5 Ways Automated Lead Nurturing Will Change Communication With Clients

The process of building relationships with prospects and encouraging them to choose to do business with you is called lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is a valuable process that helps you build connections with your target audience members and, with the right approach, make more sales.

Lead nurturing can get difficult as you grow your business. Growth means more people sending you inbound messages. It also means you have to respond to everyone quickly and with the right messaging—that can get tricky. Fortunately, by automating the lead nurturing process, you’ll put your business in a better position to answer questions and encourage leads to convert into paying customers.

What is lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing refers to the processes you use to nurture the relationship between your business and prospects, which you hope to turn into leads and, ultimately, conversions.

What is the automated part of automated lead nurturing?

Automated lead nurturing is a tool for building relationships without you or your sales team spending as much time nurturing them personally. Automation tools can take some of the stress of nurturing relationships off your shoulders by automatically sending follow-up emails, offering relevant resources and information, and responding to inbound questions or concerns.

Some common examples of how automated lead nurturing works include:

• Sending reminders to leads who left items in an abandoned shopping cart online
• Sending follow-up emails with a free download, such as a guide or infographic
• Sending anniversary or birthday emails to potential or past customers
• Sending a reminder about a sale or event

With automated lead nurturing, those emails, texts, or SMS responses go out immediately, keeping leads updated on what’s going on with your brand, reminding them of products they’re interested in, and keeping the lines of communication open.

7 Benefits of Automated Lead Nurturing

The benefits of using automated lead nurturing software are useful when you want to take your business’s lead nurturing campaigns to the next level. Some of the ways automated lead nurturing can help include through:

Increased Efficiency

With automated lead nurturing, you improve efficiency. Without automation, it takes hours to go review different leads and determine who you should reach out to and with what content. Automation eliminates that process by identifying the appropriate content to send without you needing to get involved. This streamlined process reduces the risk of missing conversion opportunities and improves the speed at which you reach out to potential customers.

Better Data Management

Another benefit of automated lead nurturing is that it helps you develop better data management. Since data collection is automated and all data is stored in one location, it’s easier to stay organized, analyze the data you have, and access data when you need it.

Higher Conversion Rates

Leads that go unexplored make it harder to get the conversion rates you want. With lead generation automation, leads get consistent, timely follow-up messages, improving the chances of them becoming paying customers in the future. In addition to improved conversion rates, automation helps gather additional data and can provide you with reporting features to show you what’s working (or not). With that information, you can adjust your automated emails or conversion campaigns to appeal more to your target audience.

Consistent Lead Quality

Consistent lead quality is another reason to use automated lead nurturing tools. Automating this task means you’ll set up specific criteria to identify the leads you want to pursue. When those leads come into your inbox or reach out to your company in other ways, your automated system will get triggered and respond. Even though the process is all automated, choosing criteria for the lead to meet will ensure you get consistent lead quality. Consistent lead quality equals less stress for your sales team and a higher chance of conversions.

Improved Lead Nurturing

Manually responding to leads, keeping the right leads updated with the correct content, and sticking to a schedule can be difficult when you do it all on your own. With automation, you won’t miss outreach opportunities because your automation tool handles those communications for you. With automated lead nurturing, your leads always get consistent communications from your brand.

Scalability

As your company grows, responding to a larger influx of leads may become overwhelming. Fortunately, scalability is possible with automation. Rather than adding more people to your team to respond to a higher volume of inquiries, automation tools make it possible to respond to more people without extra effort.

Data-Driven Insights and Decision Making

A final reason to take advantage of automated lead generation is that it helps you get data-driven insights. Through your lead generation process, you’ll learn what time of day your audience likes to be contacted, gather information about your leads’ interests and what appeals to them, and more. Your business can use this information to develop more effective lead nurturing strategies.

5 Ways Automated Lead Nurturing Will Change Your Business

With the right approach, automated lead nurturing can grow a business’s revenue stream. Here are five things automated lead nurturing will do for you.

Automatically qualify, segment, and nurture new leads

It takes a lot of time to manually quality, segment, and nurture leads. With automated lead nurturing, those tasks are done automatically based on the settings you establish within the system. That rapid nurturing process means you get more potential leads into your funnel than manual methods.

Use behavior tracking to deliver the right content on time.

