Level Up Your Lead Nurturing

In our recent article What Big Things Can We Expect In 2022? we made a prediction that Lead Nurturing will be more important than ever this year. In the latest episode of the B2C Lead Generation podcast we speak to Oren Greenberg from Kurve to look into ways lead buyers and brands can level up their lead nurturing and ultimately build stronger and longer lasting relationships.

This article is adapted from the podcast of the same name. If you’d rather watch / listen check the links at the bottom of the page. 

What are some of the biggest mistakes brands make when it comes to lead nurturing? 

Oren Greenberg: In terms of the mistakes companies make, I think there’s quite a few.  Segmentation is a core aspect of it. Not actually going through the effort of segmenting and sending very broad emails or irrelevant emails for people in different parts of their journey.  It’s a component of personalisation and personalisation and segmentation are two sides of the same coin. 

Another problem is not using the data that they have. That is zero party data or first party data. They are really missing a big opportunity there to customise and personalise that. I think that is quite common. 

I think sending far too many emails in far too short a time frame which just feels non personal and a bit too generic and maybe a bit too sales oriented.  Once again this doesn’t take into account where a person is in their nurture journey. If we simplify the funnel - Awareness / Consideration / Decision - you don’t want to send decision bases sales emails to someone who is in the awareness stage. This doesn’t resonate well. 

I think a lot of it is a symptom of the power of automation from a lot of different email marketing tools over time. People are just not up-skilled in lead nurturing and they are also not the recipient of the email sequences they are setting up. 

I think people are also under a lot of performance pressure. They are trying hard to drive results and one of the instincts is “Send more emails.” But actually all you are doing is increasing the churn. It may have a short term impact but you are impacting deliverability and leading to higher churn as people are unsubscribing  because you are bombarding them. 

What’s interesting in relation to the Awareness / Consideration / Decision segmentation is that brands may do that at the point they come in - that is when the lead is generated - but they don’t update this status and change nurturing accordingly?  

Yep, it’s definitely a part of this “What is the origin of the lead?” question. I think it’s also a part of the complexity because you do have multiple channels and multiple sources. The problem is we create linear journeys but people are not linear. They behave in a way that is actually very convoluted and complex and chaotic. I think the concept of the funnel is to try and bring sanity to that process but the problem is it is not really reflecting how people behave. 

We are moving away from fixed channel stages to hyper-personalised data driven models. 

When it comes to progressive profiling is there a good way to encourage leads to engage?

I think there is a difference between getting data and getting the right data. It’s not about the number of questions you ask it’s about asking the right questions. 

With progressive profiling what a lot of people are trying to do is actually overcomplicating things. Especially if you are manually creating these different sequences. What you really need to understand is what is the most important information you need? It already makes it easier because you have to ask less questions to get that information. 

It also comes back to value. You have to offer something of value to them to get them to fill in the form / answer the question. 

Don’t stop there. Oren has tons more to offer! Check out the full podcast on Spotify, Apple or watch over on Databowl’s YouTube Channel.