Integrate Lead Nurturing Into Your Marketing Strategy

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Create a lead nurturing strategy using best practices.
  
• Create components in Account Engagement to support your lead nurturing strategy.
  

Introduction and Words to Know

Building trust, sharing valuable insights, and being responsive: Those are all important things to do in any relationship. And they should be the guiding principles for your communications with prospects and customers. When you treat people like individuals by sending them content tailored to their unique business needs, when you respond to their behavior in real time with relevant, helpful emails, you become a trusted business partner instead of a faceless corporation. 

Lead nurturing is personal, timely, and repeatable. Surprise customers with your attention to detail, delight them with your content, and engage them by listening before responding. You’ll retain their business and earn their loyalty. 

A successful lead nurturing program accomplishes the following goals.

1. Delivers the right message at the right time
   
2. Saves you time and resources
   
3. Builds strong customer relationships
   

So before we go further, let’s look at some common terminology we should know about lead nurturing.

Account Engagement automates lead nurturing by triggering emails based on a person’s behavior or a preset time interval. It ensures you provide the right information to the right prospects at the right time, every time. Lead nurturing is an effective strategy no matter the unique challenges of your industry. 

Deliver the Right Message at the Right Time

With lead nurturing, you know your messages will always be relevant, because you determine the conditions that trigger each message. As you learn more about each customer, your marketing strategy adapts to include that new information. 

The most effective lead nurturing campaigns, also known as engagement programs in Account Engagement, include customized built-in segmentation and create dynamic content so that customers always receive up-to-date, targeted communications. You must communicate one to one with prospects and customers through one-to-one nurturing programs. 

Campaigns should also respond to what customers are doing and saying; for example, when a customer views your pricing page, or registers to attend an event, or when a customer shares their industry or their job title. 

This is exactly what happens when Cindy had the visitor enter their email and other information at the Acme conference tablet giveaway. She had completion actions set up that automatically entered the prospect into an Engagement Studio welcome program. Engagement Studio can help you manage and segment all of these customer interactions. So let’s look at a couple of these features that can help you deliver the right message at the right time. 

Engagement Studio

Engagement Studio programs are customizable and consist of conditional steps that help to truly define the prospect’s journey. You choose the recipients, you build and tailor the program to prospect experience, and you report on programs all to generate the most promising leads for your sales team based on behavior and qualifying values. Engagement programs can be paused or edited at any time.

Let’s go ahead and create an engagement studio program right now. 

1. Navigate to Automation.
   
2. Select Engagement Studio.
   
3. Click +Add Engagement Program.
   
4. Enter a name.
   
5. Choose a folder.
   
6. Enter a description (for internal use only).
   
7. Click Recipients Lists and select a list to include or exclude from your program.
   
8. Click Save.
   

After you save your program setting, you’re ready to add steps and build out your prospect paths. 

Staying on top of your customer’s needs in our increasingly connected world can be tough. With automated lead nurturing, you can let Engagement Studio organize all of that for you with predetermined content and triggers that listen and respond to customer needs so you don’t have to. 

Engagement Studio automates your lead nurturing campaigns and removes the tedious process of tracking individual leads as they go through each stage in the cycle, including the hand-off of qualified leads to sales. Using the lead scoring and grading features, you can assign scores based on customers’ activities and engagement with your emails, website, and other content. 

Save Time and Resources

Staying on top of your customer’s needs in our increasingly connected world can be difficult. If you spend a little time upfront getting organized as a company, it will save you tremendous time and resources down the road. Let’s look at three easy ways to do just that.

Establish naming conventions. It’s important to set aside time to organize your Account Engagement account if you haven’t already. You’ll be reusing content and referencing existing lists and assets, so you need to make sure your content is easy to find. Naming conventions keep your account organized by establishing structure and simplifying the process of adding assets to your programs. You can base your naming convention around an item like a topic, asset type, date, channel, program name, and so on. While all assets are important, we recommend starting with list names.

Clean up data for accurate segmentation. Once you’ve selected a naming convention, update all your existing assets in your account. Reconfirm prospect email addresses first, and then double-check that there are no matching records or dupes of the same record.

Set default mail merge values for fields. To make sure every email shows relevant information even when a prospect field is blank, set up default mail merge values. Setting these up helps you avoid embarrassing mishaps like sending an email addressed to [Your Name].

Merge fields is a quick and easy way to add some personalization to your emails so let’s go ahead and do it real quick so you can see an example. 

1. In Account Engagement Lightning App, navigate to Account Engagement Settings | Object and Field Configuration | Prospect Fields.
   
2. You will see both custom and default fields tables. Find the field you want to work with in the table, and click Edit. In the sample below, we create a “your company” default for records that don’t have a company name.)
   
3. Select Set a default mail merge value to be used when this field doesn’t have a value.
   
4. In Default Mail Merge value, enter your default value.
   
5. Click Save default field.
   

Build Customer Relationships 

The strongest relationships are built slowly over time. Automated lead nurturing is designed to capitalize on this. At its core, lead nurturing is the process of automatically sending relevant messages or emails to leads throughout the customer journey. 

Your first step: thinking through a logical sequence of engagement. Next, create relevant, varied content that will move your prospect along a defined path. For example, build a welcome series for new clients, or create a solution-based series for existing clients. A successful nurturing program hinges on content, so vary the content types and topics, and always aim to provide value. 

In this unit, you’ve learned how to create a lead nurturing strategy that is relevant and tailored to your customers. You’ve learned the importance of personalizing the customer journey to help build a trusting and lasting relationship. When you combine lead generation and lead nurturing to create a comprehensive, personal, and meaningful experience for your customers, everybody wins. You are ready to generate leads and help nurture them and ensure they are ready for your sales team. 

Resources 

• Salesforce Website: What is Lead Nurturing?
• Salesforce Help: Engagement Studio Overview
• Salesforce Help: Add to Nurture Action in Page Layouts