Behavior tracking gives you a deeper look into what your customers want and when they want it. For example, you can build segments based on specific behaviors and encourage your automation tool to send follow-up emails targeting users’ needs.

Use lead nurturing campaigns to create multiple options to buy.

You can improve the number of sales your company closes by ensuring leads have more opportunities to make a purchase from you. Leads don’t always have a straightforward path to making a purchase, so being able to send out reminders about abandoned carts or emails about upcoming events to nurture those leads and give them multiple opportunities to reengage with your brand can pay off.

Use automation for lead nurturing.

Manually responding to every lead that comes into your inbox or chat could become impossible as your business grows. But, with automation tools, you can set guidelines for lead scoring and let the tool decide if a lead is right for your sales funnel. After scoring leads and determining the likelihood of those leads becoming conversions, your automation software can boost your sales cycle. It can ensure those qualified leads get the content and information they need to convert.

Use automated reporting to make data-driven decisions.

Finally, automated reporting can change your business by showing you what works and what doesn’t. You’ll get more information on click-through rates, open rates, the kinds of links leads click, and the links that were avoided. With that information, you can make better, data-driven decisions to encourage people to buy from your brand.

The 7 Best Automated Lead Nurturing Tools of 2024

Now that you understand the importance of automated lead nurturing tools, here are seven that you may want to try as you build your brand and automate your processes.

Podium

Podium is the right choice for lead generation and automated lead nurturing across multiple industries, including MedSpas, HVAC, automotive, and others. With an AI-powered inbox and the integration of an AI Employee that can respond to inbound leads immediately, you can position yourself as a powerful competitor in your market. Podium’s Core plan starts at $399 per month. See how Podium’s AI Employee can benefit your business.

Zixflow

Zixflow is a lead nurturing tool and platform with a simple interface and user-friendly design. It centralizes lead management so your sales team can access all information about each lead in one place. Its automation features let you set up triggers through sales cadences, so follow-up contact occurs at the right time for each lead. Zixflow offers a free plan, and its basic paid plans start at $39 a month.

Campaigner

If your company prefers to handle leads via email, Campaigner is a good choice for you. Campaigner is a competitor of Mailchimp and has tools to create, track, send, and manage emails to your prospects and leads. Its automation tools let you segment leads, perform A/B testing, and send automated email sequences. Campaigner starts at $59 a month.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is pipeline management software. It both manages and tracks your leads as they move through your sales funnel, letting you gather customer data to help you more easily convert them from leads to buyers. The system is user-friendly with drag-and-drop options, and the automation tools use AI-powered prompts that focus on converting high-quality leads. Pipedrive starts at $14 a month for the most basic plan.

LeadSquared

LeadSquared is a lead nurturing tool that lets you segment leads into buckets based on region, job title, company size, industry, and other factors. When a new lead is added to the list, those buckets automatically update. Then, you can perform automated outreach through WhatsApp, email, SMS, and other channels. LeadSquared requires you to contact the team to get a quote for its service.

TextMagic

TextMagic is an SMS marketing platform. It focuses solely on sending texts and SMS messages to leads, encouraging them to click through to make a purchase (or perform another wanted action) on their mobile devices. Some of the platform’s top features include its analytics tools and the option to send bulk SMS messages. It also automatically replies to leads to keep the lines of communication open with your potential customers. TextMagic starts at $0.049 per text.

AWeber

To create, control, and automate emails to leads, you can try AWeber, an email marketing platform. This platform’s lead nurturing tools include automated email sequences for abandoned carts, cross-selling opportunities, and more. According to the company, most of the automation AWeber offers are 90% built, meaning you customize them yourself before activating them. AWeber has a range of subscription options, starting with a free plan for up to 500 subscribers. However, if you want the full functionality of the platform, you’ll need to upgrade to the Plus plan, at a minimum, at $20 a month.

Nurture Your Leads at Any Time With AI Employee

Qualified leads don’t always buy right away, and the journey to becoming a buying customer can be different for everyone based on specific buyer personas. With a lead nurturing tool, you create more opportunities for people to interact with your company and convert.

With Podium’s AI Employee, lead follow-up is automated, letting you nurture leads at any time, day or night. Any lead, whether from the web, a phone call, an email, or a text, gets an immediate response. See how Podium’s AI Employee can help you get 30% more sales by watching a demo.