Lead follow up, lead nurture, middle of funnel, social selling …. There are a lot of different ways to say “talk to your leads” after they join your list.

And this is where the money is made.

It’s also often where businesses (mine was guilty of this for a long time too) lose A LOT of revenue.

In the “clothes dryer” of the funnel – I’ll explain what that means in just a second.

First, let’s define what lead nurturing is … and then why I call it the clothes dryer of every funnel.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is building relationships with your potential customers (your leads) with the goal of earning their business.

People buy from those they like and trust … and those two things can sometimes take a bit of time – especially if your business doesn’t have a well recognized brand or reputation.

Time … this brings me back to the clothes dryer analogy – and why we tend to lose money with lead nurturing.

It takes time!

And we all know how that goes.

When we throw a load of laundry into the dryer, some of it dries pretty quickly (does anyone hate laundry as much as I do?)

The thin t-shirts will dry a lot quicker than a big ol’ fluffy towel.

Which means the towels take more time to dry.

But if we keep the dryer going, everything eventually gets dry.

Our leads are like the load of clothing we throw in the dryer.

Lead nurturing is the dryer tumbling.

If we don’t keep our dryers going, our leads won’t dry (aka build enough trust & relationship to pull out their credit cards).

And that takes time. Which most of us don’t have. And thus, we lose money in the clothes dryer of our funnels.

Enter automation.

What is marketing automation for lead nurturing?

Yay!

What if we could use technology to automate our lead nurturing and follow up?

Then, we can do things like *actually finish our laundry* while our leads are being nurtured, relationships are being built AND sales are being made.

Marketing automation uses technology to send emails, text messages etc to our leads and nurture them into a sale.

This is what will save you time, ensure that your leads are being taken care of and speed up the entire process.

Win – Win – Win

I’m a firm believer that up to 70% of our businesses can be automated …. with the right strategy and then of course – the right technology

Because everything repeatable can be automated.

Let’s dive in.

3 best marketing automations for lead nurturing

Ok now that we have covered some benefits of marketing automation for lead nurturing (and talked about laundry), let’s look at execution.

After all, those leads aren’t going to nurture themselves.

[Oh but they will after we get this set up].

Build it once – use it for years!

1. Marketing Automation – Email Drip Campaigns

Let’s start with one of the most simple (yet most effective) marketing automation for lead nurturing – an email drip campaign.

When someone joins your list (from a lead magnet, newsletter, purchase etc), drip out a series of emails over time in a nurture email campaign.

All automated of course!

If you want to check out my 7-Figure Funnel Framework, grab a free pass to my masterclass.

Here’s an example flow of a quiz funnel email drip campaign that delivers quiz results and follows up with an invitation to join a live webinar.

Let’s take a look at how to make your email drip campaigns more effective and some ways to optimize these email drip campaigns.

How to make sure your email drip campaigns are effective (aka actually building those relationships and moving leads into your sales process)

1. The emails are relevant to the thing your lead opted in for. If you are building your list through a lead magnet, make sure that each email makes sense with the subject of the lead magnet (at least at first). This will ensure that your lead gets what they expected and you are able to connect the dots to the next thing.
2. The emails are frequent enough that your leads begin to recognize your name. One of the biggest mistakes I see with lead nurturing is not doing enough of it! According to the RAIN group, it takes on average 8 touches to move a lead to the next step. And because they won’t open every email you send, you’ll need to do more then 8.  I have good news though – this isn’t manual. This is automated.
3. The emails provide value AND an invitation. You have no idea how many clients I’ve worked with who came to me with a “sales” problem and the real problem was that there wasn’t any “sales” happening. You have to make offers. Often. All the time even. And no, this isn’t overly salesy. Yes, we want to nurture our leads and provide value. But we also want to make sure that when we are ready, they are able to say yes right then.

So, take a look at your email drip campaigns. Do you have ‘em? Are they effective?

2. Marketing Automation – Audience Segmentation

Alright, so now we have covered simple email drip campaigns for your lead nurturing. And if you get that one in place, you’ll be ahead of most. Those emails are the first step in keeping your clothes dryer tumbling.

But hang on …. What if we could make that lead nurturing MORE effective?

What if we could segment, qualify and personalize our lead nurturing?

[Yes, still completely automated]

Audience segmentation is a fancy phrase that means putting your leads into groups based on interests, behaviors etc.

If we have groups of leads that have something in common, we can talk to them a little differently. This creates a personalized and very targeted lead nurturing process that is completely automated. And yes, as always – you just have to build it once.

My absolute favorite way to do this is through a quiz funnel.

A quiz funnel acts as a lead magnet, lead qualification tool, and allows us to segment our audience based on strategic quiz results. If you want to make your lead generation more effective and build in automated lead nurturing, check out my free 3 day challenge to design, build and launch a quiz funnel in less than a week.

With this funnel, you’ll now know something about your leads based on how they answer a series of questions.

You’ll segment them into categories and each category will have a different lead nurturing follow up that is very specific to their interests, needs etc.

How cool is that?

3. Marketing Automation – Buyer Behavior Tracking

Let’s go one step further in our marketing automation for lead nurturing.

One of my favorite marketing automations to segment my audience is buyer behavior tracking.

What does that mean?

It means putting the leads that are closer to the sale on a different follow up system than those who might still need a little more nurturing.

Tracking buyer behavior helps you prioritize your leads and focus more efforts on the ones who are most likely (and ready now) to convert to a sale.

With the right strategy + tech, this is actually pretty simple to do.

What are examples of buyer behavior?

• Opening emails
• Clicking emails
• Checking out your sales page
• Downloading resources
• Booking calls
• Video consumption
• Starting (but not completing) the sales process – aka abandon cart

It’s cool to track those behaviors … but it is even cooler to do something about it. The whole idea is that when a lead begins to exhibit those buyer behaviors, your automations do something to help them go ahead and buy.

Here are a few examples that are all pretty simple to set up.

Video Consumption – If you have a lead who watches 50% or more of a sales video, you could put that lead into a sales sequence, alert your sales team or send a text message. This works great for evergreen webinars, video sales letters (VSLs) and video based lead magnets.

Here’s an example of a workflow that is triggered when a lead watches 90% or more of one of my evergreen webinars. We then do some pretty cool stuff – like tag them as a hot lead, kick off sales sequences and more!

Page View – If you have leads who are viewing your checkout page but haven’t completed a purchase, wouldn’t it be cool to reach out to them to see what questions they have or nudge them to complete a purchase?

Here’s an example of a workflow that is triggered when someone visits one of my sales pages

Abandon Cart – Attention – hot lead alert! I personally recover over 50% of the sales from leads who begin to checkout but don’t complete their purchase. All with a simple email drip that pushes them back to what they started. A two-step order form and 4 part email series will do the trick here. You can use your email sequence to remind them, overcome objections and even provide a discount code.

Here’s a workflow trigger example when someone begins the checkout process but doesn’t follow through

Pretty cool, huh?

And the best part is that if your marketing automation tags your leads as they begin to exhibit this buyer behavior, you can do some really cool things – like score your leads, make custom offers, prioritize sales team reach outs and always know who is closest to the sale!

Final Thoughts on Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing

I know I can get pretty nerdy when it comes to automation. But that’s because I love to work smarter – not harder.

Marketing automation is where strategy meets technology. You gotta have both.

Luckily, we have built out a platform that is both strategic and beautiful.

Imagine having an automation suite completely built out for you baked full of the strategy that took me years to develop?