What Is Lead Nurturing? Methods and Steps Explained

“We collected business cards at the trade show and through the website, but none of it turns into meetings.”
“Dormant customers keep piling up and we have no idea where to start.”

Problems like these, which many executives and sales leads have, lead nurturing can be solved by adopting it strategically.

This article covers lead nurturing from the basics through to successes built on CRM and MA.

Summary
・Lead nurturing is, in short, continuing to give prospects information and growing them into people ready to buy now: that is the process
・With consideration periods lengthening and personalisation advancing, it is today an essential survival strategy.
・As for how well lead nurturing works, use of an MA tool, joint working with sales, and a grasp of behavioural data are what decide success or failure
・With HubSpot in place, there are also many cases of a tenfold appointment rate or a 1.8 times close rate being achieved

▼Who this is for
・Anyone leaving the leads they have won untouched
・Anyone who has hit the limits of cold calling and a sales style that depends on individuals, and is considering building a system
・Anyone who wants to reawaken dormant customers efficiently and build a flow that produces meetings steadily

1. What lead nurturing is

In B2B marketing, the first step in designing a strategy is understanding the terms correctly.
We start with where lead nurturing sits in the overall process and why it matters, set out systematically.

1.1 What lead nurturing is

Lead nurturing means, literally, growing prospects, and it is one of the processes within demand generation。
It refers to the whole process in which, for the prospects — leads — won through marketing, you keep up suitable information and communication over the medium to long term, raising their interest, building buying intent, and finally leading to a meeting or an order。

Related article:
What is demand generation? Concrete methods and implementation steps for maximising leads, meetings and revenue
What is lead generation? The main methods, the points that make it work, and examples

1.2 Lead nurturing is the service that leads people to the goal of demand generation

As the figure above (Figure 1) shows, lead nurturing is one part of a sequence in marketing, and it needs to be understood as distinct from the processes either side of it: lead generation and lead qualification.

Phase	Purpose	Example activities
Lead generation	Winning prospects	・Trade shows ・Online advertising ・SEO ・Document downloads ・Running webinars and so on
Lead nurturing	Building purchase intent in the prospects you have acquired	・Automated email sequences ・Content delivery ・Retargeting ads and so on
Lead qualification	Picking out the customers with high purchase intent	・Prioritising by behavioural history and scoring ・Verification by inside sales

Lead nurturing means working continuously on customers whose purchase intent is still low at the point they are acquired through lead generation, and raising them to a state where, at the next stage of lead qualification, they can be handed to sales as customers ready to buy now.

2. Why lead nurturing is needed

So why is lead nurturing indispensable?
This section explains the background.

2.1 Because you will not be chosen unless you keep delivering individually tailored information

Before they ever speak to a sales rep, customers make full use of websites and social media to gather information on their own initiative.
Moreover with the spread of generative AI it has become possible to pull up the information you need in an instant, and the accuracy and speed of the information customers get hold of have improved dramatically。

Amid this flood of information, customers have become remarkably ruthless about discarding generic advertising that has nothing to do with them. The only things they will give their valuable time to are the ones they can instantly sense were made for them.

So it is better to write it as Without a mechanism that captures what the customer is doing right now and keeps delivering individually tailored information that feels made for them, which is what lead nurturing is, it is hard even to get onto the shortlist。

※ Tools for reliably capturing the customer’s present moment are covered in detail in a related article.
There is a rollout checklist too, so do take a look.
Related article:
Before they ever speak to a sales rep, customers make full use of websites and social media to gather information on their own initiative.
Moreover with the spread of generative AI it has become possible to pull up the information you need in an instant, and the accuracy and speed of the information customers get hold of have improved dramatically。

Amid this flood of information, customers have become remarkably ruthless about discarding generic advertising that has nothing to do with them. The only things they will give their valuable time to are the ones they can instantly sense were made for them.

