3. Designing your nurture

How to build stronger, better-targeted nurture programs.

Why do we nurture?

Trying to sell to cold prospects is tough. To drive sales, leads need to be “warmed up” over time. Buyers spend most of their time doing research online. Just 17% of their time is spent meeting with vendors.

Prospects don’t have a high propensity to purchase unless they have a need, and place value on a product or service. But before prospects can value a solution, they need to understand how they benefit from the outcomes it delivers and how it addresses the challenges they’re facing.

That’s where nurture (or drip) programs come in. These programs acknowledge the 95/5 rule, which says that at any given time, only around 5% of your audience are actually ready to buy. The other 95% need to be kept warm, so that when they are ready to buy, your brand is at the front of their mind.

The purpose of a nurture program is to engage and educate those prospects over time. Messaging and content are shared with them gradually, helping them build up a robust understanding of what you offer and why it’s valuable to them—while keeping your offering front-of-mind over a period of weeks or months.

This approach helps prospects learn everything they need to know about a product or service, without being subjected to a direct sales pitch. It’s a natural learning process that, when executed correctly, drives higher intent and pipeline conversion rates when MQLs are passed to the sales team.

Practice mindful
lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is a slow, gradual process. See how practicing it mindfully can help you deliver better results for everyone.

Read now

How to design content for prospect nurturing

Content is the most important component of a nurture program. While distribution and workflow design are important, if the content isn’t compelling, then readers won’t engage with it—meaning they don’t learn anything from it. To design content relevant to the prospects you’re nurturing, you need to dissect your product or solution.

Start by asking the following:

What outcomes does my product drive?
How does it drive those outcomes?
What problems does it solve?
How does it solve those problems?
Why are those problems an issue for our prospects?
What happens if you don’t address the problems?

The main takeaway from these questions is that regardless of what problem your product solves or the outcome that it drives, you also need to articulate how it does those things.

Understanding and exploring the “how” helps teams create the educational content that’s critical for a nurture program, and get to the heart of what makes their offerings valuable for prospective customers.

The basics of good nurture workflow design

Good nurture workflow design starts with a strong understanding of your prospects, enabling you to create the right content for them and deliver it in natural ways that educate and engage without being pushy.

Here are our tips for creating a successful nurture program:

Be consistent

Send emails at the same time, in line with target time zones. If you’re nurturing prospects in the UK and the US simultaneously, early afternoon works best. Ensure you only send emails on weekdays, excluding weekends, evenings, and public holidays from your schedule.

Segment your audience

Focusing on individual audience segments can help you keep your programs relevant—especially if your value proposition changes based on the target. In most cases, you’ll want to segment your audience by job title or seniority, industry or vertical, or company size. For example, C-suite or director-level prospects don’t respond well to “how to” guides that are common in marketing, but may have a higher interest in broader thought leadership or predictive industry reports.

Find the right frequency

While it’s tempting to send emails three times a week, avoiding spam is critical to the success of a nurture program. Sending one to two emails a week is sufficient for most nurture activities. Often, marketers think that sending frequent communications will qualify prospects faster, but the reality is that emails are ignored and prospects feel harassed, leading to negative sentiment about the brand.

Experiment freely

Today’s prospects know when they’re in a sales funnel and understand that downloading content will result in phone calls and emails pushing toward a demo—usually at the wrong time. Experimenting with how education is delivered can result in big gains. Newsletters, organic social posts, and free courses have gained popularity as nurture tactics in recent years and often drive increased engagement versus the static email programs that have been common for the last decade.

Key nurture pitfalls - and how to avoid them

There are a few critical pitfalls to avoid when building a nurture program. Keep an eye out for early indicators of these problems when designing your own campaigns:

The program is too short

The most common approach to nurture programs is to build between three and five emails that slowly work towards sending the prospect a demo request form. But often, that isn’t enough to get the job done. B2B decision-making is a complex process, with some experts estimating that the average prospect goes through 20 to 50 touchpoints before buying. So, if you aren’t nurturing for at least two times your average sales cycle, you aren’t likely to be successful.

Not focused on the prospect

There’s a huge temptation for marketers to make their nurtures focused on product marketing and self-promotion. However, this results in a misalignment between the intent that marketers assume a lead is showing, and the research a prospect is trying to conduct—leading to low engagement and a lack of scoring opportunities. Promoting demo request CTAs and products too early can also turn prospects off of your solution, wasting the budget you’ve invested into generating leads in the first place.

Only built around email

While the most common approach to nurturing prospects is through email, it isn’t necessarily the most effective tactic. As inboxes have become overwhelmed with communications, email has become a low engagement channel. If you frequently find yourself ignoring emails that don’t come directly from colleagues, you’re certainly not alone. To overcome that challenge, marketers must do all they can to make their emails stand out, and vary the channels and formats they use across their nurture programs.