4 Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns for B2B to improve your client conversion rate

Constant communication with your clients and potential clients is of crucial importance for the success of your customer retention and conversion, ROI, revenue, and more. It’s the essence of the business in B2B world.

With the peak of inbound marketing as one of the leading channels for lead generation, your lead nurturing strategy must be a top priority. 

And how is this connected to client communication?

The easiest way to communicate with your clients on let’s say “daily basis” is through some sort of a sequence that will keep them engaged with your product or service, but at the same time you’ll be able to “influence” them into paying and staying with your solution.

These sequences of messages (either through email, social media channels, or a mixture of both) are often referred to as lead nurturing campaigns. 

Let’s go through the basics and what you should implement in terms of lead nurturing campaigns in B2B.

What are lead nurturing campaigns?

First and foremost, we need to know that there are a number of ways to nurture a lead: you can use personalized content through various channels, landing pages, use a multi-channel approach to nurturing, or even stick to a single channel like email outreach and create follow-up sequences. Either way, you need to create content that will be distributed according to certain triggers and timing.

The lead nurturing campaigns are usually email or LinkedIn campaigns that are set up in a sequence with the goal to follow your leads’ behavior and in a timely manner send them content and information according to their actions. 

Your ultimate goal here would be to “feed” them with the proper content in order to win them over (or back) to your product or solution.

In order to set up your lead nurturing campaigns, you need to use CRM and message-sending software for email and/or LinkedIn messages (like Sales.Rocks ;)). 

Your CRM will contain all of the information for your lead actions and you can import your specific lists of leads and send the messages through your automation software.

At this point, if you worked before with email campaigns you might find drip campaigns and lead nurturing campaigns very similar. However, there are quite some differences in terms of the setup for both, mainly the lead base you are reaching out to (this will be a base of inbound leads and clients), their actions, and time setup.

We won’t go into details of the drip campaigns, but you can check in our other article about Drip-Campaigns, what they are and how to set them up.

It’ll depend on the end goal of your campaign in order to choose whether to use drip- campaigns or lead nurturing campaigns.

Why are lead nurturing campaigns important?

It all comes down to missed opportunities. If you don’t regularly communicate with your customers, potentials, or leads, they strive to go somewhere else. It’s just like private life, you need to nurture your relationships in order for them to grow (in this case they’ll grow into loyal, long-term customer relationships).
 

How would you keep in touch with potentials and leads?

By setting up lead nurturing campaigns you’ll make sure you follow up with people with different intents, and you can do this automatically, hitting the prospect or lead, or even customer with the proper content at the proper moment with the main goal to convert.

Types of lead nurturing campaigns for client conversion

Now let’s skip the rest of the theory and get into practice:
There are a lot of cases you can implement a lead nurturing campaign, with, of course, different goals. This is why is important to set up your campaign goals upfront.

Let me walk you through the nurturing campaigns we’ve set up for Sales.Rocks.

 1. Lead nurture for unfinished registrations

There are times when an interested person is just hesitant if they are ready to put the trust (that also means money) in your product or service. 

But this doesn’t mean that they won’t choose you, it’s just that they might not be ready yet and need more persuading of the benefits your product brings.

We’ve set up a campaign that will follow up the users that haven’t finished the registration on the Sales.Rocks Platform, so that we can check if help is needed or they got stuck somewhere and weren’t able to register, but also send out additional information that will help them with their choice. 

Creating a FOMO (fear of missing out) in this series would be a good way to draw attention, for example, some free offer for a limited time or a reminder. 

The outcome of your lead nurturing campaign should be to keep your leads warmed up and reminded of what they are missing out on, and eventually convert them into customers.

Templates from our Lead Nurturing campaign of this type would look like this:

2. Welcoming series

When a potential decides to give your solution a go (this can be a trial or even a booked call for a demo), it’s time to give them a little extra attention.

If you want to go the extra mile here, you can even include the higher-level person in your company hierarchy. Having your CEO or Founder in direct communication with each potential gives your campaign even more authority and builds the trust from your potentials.

The welcoming nurture campaign can contain different types of content, mainly focusing on the benefits of the service you are offering. Sending over How-tos and Guides, giving them some stats and solutions to pain points from their industry can be a solid base for a welcoming sequence.

The outcome of these types of nurturing campaigns would be an opportunity to upgrade your potential into a paid customer, to upsell or keep the potential interested for a longer period of time.
 

Here is our example:

3. Customer Success nurturing campaigns

After you won a customer, you don’t want to leave them on their own and forget about them. You would need to spend even more time now after the conversion, than the time you spent converting them. 

Nurturing campaigns from your Customer Success Team are crucial for customer retention, getting feedback, and improving your service. 

Depending on the subscription they chose or the product they bought, you can set up nurturing campaigns to follow up with your customers on their satisfaction and experience with your solution. 

The outcome of these customer nurturing campaigns would be to get all the feedback in and inspect the readiness of your current customers to stay with you and even upgrade. 

The best way to communicate through these campaigns is to assign a dedicated Agent that each of your customers will get acquainted with and get comfortable enough to share their true feedback and experience. 

The outcome of these campaigns would be to get feedback, get an opportunity to ask for case studies, ask customers to get in the loyal program, community, or partnership, and eventually upgrade the customer to a higher tier. 

This type of nurturing campaign will also increase your product adoption rate. The easier is for users to adopt to using your product, the longer they will stick with it.

Here is how we get feedback from our customers:

4. Lead nurture for canceled subscriptions and refunds

The ugly truth is that one size doesn’t fit all. Often enough you’ll have cases where a customer decides that your solution doesn’t cover their needs, or your product was not what they expected.

There is no need to burst into tears, but rather learn from the valuable feedback they left and take into consideration their complaints to make space for improvements. 

Having a customer cancel a subscription or refund a product, is a good opportunity to set up a lead nurturing campaign to make a path for a potential comeback. Maybe the timing for them wasn’t right, or they relocated their budget, or simply your solution still has to develop to be able to solve their challenges. Your chances might not be lost just yet.

You can reach out to them with a nurturing sequence and ask them where did you go wrong, what was missing or if there is any way you can cover their needs in the future. Offering some value in exchange might also change their mind, let’s say some free resources or something extra to give your solution another go.

Might sound like bribing, but giving an extra value to a customer that has decided to no longer stay with you is an opportunity to show them that they might find something else in your solution, that they haven’t explored before, or at least end things in good term.

The outcome of the canceled subscription nurturing campaigns would be to win a client back, to give extra value in return for renewal, and let your ex-clients remember you when the right time comes for them. 

Following examples of the nurturing campaign we’ve set up:

Improvement of client conversion rate with nurturing campaigns

I’m sure, by now, you got the idea of how important lead nurturing campaigns are. Although we covered different types of nurturing campaigns with different outcomes, the main goal of a lead nurturing campaign is clear: To improve your client conversion rate, no matter if you are trying to get new clients in or upgrade your old ones.

Lead nurturing campaigns are also a go-to channel for upselling, social selling when combined with LinkedIn and set up all according to the actions of your prospects.