In today’s bustling marketplace, where consumers are inundated with choices, how do you capture and retain their attention?
The solution is a strong lead engagement strategy. In this blog, we’ll walk you through the basics of lead engagement and 8 proven techniques for keeping your leads interested and involved in your communications.
Table of Contents
What is Lead Engagement?
Lead engagement is the process of providing content and experiences designed to keep your leads interested and interacting with your company until they eventually become customers.
Or, to put it another way, lead engagement is the process of nurturing a relationship with a potential customer. It’s all about slowly establishing familiarity and trust.
Lead engagement is the next phase after lead generation (the process of acquiring potential customers’ contact information).
The Role of a Lead Engagement Strategy
The goal of a lead engagement strategy is to convert qualified leads into paying customers. It can be used for both B2B and B2C sales.
Sales and marketing teams can use a variety of content types to engage leads: free webinars, blog posts, video tutorials, e-newsletters, infographics, etc. Methods for distributing this engagement-focused content can include email marketing, social media posts, and paid ads.
Lead engagement is a crucial step in the buyer journey. According to Hubspot, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, and one common reason for this is the lack of a lead engagement strategy.
Consumers today have endless options for where to spend their money. (They also have high expectations, thanks to the standards set by today’s top companies). As a company leader, it’s up to you to keep your leads interested and interacting with your brand until they eventually convert to a customer.
8 Tips for an Effective Lead Engagement Strategy
Ready to start building a lead engagement strategy? Here are some tried-and-true practices for ensuring your lead engagement efforts are successful.
1. Meet Your Leads at the Right Time and Place
The crucial first step in developing a lead engagement strategy is considering what your audience wants and needs.
At what stage of the customer journey are you reaching out to your leads? Are they in the initial Awareness stage, the Consideration stage, or closer to the final Decision stage?
What are your leads’ preferred methods for consuming content? Look at past campaign analytics to see if your leads are more likely to engage with emails, text messages, phone calls, social media posts, push notifications, in-app notifications, or something else.
Answering these questions will allow you to create highly relevant—and thus, highly engaging—content.
2. Personalize Communications
Another way to make your content feel extremely relevant to your leads is to personalize your messaging.
Start by determining how to segment your leads. You could segment your leads based on demographic data like location, age, and company size; or based on behavioral data, such as which web pages a lead visited or the number of days since they signed up for a free trial.
Then, you can build dynamic content into your email marketing. When sent to a bulk list of email subscribers, the dynamic content will differ based on data you have about each contact.
For example, an online clothing retailer might include dynamic content that will feature new products that are similar to the lead’s past purchases.
An accounting software company might create dynamic email content based on a lead’s company revenue, promoting the price plan that would best meet their accounting firm’s needs.
Considering that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase after a customized experience—and that 55% of marketers are prioritizing personalization in 2024—it’s clear that personalizing your communications is a winning strategy for lead engagement.
3. Provide Valuable Content
Content marketing—the practice of creating and distributing timely, useful, and relevant content—is a proven strategy for engaging leads throughout the customer journey.
When you provide highly valuable content— like video tutorials and blog posts that answer common questions—and free tools and templates, you will establish yourself as a trusted authority in your industry. Your audience will consider you a valuable resource, and they’ll keep coming back for more.
When the content is consistently valuable, your leads will continue to open your emails, read your blog, and share your social media posts. And when the time comes to make a purchase decision, which company do you think they’ll choose?
Probably the one that has been helping them all along.
4. Interact with Leads on Social Media
Social media is an essential platform for boosting lead engagement. There are seemingly endless opportunities for leads to engage with your brand, including:
Liking and reacting to your posts
Commenting on your posts
Sharing your posts
Messaging you directly
Using your branded hashtags to provide user-generated content
Writing reviews
Tracking your engagement on social media is easy—all of the major platforms provide analytics for business pages.
To successfully engage your leads on social media, follow these best practices:
Post valuable content consistently (at least once per day).
In your posts, focus on helping, not selling. Provide answers and assistance to your potential customers.
Save your sales pitch for paid ads on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Respond quickly to comments and direct messages (even if they’re negative).
Experiment with different content types (video, infographic, blog post, etc.) to determine what works best.
Being active and involved on social media will help you remain top-of-mind among your audience and reinforce your status as a trusted authority.
5. Create Engaging Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective methods for directly communicating with leads and driving conversions. It’s also the most cost-effective, with an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
To create email marketing that will engage and convert your leads, consider the following best practices:
Personalize messages by segmenting your leads and using dynamic content.
Deliver valuable content that your leads will actually want to receive.
Include a strong call-to-action to drive your desired results.
