Lead Nurturing with Marketing Automation: Four Steps and Three Keys to Success

Lead nurturing — approaching the prospects you win at trade shows and through your website at the right moment, and keeping it up — matters a great deal.

But there is a limit to how much customer data you can manage by hand, and to how far you can tailor communication to each person that way.

What you need here is making use of a marketing automation (MA) tool

This article covers the basics of lead nurturing, then the concrete steps and points to watch for getting results out of an MA tool.

Summary
・Lead nurturing means providing useful information that matches the stage a customer has reached, nurturing them through to an order
・An MA tool makes customer behaviour visible, automates outreach and picks out the most promising customers, lifting sales efficiency dramatically
・Success rests on four steps — defining the target, preparing content, scoring and automation — plus close co-operation with the sales team

▼Who this is for
・Anyone whose leads are sitting untouched and going to waste
・Anyone who cannot tell how interested a prospect is, and so cannot tell who to approach first
・Anyone reaching the limits of sending email and managing lists by hand
・Anyone who wants to build a system that automates the work

1. What lead nurturing is

Lead nurturing is the process of raising the interest of the prospects (leads) you have won and nurturing them to the point where they are considering a purchase。

In B2B, and with high-value products, the period between a customer’s first contact and a purchase tends to be long.

So rather than leaving customers who do not buy straight away, you keep useful information flowing, so that when the moment to decide arrives you are their first choice.

※We cover lead nurturing in more detail in the article below, so do take a look at that as well.
Related article: What is lead nurturing? Methods and steps, explained in full

※For concrete methods of winning prospects in the first place — lead generation — see the article below.
Related article: What is lead generation? The main methods, the points that make it work, and examples

※For the whole picture of the marketing process from winning prospects through to creating meetings — demand generation, lead nurturing included — see the article below.
Related article: What is demand generation? Concrete methods and implementation steps for maximising leads, meetings and revenue

2. The advantages of using MA for lead nurturing

Bringing a marketing automation (MA) tool into your lead nurturing turns marketing activity that tends to depend on individuals into a system, and sharply improves both the efficiency and the precision of your outreach across the organisation.

2.1 Making customer behaviour visible: never miss a spike in interest

With an MA tool in place, you can see in real time which emails a customer opened, and which pages on your site they looked at, when and how many times.

Behaviour such as repeatedly viewing the pricing page, or reading a particular case study closely, is a strong sign that the decision is moving forward.

Capturing shifts in interest you could never see before, as numbers and data, means you can follow up at exactly the right moment。

2.2 Automating outreach: the right communication around the clock

By setting the conditions in advance — which customer behaviour triggers what, and when — you can have actions such as sending an email run automatically.

For example, the system can take care of a whole sequence: a thank-you email immediately after a white paper is downloaded, then a related case study three days later.

Even outside working hours, you can keep the right information flowing around the clock without making customers wait, which keeps lost opportunities to a minimum。

2.3 Picking out promising customers: prioritising without relying on a salesperson’s instinct

Scoring, which puts a number on customer behaviour, means you can judge objectively which customers out of a huge list sales should approach right now。

With rules such as +20 points for attending a seminar and +10 for reading a case study collection, you pass to sales only the customers whose total passes a threshold, so the sales team can concentrate its resources on the meetings most likely to convert.

3. Four practical steps for lead nurturing with MA

Here are four concrete steps for turning lead nurturing into a system with an MA tool, and getting results from it.

3.1 ①Define your target (persona) and the customer journey

Start by being clear about who you are talking to and what experience you want to give them.

Set out in detail the persona that represents your ideal customer, then write out the customer journey — the process that customer goes through from recognising a problem to adopting a solution.

• gathering information
• comparing options
• making the final decision

For each of these phases, picture concretely what the customer is worried about and what information they are looking for, and write it down.

3.2 ②Prepare your content

Based on the journey you have mapped, prepare the content you will deliver to customers at each phase.

Even with an MA tool in place, nurturing will not work if there is nothing to deliver.
Here are some examples of content by phase.

Phase	What the customer is thinking	Example content to prepare
Gathering information	“I have a vague sense of the problem, but I do not know how to solve it…”	・Industry trend explainers ・Beginners’ guides ・Useful background information and so on
Comparing options	“I know what the options are, but I want to narrow down which one suits us…” “There are too many options and I cannot tell which one suits us…”	・Case studies ・Product comparison tables ・Detailed feature explainers and so on
Making the final decision	“I want to clear up the doubts about adopting it and get sign-off”	・Cost calculators ・Role models for how to run it ・Q&A collections and so on

Rather than simply introducing your product, keep providing useful information that solves the problems your customers have — that is how trust is built.

3.3 ③Set your scoring rules

For each customer action, decide in advance the rules for awarding points。

With a huge list of customers, this lets you work out automatically which of them are the high-priority ones to approach now.

