touchpoints

As you move through the various stages of the sales funnel, it’s important to change your lead-nurturing tactics and message to fit where your prospect is on their journey. For example, someone who is just learning about your company for the first time needs a different message than someone ready to make a purchase decision. By offering multiple touchpoints and tailoring your message to each stage, you’ll stay top of mind with your prospects and increase your chances of converting them into customers.

Although direct mail is very effective, campaigns that use both digital and physical methods of delivering information tend to be more successful. Technologies such as QR codes and personal URLs bridge the gap between the analog world and digital environments.

Adding personalized QR codes to direct mail postcards (which is easy to do with Postalytics) is a great way to increase conversion rates and ROI. By directing potential customers to personalized landing pages, you can use the information you have acquired about them to drive the content and offers they see. This way, you can create a highly customized and targeted experience that caters to the needs and desires of each prospect.

Just as digital and physical communications work together, you can also use them to complement each other. When your customer receives an email or text message asking them to watch for material that will arrive via the postal service, they are being directed from an electronic channel to the mail. Postalytics’ built-in mail tracking technology enables sales and marketing teams to master this precise timing.

Step Six: Nurture leads with follow-ups

Finding the right target market and delivering the right message is essential. But as we’ve discussed, timing is also critical. It can be challenging to reach a prospect at the right time, but if you are persistent and follow up regularly, you’ll eventually connect with them when they are ready to buy.

Postcards, used as a lead nurturing tactic, are a great way to stay in touch with customers after a sales call or response to your marketing efforts. Postcards are personal and stand out in a crowded digital marketplace. According to a survey by AdWeek, 54% of customers want to receive mail from brands they are interested in. Sending a postcard is a great way to set your business apart from the competition.

Step Seven: Personalize your marketing message

People are the foundation of any business, whether you are selling to individuals or other businesses. Recognition, appreciation, and personalization are key to building customer relationships. Today’s technology makes it easy to send personalized letters, postcards, and emails, and thanks to Postalytics’ variable data tools that sync with your CRM, this process is automated on our platform.

Personalization involves more than just using data to greet a prospect by name. With the information at your disposal, you can use platforms like Postalytics to customize graphics or text to better match the buyer’s profile. You can use purchase history data, credit scores, or other demographic data to change messages easily, offers, and images to fit the individual prospect’s profile.

Step Eight: Use marketing automation

As a business owner, you are always looking for ways to increase sales and efficiency.

Marketing automation is a great way to achieve both. By automating your marketing communications, you can deliver relevant messages to leads at key points in their journey while creating a consistent experience for all leads. This makes it easier to assess what’s working and what’s not so that you can fine-tune your marketing strategy.

Examples of B2B Nurture campaigns

Now that you are interested in trying out a direct mail campaign, it’s time to start a nurturing campaign! There are some great techniques you can use to make your nurture campaigns even more successful. By trying different strategies and methods, you can find out what works best for your business and your customers. Keep experimenting and tweaking your campaigns, and you’ll soon see better results.

Stay top of mind – nurture campaign

This direct mail campaign can help you stay in touch with your prospects and make sure you are in the right place at the right time – when your prospects are ready to buy.

New lead – nurture campaign

This lead nurturing campaign specifically targets new leads to make a strong first impression. Then, you can build on that trust by providing them with informational materials that educate them about your product, make them feel positive about your company, and guide them through the buyer journey.

Read a guide on automating direct mail to boost results and find out exactly how to execute these campaigns. 

B2B Lead nurturing best practices

If you want to convert more leads into paying customers, you need a strong lead nurturing strategy. By following these best practices, you can shorten the sales cycle, reduce customer acquisition costs, and improve your ROI:

1. Create personalized content: By creating targeted content for each buyer stage, the journey will educate your customers and encourage them to continue down the sales funnel.

2. Measure your performance: By analyzing your performance metrics, you can identify areas that need improvement and make changes to meet your target audience’s needs better.

3. Optimize your lead-nurturing campaigns: Different types of testing can help you figure out which messages are most effective and what time of day you should send them. Optimizing your lead nurturing process’s content mix, paths, and frequency can further improve your results.

Lead nurturing email marketing

Email marketing can be a powerful tool for nurturing your leads. 

You can keep your leads interested and engaged by sending timely, relevant information and offers based on their activity. Postalytics integrates with your marketing software like Mailchimp so you can leverage your contact list across channels and track email open rates and other metrics on our automated marketing dashboard.

Lead nurturing email examples

If you want to stay at the top of mind with potential clients, you should regularly communicate with them via email and direct mail. 

This automated email and direct mail workflow is an excellent solution if you want to create a consistent brand message across multiple channels. We start with a postcard, then nurture your leads via email, and finish with a direct mail offer or invitation. You can easily customize your mailings, send triggered campaigns, and more with our intuitive design tools.

Here are some more examples of effective lead nurturing emails:

• A welcome email: A welcome email sets the tone for the relationship and establishes expectations. Every time you acquire a new free user, email subscriber, newsletter subscriber, or blog subscriber, a welcome email should follow shortly after.

• Re-targeted emails: You can set up a B2B re-engagement campaign that targets inactive subscribers with a reminder email and incentive offer. 

To learn more about how automated direct mail can help you convert more B2B leads, check out the demo from Postalytics.

Final thoughts

A lead-nurturing campaign offers a great opportunity to get the results you want, especially if direct mail is part of the process. Direct mail has often been viewed as a tool for large organizations with large volumes of identical material. However, new technologies such as Postalytics have made it possible to send small mailings in an automated fashion at a reasonable cost. 

This makes direct mail a crucial part of B2B lead-nurturing strategies. 

When you connect your direct mail lead nurturing campaigns to a CRM system, you can leverage all the information and data stored in the database. This allows you to control and personalize direct mail campaigns that attract attention and avoid the pitfalls of an overused email channel.