Use an email automation tool to build out entire email workflows that will autonomously send the right content at the right time, depending on where a lead is in the customer journey.
Monitor email metrics (open rates, click rates, conversion rates) to determine what is working and what could be improved.
Maintain an accurate lead database—with up-to-date contact information for each lead—to improve email deliverability.
Sending high-value, personalized emails on a regular basis will keep your leads engaged with your brand and improve the likelihood that they will convert.
6. Add a Chatbot to Your Website
Chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular tool for real-time engagement. The use of chatbots has increased by 92% since 2019, and 73% of buyers expect to interact with a chatbot when they visit your website.
Chatbots enable real-time interaction between businesses and website visitors. Leads can ask questions and get immediate, personalized, 24/7 support. (And it’s pretty effective support—chatbots can handle 70% of chats from start to finish without human help).
Choose a chat tool that enables integration with your CRM or marketing automation platform. By sharing data across all platforms, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of your leads’ preferences, pain points, and online behaviors—and your chat tool can continue to improve the level of personalization it provides to your website visitors.
Here are some tips for setting up a chatbot for your website:
Set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your chatbot so you can measure success. Common chatbot KPIs are the number of CTAs clicked, the number of forms completed, and the number of purchases made through the chatbot.
Create personas for the different types of leads who will use your chatbot.
Determine how your chatbot will drive these personas to conversion.
Give your chatbot a personality—how will it talk to your website visitors?
Create your chatbot’s conversation flow by anticipating the questions your leads will ask.
Customize your chatbot’s design to align with your brand and web design.
Set targeting rules to determine when and how your chatbot will pop up with an introductory message.
Just as with any marketing tactic, be sure to continuously measure your chatbot’s performance so you can make adjustments as needed.
7. Host Webinars and Virtual Events
Putting together a live webinar or virtual event is a cost-effective way to reach and engage a wide audience. Some of the most common types of virtual events include:
Educational webinars that teach a professional skill
Thought-leadership webinars, where you share expert insight and advice to help your audience with a particular challenge they face in their industry
Live product demonstrations, where you demo your product and allow audience members to ask questions
Virtual conferences, during which multiple speakers and panelists participate
What makes virtual events and webinars so engaging are the interactive components. During a presentation, you can get the audience involved by:
Asking them to fill out a live poll, then showing them the real-time results
Encouraging them to ask questions in the live chat
Including a Q&A session at the end of a presentation to answer questions
Allowing audience members to turn on their mics and ask their questions (or share insights) live
Providing virtual networking opportunities
The most important component, of course, is the content itself. Be sure your virtual event is providing valuable information. Invite industry experts to co-host your event, include attention-grabbing visuals, write a compelling script, and edit and rehearse your presentation until it becomes effortlessly engaging.
8. Follow Up Regularly
Lead engagement isn’t a one-and-done tactic. To keep leads engaged with your content, you must consistently touch base with your audience. The timing, frequency, and method of follow-up typically depends on a lead’s current stage of the buyer journey, but here are some general best practices to follow:
Start with the 3x3x3 rule—follow up three times, with three days between each outreach, and use three different channels.
Consider the best days and times to send your follow-up. Data shows that the best days to send follow-up emails are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays; the best times are mornings (8 a.m. -10 a.m.) and evenings (4 p.m. - 6 p.m.).
Monitor engagement metrics (open rates, click rates, social media likes, etc.) to determine which follow-up tactics are proving to be most effective.
Include one call to action per message.
Keep your messages concise (aim for 50 to 125 words per email).
Ensure that every communication you deliver is providing value (e.g., promoting your latest blog post via email, or sharing a video tutorial through live chat).
By following these best practices, you can effectively stay in touch with your leads and nudge them closer to conversion.
Lead Engagement: The Necessary Step Between Lead Gen and Conversion
A strong lead engagement strategy is crucial for your business’s success. When you consistently stay in touch with your leads and add value through personalized interactions, you will gradually earn their trust and drive them to convert. Keep up the good work, and you’ll retain them as loyal customers for life.
Start building a strong lead engagement strategy today!
Hyper-Personalized Lead Engagement by Nimbler
Ready to take your lead engagement to the next level? Discover how Nimbler’s AI Sales Assistant empowers you to create tailored outreach that will resonate with your most qualified leads. With Nimbler, you can:
Segment your leads based on 50 different data points
Generate hyper-personalized messages
Boost email deliverability with a unique message to each lead
Launch and track autonomous outreach campaigns
Build email sequences that will reach the right leads at the right time
Start your free trial today, and discover how to use Nimbler to supercharge your lead engagement process!
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