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As companies adopt inbound marketing as a way to generate more leads, the importance of having an effective lead nurturing strategy becomes very clear. In most cases only a relatively small percentage of your inbound leads will be ready to make an immediate purchase, leaving upwards of 90% of your inbound leads on the table.

Implementing an effective lead nurturing strategy can have a huge impact on the results of your inbound marketing strategy. Research conducted by Forrester has shown that marketers see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured vs non-nurtured leads. Furthermore, the research also reveals that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost (Source: Forrester, 2014).

Despite the clear benefits of lead nurturing, a study by MarketingSherpa indicates that only 36% of marketers actively nurture their sales leads (Source: 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report). Without question, this means that there’s a huge opportunity for savvy marketers like you to implement effective lead nurturing strategies and gain an advantage over your competition.

So you are probably wondering…

• Which lead nurturing tactics work best? 
• What do super successful marketers do differently?
• Or how do I get started with lead nurturing?

Lead nurturing is of course just one component that goes into executing an inbound marketing strategy. If you’d like to learn what super successful inbound marketers are doing differently to attract traffic, convert leads and close customers you can check out this comprehensive resource – An Epic Guide to Creating an Inbound Marketing Strategy.

Now let’s get down to it – we’ve read through dozens of reports, dug into the most recent data about lead nurturing and compiled this list of the seven amazingly effective lead nurturing tactics. 

7 Amazingly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics

1) Targeted content – Leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20% (Tweet this stat)

When it comes to lead nurturing, one size certainly does not fit all. As the research proves, strategically nurturing your leads using targeted content can significantly improve the results of your inbound marketing strategy.

Using targeted content for lead nurturing may seem obvious, but it’s something that marketers are struggling with. Last year Forrester Research reported that 33% of B2B marketers cite “targeted delivery of content” (i.e., delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time) as their biggest lead nurturing challenge.

There are a few prerequisites for using targeted content for lead nurturing. First of all, you need to understand each of your unique buyer personas. Of course, you then need to create an assortment of targeted content designed to nurture each of your personas based on their interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers. Lastly, you need to have a marketing automation platform in place to help you identify, segment and target your unique buyer personas as you scale your inbound marketing strategy.  

2) Multi-channel lead nurturing – Four out of five marketers say their email open rates don’t exceed 20%. It’s time to think beyond the inbox. (Tweet this stat)

In the past, most lead nurturing strategies involved setting up a simple email drip campaign that would send out generic emails to a list of prospects. These day, email-only lead nurturing strategies have a few inherent problems.

For one thing, almost four out of five marketers say their email open rates don’t exceed 20% (Source: The State of B2B Lead Nurturing Survey, Oracle). On top of that, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. A lack of effective lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance (Source: MarketingSherpa).

Today, marketers like you are looking for new lead nurturing tactics and technologies that go beyond the limits of email. With the help of powerful marketing automation platforms, savvy marketers are now executing multi-channel lead nurturing strategies.

Effective multi-channel lead nurturing most commonly involve a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach. Because there are so many tactics involved, to execute this properly, you really need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and working cohesively.

3) Multiple Touches – Prospects receive an average of 10 touches from the time they enter the top of the funnel until they’re a closed-won customer (Tweet this stat)

While the buyers journey for every product and service can be quite different, research from the Marketing Lead Management Report indicates that on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of funnel until they’re a closed won customers.

Interestingly, another research study from Demand Gen suggests that 49% of marketers include less than five touches in their lead nurturing programs (Source: 2015 Lead Nurturing Benchmark Study). If you’re in this category, it might be time to revamp your lead nurturing efforts a bit. 

As you can imagine, the most successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that helps prospects progress through the buyer’s journey by addressing common questions and concerns. In addition to email tactics, consider how you can use a mix of content types like social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, or even direct mail, to nurture your prospects into customers. 

4) Timely Follow Ups – The odds of a lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after an inbound lead converts on your website (Tweet this stat)

The benefits of immediate follow up calls seem quite evident, but most organizations still aren’t acting very quickly. A recent article in Harvard Business Review highlighted the surprisingly slow response times of most US based companies. Here are a few benchmarks from the study which included feedback from more than 2,240 US companies:

• The average first response time of B2B companies to their leads was 42 hours
• Only 37% of companies responded to their leads within an hour
• 24% of companies took more than 24 hours
• 23% of the companies never responded at all

Automated lead nurturing can help you reach large groups of prospects, but a timely followup email or a phone call is still quite often the best way to convert inbound leads into qualified sales opportunities. As several research studies have shown, the odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion.

When you make a timely, well researched call to an inbound lead it’s far more effective than any volume of cold calling. You know exactly what the prospects is researching based their recent browsing behaviour and you also have enough information about the prospect to do some initial research about the organization they work for and their specific role within the company.

5) Personalized emails – Personalized emails generate up to 6 times higher revenue per email than non-personalized emails do (Tweet this stat)

Several research studies indicate that email marketing continues to be the most effective tactic for lead nurturing.  The research also consistently shows that personalized emails tend to produce significantly better results than generic email blasts. In fact, a recent study by Experian indicated that personalized emails can generate up to six times higher revenue per email than non-personalized campaigns do (Source: Experian Email Marketing Study).

As highlighted in this helpful blog post, there are all kinds of ways you can personalize your emails to improve your lead nurturing strategy. You can send triggered emails when someone downloads your gated content, clicks on links in your emails, visits certain pages on your website, or when they demonstrate a high level of engagement. When you combine the power of marketing personalization with behavioral triggered emails you can deliver the right marketing messages to the right people, at exactly the right times.