It is a good idea to split the rules into attribute-based scores and behaviour-based scores, as below.

Category	Example item	Points awarded	Aim
Attribute score	Job title (decision-maker, board-level)	+20 points	Likely to hold the authority to decide
	Target industry	+10 points	An industry that fits your product well
	Headcount (above a threshold)	+10 points	Budget and needs line up
Behaviour score	Email opened	+1 point	Interested in what you send out
	Case study page viewed	+5 points	Looking for a concrete picture of what adoption would look like
	Pricing page viewed	+10 points	Checking concrete budget figures; the decision is moving forward
	Enquiry or demo request	+50 points	Very high intent; needs an immediate response

Define customers whose total passes a threshold as qualified leads (SQLs) and set the system to notify sales immediately, and your sales activity lands at exactly the right moment.

3.4 ④Design your workflows (automation)

Once you have your personas, your content and your scoring rules in place, use the features of your MA tool to build flows that automate the whole sequence of communication。

A particular action becomes the trigger, and the system carries out the action you decided on in advance.

Here are some examples of what that can look like.

・Designing an email sequence
Starting from a document request, build a scenario that sends a related case study a day later and an invitation to a free assessment three days after that

・Setting up branching
Send deeper information to those who clicked a link in the email, and try a different angle with those who did not.

This automation lets you keep up careful, individual follow-up with every customer without taking up your team’s time.

4. Three things that make MA work

With an MA tool, what matters is how you run it after it is in place.
Here are three things that matter for making the tool work and nurturing leads effectively.

4.1 Personalise

Sending every customer the same email will not get you far.

Drawing on what builds up in the MA tool —attribute data (industry, job title and so on) and behaviour data (pages viewed, downloads)— and tailoring what you send to each customer’s interests matters a great deal。

Here are some examples of how to divide it up.

・By the problem they have
To a customer who often reads blog posts about cutting costs, send a case study about cost savings. To one who downloaded a guide about growing revenue, send know-how on opening new channels.・By how far along they are
To a first-time visitor, send a guide to the basics; to a customer who has already looked at the pricing page or a comparison table, send an invitation to a one-to-one consultation or a demo.

When people feel the information is relevant to them, open rates and return visits rise sharply, and trust builds more easily.

4.2 Work closely with sales

Not letting a wall grow up between marketing and sales is critical to running MA well。

However well you use MA to pick out promising customers, no order will follow unless that information reaches the sales team correctly and leads to action.

To make that work smoothly, you need to build two processes into the system.

・Agreeing the handover criteria (being clear about when a lead passes over)
If marketing passes over a lead it considers promising but sales feels it is too early, follow-up slips down the list and the opportunity is lost.
Agreeing clear criteria on both sides in advance — what score has been reached, which guide was downloaded — is what makes the handover efficient and productive.

・Feeding information back (the improvement cycle)
What sales hears directly from customers in meetings is valuable data for improving how you run MA. Share the view from the front line with marketing: that customers who read a particular guide are in fact less interested than expected, or that customers with a particular problem convert at a high rate. With that feedback, you can refine the scoring rules and improve the next email you send with far more precision.

When both teams work closely towards a shared goal of growing revenue in this way, the path from nurturing to meeting to signed order becomes one strong line.

4.3 Keep improving

Work that uses MA is not finished once you have set it up and automated it.
Market conditions and customer needs shift from day to day, so a cycle of continual refinement, based on the data running the system gives you, is essential。

In concrete terms, you improve on the following points, over and over.

・Analysing the results of each email
Analyse open rates and click rates closely for every email you send. Where the response is poor, change the subject line to something that catches the eye, adjust the timing, and check whether the content you are pointing people to matches what they expect. Repeated A/B testing is how you build up what works for your own business.

・Refining your scoring
Check that your scores hold up against actual meeting outcomes. If you keep losing deals you passed to sales on a high score, the point rules may not reflect how far along the customer really is. If a new pattern emerges — that people who read a particular white paper are closer to an order, say — change the weighting and sharpen the selection.

Rather than aiming for perfection from the start, begin small, watch how the front line responds and keep making small adjustments: that is the shortest route to a big result over the long run.

5. Use MA for lead nurturing and build effective, sustained demand

We hope that was useful.
Lead nurturing is an important strategy for strengthening contact with prospects you have been overlooking and for building a revenue base over the medium to long term. Bring in an MA tool, run it through the right steps, and you can build an efficient system that drives revenue without depending on individuals.

At NowVillage we work with HubSpot, the highly regarded CRM and MA platform, and support you throughout — from strategy and initial setup to ongoing work alongside your team.

“We want to reopen contact with customers we only ever exchanged business cards with”
“We want to increase the number of meetings our sales team holds”

If that sounds like you, do get in touch with NowVillage.

Talk to NowVillage