So it is better to write it as Without a mechanism that captures what the customer is doing right now and keeps delivering individually tailored information that feels made for them, which is what lead nurturing is, it is hard even to get onto the shortlist。

※ Tools for reliably capturing the customer’s present moment are covered in detail in a related article.
There is a rollout checklist too, so do take a look.
Related article:
Before they ever speak to a sales rep, customers make full use of websites and social media to gather information on their own initiative.
Moreover with the spread of generative AI it has become possible to pull up the information you need in an instant, and the accuracy and speed of the information customers get hold of have improved dramatically。

Amid this flood of information, customers have become remarkably ruthless about discarding generic advertising that has nothing to do with them. The only things they will give their valuable time to are the ones they can instantly sense were made for them.

So it is better to write it as Without a mechanism that captures what the customer is doing right now and keeps delivering individually tailored information that feels made for them, which is what lead nurturing is, it is hard even to get onto the shortlist。

※ Tools for reliably capturing the customer’s present moment are covered in detail in a related article.
There is a rollout checklist too, so do take a look.
Related article: Before they ever speak to a sales rep, customers make full use of websites and social media to gather information on their own initiative.
Moreover with the spread of generative AI it has become possible to pull up the information you need in an instant, and the accuracy and speed of the information customers get hold of have improved dramatically。

Amid this flood of information, customers have become remarkably ruthless about discarding generic advertising that has nothing to do with them. The only things they will give their valuable time to are the ones they can instantly sense were made for them.

So it is better to write it as Without a mechanism that captures what the customer is doing right now and keeps delivering individually tailored information that feels made for them, which is what lead nurturing is, it is hard even to get onto the shortlist。

※ Tools for reliably capturing the customer’s present moment are covered in detail in a related article.
There is a rollout checklist too, so do take a look.
Related article:
What is CRM? Features and points to watch when rolling it out

2.2 Because customers compare carefully and decision cycles are getting longer

In an era when the number of product and service options has exploded, the customer’s biggest worry is making the wrong choice. Customers try to judge carefully which solution suits them best and whether it will deliver the results they expect once it is in place.
In B2B in particular, budgets are large and evidence and comparison data are needed to convince stakeholders, so decision cycles of several months to more than a year are not unusual.

In an environment where customers are this cautious, it is only natural that an acquired lead does not close straight away. If anything, how you spend that lengthening decision period is what decides your close rate.
Through lead nurturing, you resolve the customer’s worries one by one and keep supplying useful information at the right moment. By keeping up this work of supporting the customer’s decision, when the moment comes for them to make the final call, as the adviser they can trust you raise the odds of being chosen。

2.3 Because you want to create ready-to-buy customers efficiently

Marketing activity (lead generation) steadily grows your list of prospects, but not all of them will close straight away。
Most, in fact, are still deciding.

But it is not realistic, in time or in cost, for a limited number of sales reps to keep approaching every one of these vast numbers of leads at random.
The result is a list that fills up with dormant customers: people who once requested a document or exchanged business cards but were never followed up properly.
These dormant customers have shown interest in you at least once, and with the right trigger they still hold the potential to close. That is where nurturing them into ready-to-buy customers matters.
Keep delivering useful information to a list that would otherwise be buried, using an automated mechanism, and hand customers to sales the instant their purchase intent rises, the moment they become ready to buy. In this way, nurturing lets you go out and create meeting opportunities efficiently for yourself, and that is the shortest route to maximising what a sales organisation achieves。

3. Seven common lead nurturing methods

The key to lead nurturing is to take the right approach for the stage the target customer has reached.
Here are seven common methods.

3.1 ① Email marketing

Email is the most basic method, letting you deliver personalised information based on a customer’s interests and behavioural history in a form that is close to one-to-one rather than a single blast。
Here are the main kinds of email marketing.

・Automated email sequences (scenario emails)
Triggered by an action such as a document request or seminar attendance, these go out automatically on a schedule you set in advance. A thank-you on day one, a case study on day three, a guide after a week: information arrives in stages and purchase intent builds naturally.

・Segmented emails
Customers are classified by industry, job title, pages viewed and so on, and each group receives content focused on its own interests. Narrowing the content, for manufacturing executives say, or for marketing staff, can improve open rates and click rates dramatically.

