Automated Lead Nurturing: How It Works and How to Overcome Common Challenges

Key takeaways

• Automated lead nurturing guides prospects toward a sale with less manual effort from marketing and sales teams, enhancing the customer experience and helping sales generate more revenue.
• To automate lead nurturing programs, you need sales software integrated with other sales and marketing tools that not only coordinate personalized content sequences for each lead but also create a unified customer profile within your CRM.

Successful lead nurturing automation depends on clean data, strategic lead segmentation, coordinated efforts between sales and marketing, and alignment on a lead scoring plan.

Having worked in sales, marketing, and customer success, I understand how important it is to deliver relevant content to customers. And as someone who now helps small teams build automated lead nurturing programs that can grow with them, I know how today's marketing and sales software helps lean teams be more productive than ever.

Small teams need all the help they can get, and large organizations need the ability to nurture thousands of leads at scale. Instead of manually updating your CRM or even working through spreadsheets of prospects at different stages of their buying journey, you can use automated lead nurturing to save time, target the right customers, and move them toward a sale.

Automated lead nurturing involves using software to automatically engage and educate potential customers. Marketing and sales teams use marketing automation software and AI sales tools to build customer profiles and deliver relevant, timely content with personalized messaging. Prospects receive content based on demographic characteristics, their position in the buyer's journey, and other content that they've engaged with. With automated lead nurturing, companies can guide them toward making a purchase without relying only on human outreach.

Here’s why automated lead nurturing is so valuable to companies. It can:

• Streamline sales and marketing efforts with fewer manual tasks
• Enhance customer experiences with relevant content, personalized messages, and timely responses
• Inform prospects who understand how your product or service meets their needs, making them warm leads for sales
• Lead to fewer missed opportunities when a prospect shows interest, because sales teams aren't distracted by cold leads or overwhelmed with manual lead qualification
• Achieve higher conversion rates because sales reps can engage in more meaningful conversations with prospects, thanks to information-rich unified customer profiles built throughout the lead nurturing process
• Speed up sales cycles that lead to more revenue

When a potential customer engages with a brand by registering for a webinar, downloading an e-book, or taking similar actions, sales automation software captures this information and adds it to the customer's data profile. The software then automatically begins nurturing the lead by sharing relevant, informative content to educate the prospect and build trust. Here's how it works:

A prospect signs up for a newsletter, which triggers an automated email confirmation that thanks them for subscribing and explains what they can expect.

The sales software sends other content, potentially across different channels, learning about each prospect's interests based on their engagement. As the system learns more, it continues to send a series of personalized emails, content, and even discount offers, further developing the customer profile.

The software continuously monitors key metrics, such as email click-through rates, and conducts A/B tests on elements like email subject lines to automatically refine and improve lead nurturing efforts.

As leads are nurtured, the software updates lead scores based on behavior and engagement. Once a specific score is reached, the software can notify a sales rep to follow up, helping sales prioritize the most engaged and qualified leads.

One way to distinguish types of lead nurturing automation is to examine marketing channels and campaigns. When you do, these common types of automated lead nurturing come to light:

• Automated email campaigns: This includes individual follow-up emails triggered by specific customer actions, such as downloading an e-book, and drip campaigns that deliver a predetermined sequence of content designed to educate and build credibility.
• Interactive, personalized automation: Chatbots are one example, providing prospects with instant answers and directing them to relevant content for further nurturing. Each lead's journey gets personalized as technology routes them to different content or webpages based on their individual actions and interests. Because each prospect's lead score is automatically updated based on their behavior, sales reps will know when it's a good time to reach out.
• Multichannel engagement: Communications are automated and coordinated across channels, such as when people who registered for a webinar receive both email and SMS reminders. This type of automated lead nurturing also includes retargeting ads across social channels and other websites.

One example of automated lead nurturing that you've probably experienced is the "abandoned cart" on an e-commerce site. You visited a brand's website, browsed, added a few items to your cart, but didn't complete the purchase. Maybe you got distracted, accidentally closed the tab, or couldn't make a final decision before moving on with your day. Whatever the reason, you are automatically entered into a follow-up campaign from the brand.

Within a few hours, an email arrives in your inbox, reminding you of the items in your cart with a link to finish the purchase. If you don't take action, you might get a second follow-up email encouraging you to buy based on the products' benefits. Finally, a day later, you receive a third email with a discount code to motivate you to complete the sale before your cart expires. All of this happens automatically. By setting up this lead-nurturing campaign, the marketing team generates more sales without any extra manual effort.

