Generate and nurture leads with nurturing campaigns – Download free template

This blog has been cowritten with my amazing colleague Niina Reponen, thank you!

The beauty of marketing automation is that it allows you to create and automate marketing campaigns and activities. With modern marketing automation tools, you can tailor truly remarkable customer experiences. The recipe for success is the same across industries, both B2C and B2B: sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time. However, many companies get stuck using marketing automation as an email sending tool focusing on monthly newsletters and doing ad hoc campaigns without further thinking.

While technology enables implementing nurturing campaigns, it’s by no means a starting point. When done well, nurturing campaigns – also called nurturing programs – can significantly impact your customer experience and, ultimately, your business results. 

Why do I need nurturing campaigns in marketing automation?

Marketing automation provides the perfect tools to solve many business challenges and delight your clients with an excellent customer experience. Your nurturing campaigns should be fully aligned with your business objectives.

Start by looking at your customer journey and map the customers’ pain points and success areas along the journey. What are the challenges both from your customer’s and your organisation’s point of view? How can you support your customers better on their journey? Nurturing campaigns provide you with a concrete tool for tackling customers’ challenges and creating business impact.

Powerful nurturing campaigns can have a positive impact on the following aspects:

• Drive sales 
• Generate and nurture leads 
• Increase customer satisfaction, retention and value
• Win back lost customers 

No ideas, too many ideas or difficulty to prioritise?

Have you ever attended a workshop with many brilliant ideas but in the end, everyone feels puzzled about what was agreed or how to proceed? That’s precisely why you need a systematic approach to ideating, creating and comparing the ideas for your marketing automation nurturing campaigns.

To develop truly impactful and valuable nurturing campaigns, you should gather a cross-functional team to brainstorm ideas. Including marketing, sales, and the customer support team members will bring out rich ideas. The people who interact with your customers daily may have unique insights that can lead to the best performing campaigns.

Tap into brilliant ideas and prioritise them easily with the Nurturing Campaign Canvas

To help you navigate with nurturing campaigns, you can download our free nurturing campaign canvas. It is a valuable tool to systematically go through ideas and make them so concrete that you can implement them.

The template walks you through all the critical aspects of a nurturing campaign:

• The objective and how it ties to your business goals 
• Target audience
• Triggers
• Content and data needs
• How to measure success
• How to optimise the experiment
• Concrete tasks for implementation

Ultimately, with the effort impact matrix, you will be able to prioritise the actions. Which of the action points have the most impact but are the easiest to implement? Start by building a nurturing campaign with the low hanging fruits and continue later with further steps that might require more data or completely new content.

Keep in mind that you can use this canvas for building holistic nurturing campaigns across different channels – marketing automation can definitely come in handy, but you do not have to limit your imagination to that. Most importantly, building nurturing campaigns is an iterative process where testing and analysing results is crucial. When implemented successfully, nurturing campaigns will support your customers on their journey and create a remarkable customer experience that converts.