※ A related article introduces tools that help with efficient email delivery and other marketing activity. Do have a look at that too.
Related article: What is marketing automation (MA)? Its main features, and the advantages and disadvantages of adopting it

3.2 ② Seminars and webinars

Seminars and webinars are effective as a setting for conveying specialist knowledge about your products and services, industry trends and success stories in detail。

Their advantages: you can confirm that attendees are highly interested, you can build trust through direct questions and answers, and it is easy to follow up individually afterwards.

Webinars in particular can be attended from anywhere, which makes them effective for building the relationship once a lead has been acquired.

3.3 ③ White papers

A white paper is a document bringing together know-how, research data and detailed examples that help solve a customer’s problem.

Offering content that can be downloaded free on your website is how you capture prospect information。

Those who download it are then guided to the next step by emails related to the white paper’s content or by follow-up from inside sales.

3.44 ④ Retargeting ads

This method shows your ads to users who have visited your site once, while they are browsing other sites and social media.
Customers in the middle of comparing options often drop off after a single visit to a site.
By using retargeting ads to remind them of you regularly, you can bring them back once their thinking has moved on。

3.5 ⑤ Social media marketing

Using social networks such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and LinkedIn, you post company news, blog articles and customer stories regularly. The strength of social media is showing the human face of the company; keep posting and you build familiarity and trust.
It works especially well as a low-barrier way of making contact in B2C, and with small businesses and sole traders where the decision-maker is close at hand, and it is effective at raising engagement with the brand (attachment and involvement)。

3.6 ⑥ Running owned media

This method uses a blog or news site you run yourself to publish information of value to your target audience on an ongoing basis.

By preparing articles that answer the questions and problems your customers have, you increase traffic from search engines (SEO) and establish yourself as a source they can trust. Using articles as the destination for email links, or moving readers between related articles, deepens the customer’s knowledge and creates the ground for them to recognise that they need your product。

3.7 ⑦ Inside sales

This is a sales approach that communicates without meeting in person, using the phone, video conferencing tools and email.

In nurturing, inside sales plays an important development role: hearing the customer’s specific concerns and open questions first hand and supplying the right information on the spot, lifting the customer’s decision process up a stage. Using an MA tool or similar, for customers who show signs of rising purchase intent, they make contact quickly and build a relationship of trust。
As a result, it functions as the control tower of nurturing: when needs become explicit it passes the customer smoothly to field sales for a meeting, and when more deliberation is needed it returns them to appropriate content delivery by email.

4. Six steps for putting lead nurturing into practice

The secret to successful lead nurturing is to stop sending email ad hoc and build a strategic, systematic flow.
This section breaks the process down into six steps.

4.1 [Step 1] Set your goals

Start by setting a concrete goal for the results you want from this activity. For example,

raise the share of acquired leads handed to sales within three months to 15%
or reactivate 5% of dormant customers who have had no contact for more than a year Set concrete numbers (KPIs)。
A clear goal lets sales and marketing move in the same direction.

4.2 [Step 2] Design the persona and customer journey

Next, think about who you will approach and by what path you will lead them to a close.

Define the persona, your ideal customer, and map out the journey that person takes from recognising a problem to making a purchase. Are they still at the information-gathering stage?
Or have they begun comparing specific products?

Listing the questions and worries customers hold at each stage of their deliberation is the foundation for the content you create later.

4.3 [Step 3] Organise customer information in one place

An effective approach depends on knowing the behavioural history of each individual customer.

If business card data, past email exchanges and website browsing history are scattered about, contacting people at the right moment is impossible. What matters here is consolidating information into a CRM (customer relationship management) or MA (marketing automation) tool。
With a CRM or MA tool, for instance, the whole company can see in real time when a customer read which document and which pages they were interested in, which makes precise communication possible.

4.4 [Step 4] Plan your content

Based on the persona and customer journey you have set, plan and produce the content best suited to each stage.

Stage	Customer’s interests and problems	Examples of content to offer
Awareness and problem discovery	I know there is a problem, but what exactly should I do?	・Industry trends ・Blog articles raising the problem ・Checklists
Information gathering and considering solutions	What kind of solution can fix this problem?	・White papers setting out solutions ・Case studies (including examples from competitors)
Comparison and decision	Company A or company B, which product suits us?	・Detailed product documents ・Free trials ・Webinars ・Pricing information

4.5 [Step 5] Run the activity and set rules for the approach

Deliver the content you have prepared by email and webinar, and put the activity into action.

