What’s better than converting a lead into a sale? Nurturing that sale into a regular customer of course! And the best way to do that? By using data-driven strategies to connect with customers at every touchpoint.
Why is it so important to invest in nurturing your customers? Because customer retention has a considerable impact on ROI (return on investment). In fact, a 5% increase in customer retention can result in 25 – 29% more revenue.
Now, we hear you; you might already be nurturing your customers. But are you achieving the results you want? If you aren’t, it just might be that you’re missing a trick – and it exists all in your customer data.
Using your customer data effectively can help you gain valuable insights into their characteristics, interactions, behaviors, and buying preferences. Done well, this information can be used to optimize all aspects of nurturing to improve engagement, develop relationships, and strengthen customer loyalty.
Yes, all that data you’re storing can do wonders for your bottom line. But it can be pretty overwhelming and tricky to know what to do with it and when to use it when it’s stored in siloes and its raw format. If it’s not structured correctly for your team, it almost feels like you’re trying to “find waldo” when extracting insights. This is where mapping the customer journey is key. Using your data, you can identify the areas in your customer’s journeys to use certain techniques to communicate with them. This is known as nurture marketing, and you can use our customer journey map to help.
What is nurture marketing?
Simply put, nurture marketing is a strategy for communicating with your customers, with techniques to encourage and foster brand loyalty that leads to repeat sales. This is crucial to the success of your business, because repeat customers have been shown to spend 67% more than new customers on average.
What exactly does it take to nurture customers the right way? Nurture marketing done well involves reaching out to your customers with important information, while personalizing the experience of every interaction itself. It gives your company credibility and fosters trust, while also helping businesses to:
- Strengthen current customer relationships
- Increase the value of each customer
- Encourage sales from first-time buyers
- Establish communication with prospects
Identify your customers first to learn about them
To nurture your customers, you first need to know who they are, what they like and dislike, and where they hang out online. Customer Data Platforms are essential here as it unifies your customer data to create a single unified view of your customers in real-time, to build unified customer profiles. Enriched with real-time data, you can put customer insights at the core of your marketing to build your strategy. Then you can leverage this information and use the right tools to create lead nurturing campaigns to engage your audience and persuade them to buy from you.
11 nurture marketing tactics that will increase your conversion rates
65 – 75% of business often comes from retained customers, so it’s crucial to craft your nurture marketing carefully to generate business. Here are some easy-to-implement techniques you can try to nurture your customers:
1. Abandoned cart
eCommerce brands lose $18 billion in sales revenue each year because of cart abandonment. You read that right – $18 billion a year! To avoid being a part of this statistic, leverage your customer data to send automated emails to customers who’ve added something to their basket but left before completing the checkout process.
Here’s a great example from Casper. It’s short, on-brand, and to the point. The playful, catchy headline draws customers in, while a simple and straightforward CTA button tells them exactly what to do next.
Remember to ensure the cart is automatically rebuilt when customers click the CTA link for ease and convenience. Customers finding an empty basket is usually a dealbreaker!
2. Product reviews
In a world ruled by online purchases where customers can’t touch, feel, or experience a product before they buy it, testimonials are essential in the shopper’s purchase decision. Asking your customers to review the products or services they buy will provide you with valuable insights and improvement opportunities, while showing your customers that you care.
Now, customers often only leave reviews when they’ve been absolutely blown away by a product or had a bad experience. So, to increase the chances of getting reviews across the board, pre-populate the review form with relevant information (such as product type or customer name). Not only will this encourage more reviews, but this form of personalization is a perfect way to achieve your goal and gain brand loyalty.
3. Price drops
Got your eye on something but not ready to commit yet? You’re more likely to buy if the price drops, right? If your customers are looking at certain items, notifying them of a price drop is a surefire way of securing a sale. You already know they’re interested in the product, and now you’re offering it to them for a cheaper price – now that’s a deal! If you’re conscious of your profit margins, even a small price drop can nudge these customers to convert.
Not only are you offering better-perceived value for money, but lowering the price also creates a sense of urgency. Include a phrase such as ‘Get yours before the sale ends’ to capitalize on this.
4. Birthday greetings
Your customers are important to you, right? Show them by sending a celebratory message when it’s their birthday. You could also include a small gift as a token of appreciation. This could be a discount code, a free item, or even a personalized postcard in the mail.
Customers expect brands to be more than just a business, and birthday emails are a great way to demonstrate how you value customer relationships. They are not often used by budding eCommerce brands, but are an incredibly successful form of email communication. In fact, birthday emails ‘generate 179% more clicks, 481% more transactions, and 342% more revenue’ compared to regular marketing emails. Those numbers are pretty impressive!
5. Anniversary celebrations
You don’t need to limit yourself to birthday wishes, either. Anniversaries, whether for your business or your customers, are a great opportunity to re-engage with your audience. You could send an incentive or coupon during this time to drive sales without offering discounts for the sake of it (which can, in fact, devalue your brand).
6. Annual summary
If you’re anything like us, you look forward to Spotify Wrapped; that time of the year when Spotify lays bare your listening choices, and you can cringe or remember your most popular songs of the year.
It’s a brilliant way to highlight how customers have used their service. It increases engagement, enhances relationships, and it’s easy to achieve.
7. Customer journey analytics
Do you know the paths your customers take to complete an action? Whether they’re buying a product, downloading content, or signing up for your newsletter, understanding the route they took to get there can help you identify opportunities and solve bottlenecks in your site. In fact, effective customer journey mapping results in an average increase of 54% in marketing ROI.
8. Lifecycle emails
New visitor, first-time buyer, dormant customer? You can target customers depending on where they are with a sequence of automated emails sent during key points of the customer journey. And the good news? If you make use of point 7, you’ll know exactly what they are. So, if you want to encourage a customer to buy from you again, send them relevant information and resources, cross-sell or upsell, ask for a review, or send them existing reviews. Base it on your data, and the choice is yours!
9. Oops!
We all make mistakes. That’s what makes us human. But did you know you can use your mistakes to your favor? Next time, use it as an opportunity to send an apology email and watch the engagement roll in.
But just a heads up, don’t send the apology email twice. People are fickle, and duplicate emails are heading towards spam territory – a definite way to get a heap of unsubscribers.
10. VIP content
Show your most loyal customers that you appreciate them with exclusive VIP rewards and content. This simple but highly effective tactic helps keep high-value customers by demonstrating that you care and recognize them.
11. RFM(E) modeling
And finally, we have Frequency of Engagement and monetary value Modeling. Consistently monitoring these metrics will help you to understand if your customer nurture tactics are working or where you need to make changes. It will also help you to spot areas where customer churn is high.
Nurture your leads using actionable insights
So, you know you want to nurture your leads. A Customer Data Platform is a great way to gain insights into your customer base and act on it in an automated way, which can then be used for lead nurturing strategies.
Unifying all your data into one easy-to-use platform makes decision-making simple. Not only do you get on-time and accurate data when needed, but it also makes managing your nurture strategies and entire customer journey easy.
Mapp Marketing Cloud is insight-led customer experience platform that helps you to generate actionable insights to drive customer engagement. It helps to tailor personalized customer experiences, drive repeat purchases, retain customers, and build brand loyalty.
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