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Most B2B lead nurturing tactics focus on brand building and lead conversion. But while connecting with new prospects, marketers often tend to forget about existing clients. Such neglect can lead to a drop in customer lifetime value and slower sales.
It is a common misconception among many businesses that a lead nurturing process ends when a lead becomes a customer. Lead nurturing is one of the few marketing strategies with workflows that deal with established clients. Still, only 29% of brands nurture their old customers beyond their first purchase.
The time has come for marketers to realise the scope of customer retention and start focusing on lead nurturing programs that encourage former customers to try out new services and products. This blog explores the top lead nurturing campaigns you can use to boost client engagement and create a big community of loyal customers.
But first, let’s answer an important question.
Why Established Customers Become Inactive
Your B2B lead nurturing tactics will fail if you don’t know why a particular customer has lost interest in your services. There can be many reasons behind such behaviour, but some of the common ones are:
- Poor customer care services
- Finding a better alternate
- Not able to fully utilise the services or product, resulting in abandonment
- Shortage of budget
- No longer require the services
All these scenarios occur due to a lack of communication between the company and the customer.
It will leave the clients disappointed, whether it is due to a time crunch, an overload of new leads, or any other lapses in your marketing system. But all these problems have a single solution: an effective lead nurturing campaign.
Suggested Reading: Things to do Before Setting Up a Lead Nurturing Plan
Importance of Lead Nurturing in Customer Retention
To turn customers into repeat buyers, marketers must establish and maintain a healthy relationships with their clients. Beyond solving consumer queries, companies need to invest in additional outreach programs that target only former or current clients.
Businesses can develop highly personalised marketing campaigns with lead nurturing. It is a process that aims to connect with customers proactively to generate credibility and a high brand recall rate. Most B2B lead nurturing tactics used to generate qualified leads, like email nurturing sequences, lead scoring, automation, etc., are also effective for re-engaging clients.
Integrating customer retention with lead nurturing pushes for a balanced approach toward efficient marketing under budget. Research claims that an increase of 2% in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%.
So lead nurturing helps you generate high ROI and a loyal customer base with simple nurturing techniques.
Suggested Reading: A Simple Guide For Email Nurturing Campaigns With Examples
B2B Lead Nurturing Tactics To Re-Engage Old Clients
Implementing B2B lead nurturing tactics for past clients is different from those used for potential clients. Content marketing and email promoting still play a crucial role in connecting with clients.
But what should you share with a client who already knows about your brand and has bought services?
To answer this question, you need to ask two questions:
- From your customers: What they didn’t get?
- From your team: What more do we have to offer?
And you will be ready with a load of answers that can get you started preparing a lead nurturing strategy that focuses on re-engaging past customers. Now, let’s understand how you can employ those ideas correctly.
1. Sharing Roadmaps
Building a business is a never-ending process. Developer needs to update their services or products regularly to meet the ever-changing demands of consumers. By taking feedback from paying customers, companies can build a roadmap of future features they will add to their services.
A roadmap will help align a brand’s goals with customer requirements and stay on track. It showcases your interest in consumer opinion and establishes you as a trustworthy brand.
For example, I am a paid member of Appsumo’s comprehensive writing tool Blogely. I have received a couple of emails from the Blogely team asking for feedback and discussing the tool’s roadmap. The email copy utilises the feedback page’s link and encourages the receiver to share their response.
2. Branded Nurturing
When you push former clients back into your sales pipeline, they do not start from the top of the funnel. Instead, they enter as marketing qualified leads (MQL).
And according to lead nurturing rules, an MQL turns sales-ready when nurtured with content that presents a brand’s services as a great solution to their problems. Employing this process becomes easier to engage past clients as the required data for curating such content is already present via feedback and surveys.
Understand the problems that your inactive and active clients face with your current services. Build checklists, how-to blogs, short videos, etc., that explain a step-by-step method to eliminate common queries that stop customers from utilising your services to their full potential.
3. Build a Community
Communities bring like-minded people on the same platform. How about you do the same with your customers?
Most of your paying consumers face the same challenges and have the same goals. Creating a supportive community where you and your customers can share tips & tricks or recent breakthroughs achieved with the help of your services can work as a great way of keeping the clients busy and collecting social proof.
Such communities establish an emotional bond between customers and companies, which results in higher brand loyalty. According to research, the emotionally connected customer can stay with the brand for 5.1 years.
Marketers have also picked up on this trend and have created dedicated platforms like Circle, Tribe, etc., where brands can easily create a separate space for their clients.
4. Leverage Remarketing
Encouraging former clients to get upgrades for the bought services or investing in a new product requires companies to revamp their marketing strategy entirely.
Remarketing refers to reconnecting with past customers via different channels. Businesses have a robust database of all their active or inactive clients. With the help of this data, marketers segment customers into groups and create remarketing campaigns according to their needs.
For example, if a former SaaS customer mainly communicated via emails, they get put under the remarketing channel of email nurturing. Such email sequences can start with emails like “how you have been” and expand to telling customers how they can avail of offers and access new software features.
All in all, remarketing is an efficient way of tapping into lost connections and making them aware they are a part of your brand.
5. Smart Promotions
When all re-engagement strategies fail, smart promotions can always help.
Smart promotions are time-bound offers that capture customer attention and motivate them to interact with your content. Companies use discount offers, extended warranties, additional benefits, events, etc., to trigger an action from the consumer by keeping the offers available for a limited time.
For example, birthday emails have a 179% higher click-through rate than simple emails. If a former client has their birthday coming by, mail their birthday wishes and a discount code that is only valid for the birthday month.
How To Implement B2B Lead Nurturing Tactics
With all the above B2B lead nurturing tactics, re-engaging past clients might seem hectic. Marketers prevent such situations by automating the lead nurturing workflow.
B2B marketing automation makes it easier to segment and create highly personalised lead nurturing campaigns for re-engaging former clients. Tools like ActiveCampaign, Hubspot, Plezi, etc., allow you to create automated marketing sequences that can include all your engagement efforts on one platform.
For more details, you can check out this blog:
B2B Marketing Automation: What Is It And How To Use It To Drive Sales
You should also pay attention to your churn rate as it helps understand whether your B2B lead nurturing tactics are working or not.
What is the Churn Rate metric?
It is the percentage of clients that have stopped doing business with you over a certain amount of time. According to reports, SaaS companies’ annual churn rate must be 5-7%. The brand must evaluate its lead nurturing programs for active and inactive customers if it is higher.
Suggestion: Don't miss out on the opportunity to enhance your lead generation and conversion rates with this downloadable PDF resource. It presents a wide range of effective lead nurturing ideas that you can implement in your marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
A lack of timely engagement with the client is one of the persistent reasons businesses lose paying clients. B2B lead nurturing tactics help companies solve these problems in an organised manner and further strengthen the bond between a brand and a customer.
I highly suggest you read the Ultimate Guide to B2B Lead Nurturing to clear your concepts and fully embrace business growth possibilities. It will help you efficiently balance prospects and clients in the same marketing system.
Related Articles:
9 Types of Lead Nurturing Campaigns to Drive Growth
5 Lead Nurturing KPIs To Measure for Better User Experience
Lead Nurturing Tips For Startups To Accelerate Business Growth
Top 9 Mistakes in SaaS Lead Nurturing and How To Fix Them
Optimizing Lead Nurturing for Higher Qualified Leads