What matters here is setting a rule for the state a customer must reach before being handed to a sales rep. 

For example,

A customer who downloads three particular guides and views the pricing page twice is treated as a hot lead and called by sales

A lead who opens five or more emails and views the pricing page at least twice is handed to inside sales

Set criteria of that kind.

With HubSpot’s scoring feature you can score this level of interest automatically and notify sales without missing the right moment.

4.6 [Step 6] Measurement and PDCA

Do not leave an activity running unchecked; always measure its results.
For example,

• Email open rate
• Click rate
• White paper downloads
• Meeting rate from webinars
• Hot lead rate

Check your results against measures like these.
Then analyse which content resonated and where customers dropped off.

Keep running a PDCA cycle on the data, trying a different subject line next time or making the case studies more specific, and the precision of your nurturing will steadily improve.

Related article:
Four steps to lead nurturing with an MA tool, and three points for success

5. What makes lead nurturing work

To turn lead nurturing into reliable profit, meaning meetings and orders, there are a few essentials to get right.
Here are the four points that decide whether it succeeds.

5.1 Systematising it with an MA tool

Whether lead nurturing succeeds comes down to how efficiently you can attend to each individual.
Doing that by hand is impossible, so an MA (marketing automation) tool is essential.

・Centralising and surfacing information
Connect MA with your CRM (customer management) and manage attributes such as industry and job title linked to behaviour such as which documents they read

・Optimising resources through automation
Automate staged email delivery and the calculation of interest levels (scoring) to prevent human error and omissions

・Personalisation
Deliver the content best suited to each customer’s behaviour at the right moment

HubSpot’s greatest strength in particular is that its CRM, MA (Marketing Hub), SFA (Sales Hub) and CMS (CMS Hub) are all connected, so the whole run from lead acquisition through nurturing and meetings to an order can be managed and executed seamlessly on one platform.

※ MA tools are covered in detail in a related article. There is a rollout checklist too, so do take a look.
Related article:
What is marketing automation (MA)? Its main features, and the advantages and disadvantages of adopting it

Checklist for choosing and rolling out MA

5.2 Sensible segmentation and content design

Sending every customer the same information will not land.
Segmentation, grouping customers by shared characteristics, matters.

・Have axes for classification
Classify not only by industry, company size and job title but by axes such as which of your products they are interested in and what problems they currently face.

・Make it their own concern
Adjusting what you send to each segment gives customers the sense that this is exactly our problem, and deepens their trust.

5.3 Using intent data (interest data)

What sets modern nurturing apart is the use of intent data.
Intent data is data that shows the intent behind what a customer does on your website.

・Sense what they want right now
If a customer suddenly starts viewing the pricing page or a comparison table frequently, for example, that is a sign their purchase intent is rising.

・How this works in HubSpot
You can send a notification to a sales rep the moment a particular page is viewed, or send a follow-up email automatically straight away.
Capturing the customer’s present movement, their intent, rather than just historical attributes, lets you approach them at the moment they are closest to buying.

Related article:
Four steps to lead nurturing with an MA tool, and three points for success

5.4 Working with the sales team

Lead nurturing is not something marketing completes on its own.
Without the sales team who meet customers in the field, even a well-nurtured lead goes to waste.

・A feedback loop
Build a cycle in which sales shares the characteristics of customers who close readily and marketing feeds that back into the nurturing scenario

Keep these points in mind and put lead nurturing into practice.

6. Lead nurturing case studies

Landnet Co., Ltd. runs property distribution and property investment businesses in Japan. For the company, a major theme was how to consolidate the vast amount of prospect information arriving from several platforms and deliver an approach tailored to each person.

6.1 Case study 1. Landnet Co., Ltd. (property)

Landnet Co., Ltd. runs property distribution and property investment businesses in Japan. For the company, a major theme was how to consolidate the vast amount of prospect information arriving from several platforms and deliver an approach tailored to each person.

