In my previous article, How To Track Customer Acquisitions: Customer Lifecycle, Sales Funnel, and Content Strategy, I described how companies attract, engage, and convert customers, and how this process can be optimized and improved.
In this guide, I will make an attempt to describe how SaaS/enterprise companies design lead nurturing campaigns and how lead scoring can help prioritize leads and improve conversions, as well as how lead nurturing strategy affects the creation of drip email campaigns.
The primary goal of this article is to help you design or improve your current lead nurturing strategy. But the ultimate goal is to provide marketers and founders with some core principles on the topics of lead nurturing, and lead scoring. My intention isn’t to provide a cookie cutter solution, but instead to stimulate ideas and encourage a new way of thinking around these topics.
If you’re reading this article and have things to add, or see that I’ve missed a crucial point, please leave a comment. Contributing to this guide will make it a more useful resource for everyone in the startup and marketing community. To quote a principle of Ray Dalio:
“I’m stress-testing my opinions by having the smartest people I could find challenge them so I could find out where I was wrong.”
1. Why write another guide on lead nurturing, scoring and drip emails when so much has already been written by others?
Most of the materials online on this topic are either too basic or overcomplicated. And even if you find a great source, such as Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring, there are still some important gaps that need to be filled. In this article I attempt to contribute to the overall conversation on lead nurturing, lead scoring, and drip email campaigns.
2. Why is this article so long? And why are you combining Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, and Drip Emails into one topic?
The reason why we are combining Lead Nurturing, Lead Scoring, and Drip Emails into one paper/article is that these topics are all part of a continuous marketing effort to attract, engage and convert customers. Lead nurturing is your communication process. Lead scoring is your strategy for prioritization. And drip email campaigns are one of the most effective ways to talk to your customers — for now at least. (Maybe chatbots will change this but for now email is still one of the most effective communications channels).
3. Why is this article missing a case study?
While I have tried to add examples from real companies, my initial intention was to include a more detailed case study to this article. But since this piece is already long, I decided to leave a detailed case for another post, and focus here on the bigger picture.
Before we jump into describing lead nurturing, let’s start by defining the term ‘nurturing’ as it is used in marketing. Let’s make it clear that I’m not attempting to introduce a new term for the sake of it here. New terminology can come across as noise when it’s simply about adding another meaningless term. However, in my view, using consistent and clear definitions helps bring clarity to marketing, sales, and customer success departments.
Here is the dictionary definition of Nurture: verb