11 Must-Try Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Lead nurturing is a powerful tool — and not just for your marketing and sales teams, but for your customer service team as well. While it’s often marketed as a way to engage with non sales-ready leads during the sales process, the applications of lead nurturing actually extend through the entire length of the buyer journey, from initial brand awareness to a repeat customer.

In fact, lead nurturing can also play an important role in your internal enablement efforts (let’s be honest, what can’t lead nurturing do?). 

For those of you who are hoping to get more creative with your nurturing campaigns this year, we’ve put together a list of eleven must-try nurtures to add to your repertoire. 

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO ENGAGE…

1. Welcome Campaign

Welcome emails are highly anticipated, frequently opened, and simple to automate. Keep in mind that new prospects in your database should be treated differently than the ones that have been with you for weeks or months. 

By turning your welcome emails into a nurture campaign, you can introduce these new prospects to your company, product, or service at a comfortable pace, instead of flooding them with information right off the bat. 

Remember to remind them why they converted, confirm their opt-in, and start providing them with light educational content to build awareness and keep them interested.

2. Top-of-Mind Campaign

The top-of-mind nurture is designed to engage with your not quite sales-ready leads at regular intervals, preventing leads from forgetting about your company and getting swooped up by your competitors. 

This nurture takes place over a longer period of time, providing sales with consistent touch points, and provides content primarily focused on value to the prospect. Some great content to consider for this type of nurture would be blog posts, white papers, videos, webinars, infographics, and relevant industry news.

3. Reengagement Campaign

Not all of your prospects will make it through the sales process and become a closed deal. At any given time, your database will likely consist of a number of leads who became inactive at some point during the sales process. Reengagement campaigns are targeted toward these inactive leads. 

The goal is to encourage leads to take a “hand-raising” action that will indicate that they are ready to reenter the sales process. Try sending a helpful blog post, a new white paper, a cool piece of interactive content, or a successful case study for these kinds of nurtures.

A key component to this campaign is creating the perfect moment to reengage your prospect. By delivering unique, personalized moments to customers across every digital channel, your brand can create lasting, meaningful relationships. 

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO EDUCATE…

4. Product-Focused Campaign

As prospects progress through the sales process and begin to seek out more product-focused content, you’ll want to make sure they’re getting that information from you, and not a competitor or biased third party. 

Focus on your prospects’ pain points, how your product can address them, and the key features and benefits that can help. For this type of nurture, you’ll want to use more middle-of-funnel content like case studies, customer testimonials, data sheets, and more in-depth white papers.

5. Competitive Campaign

This campaign focuses on differentiating your product or service from your competitors by highlighting the advantages of using your product, as well as the disadvantages of not using it (note: you’ll want to refrain from harping on the disadvantages of your competitors’ products, since this can come off as distasteful). 

Tailor your content to the priorities of your prospects and the competitors that come up in deals with your company.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO CLOSE…

6. Industry Expertise Nurturing

As prospects move closer to the middle and bottom of the funnel, it becomes important to reinforce that your company is the right choice. Pass on any helpful press releases, industry reports, or high-traffic content as part of this nurture to establish your company’s authority. 

For example, if your company was recently covered by an analyst report, be sure to share it with your prospects and put your own spin on the review.

7. Promotional Nurturing

As your prospects near the purchase stage of the sales funnel, a well-timed promotion or special discount can be just the catalyst they need to pull the trigger on a purchase. 

Consider offering special pricing or additional features based on their individual needs, especially if you’re working with bigger accounts where closing the deal is critical to growing your business.

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO RETAIN…

8. Onboarding Campaign

Onboarding a new client will always be a high-touch and manual process, and rightly so. However, nurturing campaigns allow you to automate some of the more repetitive tasks involved in onboarding, like providing introductory training resources, a list of next steps after close, timelines for product kickoffs, and frequently asked questions. 

These helpful resources can help your new clients get started on their own, without having to wait on a customer service rep for assistance. 

Take a look at a case study of our own efforts to build an onboarding nurture at Pardot.

9. Upsell Campaign

The upsell (or cross-sell) campaign is designed to capitalize on your existing pool of clients. By providing your clients with information and incentives to expand the list of products they are using, you can drive more revenue with little effort from your sales team. 

Just be sure to focus your message around the benefits of the upsell, instead of turning your emails into sales pitches.

10. Renewal Campaign

The renewal nurture can be a convenient way to remind your existing customers that it is time to renew their contracts. 

This nurture can be triggered a month (or more) before the renewal date, send multiple reminder emails over a specified period of time, and notify the assigned user in the marketing automation tool if no action takes place. This makes it far less likely that your clients will miss the renewals on their contracts, and takes the tedium out of the process for your service reps. 

IF YOUR GOAL IS TO ENABLE…

11. Sales Enablement Nurturing

Lead nurturing can be a critical tool for enabling your internal sales teams. By nurturing your sales team with new marketing content that they can use to help sell your product, you can position marketing as a valuable resource to sales. 

This includes content like data sheets, new eBooks, competitive one-sheeters, and even educational videos that provide selling tips from other sales reps. However, consider making this nurture opt-in for your sales team — you don’t want to risk becoming a nuisance by cluttering up their already-busy inboxes.

Want more information on lead nurturing? Take a look at the Complete Guide to Lead Nurturing.