Item	Details
The problem	Seminar lead sources were spread across many platforms and lead information was managed separately in each. Customer information could not be tracked chronologically, which created a lag between generating a lead and approaching it.
What they did	Customers were segmented by level of purchase intent and information from every platform was managed in one place. Scoring and routing were automated with an MA tool, and a system was built to track customer behaviour chronologically.
Results	Content suited to each individual customer became possible, and the number of meeting requests from seminars rose. It also contributed to deeper trust with customers and higher LTV (lifetime value).

6.2 Case study 2. Career Design Center Co., Ltd. (recruitment)

Career Design Center Co., Ltd. runs the job-change site Jo-sei no Tenshoku type. By moving away from its traditional sales style and introducing lead nurturing driven by inbound activity, meaning action initiated by the customer, the company achieved a dramatic improvement in close rate and sales efficiency.

Item	Details
The problem	Sales relied mainly on outbound and depended on individual skill. Inbound enquiries were underused, and nurturing methods and know-how were not shared internally.
What they did	The value of marketing and the scoring criteria were shared across the company. Working with the sales team, they built a system for passing on leads that reached a set score quickly, and committed to supplying information of genuine use to customers.
Results	The appointment rate rose tenfold and the close rate 1.8 times against previous levels. Sharing information across departments fostered a culture in which every employee feels connected to customers.

6.3 Case study 3. Kaizen Platform Inc. (IT and web)

Kaizen Platform Inc. supports DX (digital transformation) work such as websites and video advertising. By fundamentally reviewing its own marketing set-up and sharpening its persona design and purchase process, the company achieved a substantial rise in its order rate.

Item	Details
The problem	Its marketing activity was not organised systematically, and the results of one activity were not carried into the next. Measurement was insufficient, and many leads were going unused.
What they did	Working with the sales team, they built realistic personas. They drew out the customer’s real problem at each stage of the purchase process and placed content strategically to answer it.
Results	Inbound appointments rose 140% year on year and actual meetings 215%, a sharp increase. Delivering content that addressed customers’ problems contributed greatly to turning them into meetings.

6.4 Case study 4. Randstad K.K. (recruitment)

Randstad K.K. is the Japanese arm of one of the world’s largest general staffing businesses. By strategically introducing communication tools matched to its target audience’s lifestyle, the company reactivated dormant customers and dramatically improved its job-matching rate.

Item	Details
The problem	Reply rates to email, phone and SMS were low, making it hard to know how job seekers were getting on. As a result, dormant members were on the rise.
What they did	They reviewed their communication tools from the ground up and integrated LINE, which has high usage in Japan. This gave them a way to see job seekers’ employment status and wishes in real time.
Results	Reply rates rose astonishingly, from 20% to 80%. Regular communication became possible, which meant jobs could be introduced at the right moment for each person and the matching rate improved.

6.5 Case study 5. Shinfield Inc. (advertising and manga marketing)

Shinfield Inc. provides web marketing support using manga.
By making clear who to approach and when among the large volume of leads it had acquired, the company succeeded in raising both its appointment rate and its close rate.

Item	Details
The problem	They were generating plenty of leads at exhibitions and seminars, but relied on random cold calling, so the approach was not effective and rarely led to results.
What they did	They sent two kinds of email: useful information with no sales pitch, and service information with a sales element. Follow-up calls were then made only to the keener audience that came through the second kind.
Results	Narrowing the target raised the appointment rate from follow-up calls to 10-15%. A more efficient approach also produced a relative improvement in close rate.

7. Practise the lead nurturing that fits you and maximise your results

We hope that was useful.
Lead nurturing is an activity essential to maximising the value of the leads you acquire and to steady revenue growth

Many owners and managers of small and medium-sized firms will, however, be uneasy: they do not know where to start, or they doubt their own resources can run it.

NowVillage Inc. is a team of specialists dedicated to supporting the rollout and use of HubSpot.
We listen closely to your business model and the management problems you face, whether winning new customers, growing revenue or making operations more efficient, and propose the lead nurturing strategy that suits you best.

Our acquired leads are going to waste
We want to stop sales depending on individuals

If that is how you feel, do take up NowVillage Inc.’s free consultation.