On the B2B side, a common automated lead nurturing strategy is offering a free trial. These usually attract a lot of interest, making it almost impossible for the sales team to follow up with every lead personally. Automated lead nurturing helps identify which leads to contact, when to reach out, and what messaging to use.

When a prospect signs up for a free trial, they are automatically entered into a lead nurturing sequence. During and after their trial, they usually receive content like quick-start guides to help them use the product and case studies showing how similar organizations have benefited. Based on their activity during the free trial, leads are automatically segmented or flagged for follow-up. Depending on their use of the product, leads may be assigned to additional email nurturing campaigns or directed to a sales team member for a personal meeting to answer questions and close the sale.

When it comes to automated lead nurturing, the two most common challenges relate to data and alignment between marketing and sales. Let's break it down:

If you leave outdated or non-standardized data in your CRM, you're likely nurturing leads that won't result in sales. If you don't strategically segment your leads, you risk sending irrelevant content and messages to prospects.

One way to address bad data is to use an AI-powered tool that cleans CRM data. Once you have clean data, you can focus on segmentation based on behavior, buyer stage, and customer type.

When marketing and sales don't collaborate, the customer experience becomes disjointed from start to finish. Even if you make the sale, the customer is more likely to feel confused or disappointed, which lowers your chances of keeping their business.

Resolve this by ensuring both teams understand your customers and their buyer journeys. Then establish a consistent way for marketing and sales to collaborate on the messaging and content in your lead nurturing campaigns. Finally, make sure sales and marketing agree on lead scoring criteria and implement a clear process for flagging and contacting warm leads.

Having worked with organizations of all sizes and in various niches, I recommend these best practices:

The KPIs you track should relate to your buyer journey. If you're looking at fresh leads, don't measure them based on whether they're booking sales meetings or becoming opportunities. Instead, focus on whether they're opening emails or reading content. Identify appropriate KPIs for each stage to plan effectively.

A lead that visits your website today and a lead that visited nine months ago are not the same. Accounting for decay over time ensures that each lead's website visit isn't given equal weight in their lead scores. By recognizing decay in your lead nurturing automation program, you help sales reps focus on leads with the freshest activity and strongest interest.

When you have a segment of unengaged leads, consider it a prime opportunity to test different ideas. After all, there isn't much to lose with this group, and you might discover something that works well. For instance, I know a game creator who tested a direct mailer on leads that hadn't responded to any other nurturing efforts. This creator didn't feel comfortable testing it on a larger group already engaged with digital content. Surprisingly, it was successful — and continued to perform well with other lead segments.

You need to be able to rely on your CRM as the single source of truth. Make sure any outside tools you add for marketing or sales integrate with your CRM. When you do, sales and marketing will use the same data set and have the same visibility. Beyond that, here are the must-have features to build successful automated lead nurturing programs:

• Analytics: This allows you to track behavior, engagement, and overall campaign performance, so you can figure out what works and optimize your nurturing efforts.
• Dashboards: Build custom dashboards for various teams and users, including sales leaders, sales reps, and marketing. This keeps everyone updated on goals and focused on the right activities.
• Lead scoring: Assign numerical values to leads based on their demographics and engagement to identify high-potential prospects.
• Lead segmentation: Segmenting your leads into smaller groups based on shared traits, behaviors, or interests helps you deliver relevant content that nurtures leads more efficiently.
• Multichannel nurturing: Meet people where they are, not just in their inbox. Reach out to leads and monitor their engagement across various channels, including SMS, social media, and push notifications.

I've seen too many teams fall into the trap of using the least expensive technology. What they don't realize is that it can end up costing more in the long run when they need a better, more robust option. It's wise to pick tools with features and support you'll need three years from now. This gives you room to grow without stopping for a software transition. As you select the software and tools for automated lead nurturing, consider the following:

• Ease of use: Find out if your team needs to code, use templates, or build with drag-and-drop tools.
• Speed to start: Determine how quickly your team can start using each new tool and whether you have the necessary time, resources, and support to implement and train.
• Customer support: Ask what type of training and ongoing support vendors offer.
• Integrations: A flexible CRM allows for many integrations, and any tool you add must connect with your CRM, or you won't have unified customer data.
• Scalability: Any tool you use must be able to scale as you grow, or it will cause problems later on.

Automated lead nurturing is a powerful way to earn revenue with fewer tedious tasks and less confusion between sales and marketing — but you need to start correctly. That means both teams should agree on the strategy, stay close throughout the process, and use the best tools.