6) Lead Scoring – 68% of successful marketers cite lead scoring based on content and engagement as the most effective tactic for improving revenue contribution from lead nurturing (Tweet this stat)

As the 2013 Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study revealed, 68% of successful marketers cite lead scoring based on content and engagement as the most effective tactic for improving revenue contribution from lead nurturing. With compelling research like that you’d think that everyone would be adopting lead scoring, but a recent study by MarketingSherpa indicates that only 21% of B2B marketers are using lead scoring.

For those who are new to the concept of lead scoring, it is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. Lead scoring can be implemented in most marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values to certain website browsing behaviours, conversion events, or even social media interactions. The resulting score is used to determine which leads should be followed up with directly by a sales rep or which leads need to be nurtured further down the funnel. 

Based on this research, it seems as though lead scoring is an effective lead nurturing tactic that most marketers simply aren’t taking advantage of yet. 

7) Sales and Marketing Alignment – 89% of companies that align their sales and marketing lead nurturing efforts report measurable increases in the number of sales opportunities generated (Tweet this stat)

According to a study by market research firm CSO Insights, when both sales and marketing share responsibility for lead nurturing, companies experience a significant increase in conversion rates. As the 2014 Sales Performance Optimization Study revealed, 89% of companies that aligned sales and marketing lead generation efforts reported measurable increases in the number of leads that turned to opportunities as a result of continuous nurturing (Source: Sales Performance Optimization Study).

In order for both sales and marketing to contribute to lead nurturing you’ll need to identity when prospects should be transitioned between teams as they progress through the funnel. In creating your lead nurturing strategy, think about how you can use triggers like lead scoring, pageviews, workflow enrollment, conversion events or sales contact to transition leads from automation to direct one-on-one outreach.

The shared expectations, responsibilities and goals for this collaboration between sales and marketing should be outlined in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Creating a formal sales and marketing SLA will help the two teams hold each other accountable for converting leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers.

In review, let’s quickly recap the seven most effective lead nurturing tactics:

1) Targeted content – Leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%

2) Multi-channel lead nurturing – Four out of five marketers say their email open rates don’t exceed 20%. It’s time to think beyond the inbox.

3) Multiple Touches – Prospects receive an average of 10 touches from the time they enter the top of the funnel until they’re a closed-won customer.

4) Timely Follow Ups – The odds of a lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after an inbound lead converts on your website.

5) Personalized emails – Personalized emails generate up to 6 times higher revenue per email than non-personalized emails do.

6) Lead Scoring – 68% of successful marketers cite lead scoring based on content and engagement as the most effective tactic for improving revenue contribution from lead nurturing. 

7) Sales and Marketing Alignment – 89% of companies that align their sales and marketing lead nurturing efforts report measurable increases in the number of sales opportunities generated.

Want some more tips & tricks to boost the results of your inbound marketing strategy?

Readers are being bombarded by more and more content each and every day. This overwhelming volume of articles, videos, status updates, and more is causing audiences to bounce faster from websites, click “delete” immediately on emails, and use any method available to tune our the noise.

At the same time,  reliable sources of content distribution are becoming increasingly important for publishers, as spam filters grow more powerful, ads are blocked, and social media becomes a pay-to-play channel. So what can publishers do to earn the reader attention and engagement they so desperately need to drive revenue? 

It’s easy for readers to glance over emails that make them feel like “just another name on an email list.” Or leave a website that’s littered with far too many irrelevant options. But when it feels like a newsletter was curated just for you, or a website had the exact link you were looking for—that’s what keeps people engaged for longer. 

Audience segmentation and personalization can make one-to-many communications feel more personal, while simultaneously offering greater value to a larger number of readers.

To help you learn more about audience segmentation and personalization, we teamed up with BrightInfo to write Personalize or Perish, the definitive guide on how publishers can:

• Collect better unified audience data across websites, events, emails, and more
• Build audience segments specific to internal or external offerings
• Communicate unique messages out to these segments via email and on-site content

Ready to learn more?

>> You can download the full ebook here

The pivot table is one of Excel’s most powerful — and intimidating — functions. Powerful, because it can help you summarize and make sense of large data sets. Intimidating, because you’re not exactly an Excel expert, and pivot tables have always had a reputation for being complicated.

Download our complete guide to using Excel here for more step-by-step Excel tutorials.

The good news: Learning how to create a pivot table in Excel is much, much easier than you’ve likely been led to believe. But before we walk you through process of creating one, let’s take a step back and make sure you understand exactly what a pivot table is, and why you might need to use one.

What Is a Pivot Table?

To quote Microsoft, a pivot table is a report that lets you, “summarize, analyze, explore, and present a summary” of your data. And it is particularly useful “when you have a long list of figures to sum, and aggregated data or subtotals would help you look at the data from different perspectives and compare figures of similar data.”

In other words, a pivot table lets you extract meaning from that seemingly endless jumble of numbers on your screen. And more specifically, it lets you group your data together in different ways so you can more easily make comparisons.

The “pivot” part of a pivot table stems from the fact that you can rotate (or pivot) the data in the table in order to view it from a different perspective. To be clear, you’re not adding to, subtracting from, or otherwise changing your data when you make a pivot. Instead, you’re simply reorganizing the data so you can extract useful information from it.

Use Cases for Pivot Tables

If you are still feeling a bit confused about what a pivot table actually does, don’t worry. This is one of those technologies that’s much easier to understand once you’ve seen it in action. So, here are two hypothetical scenarios where you’d want to use a pivot table.

Scenario #1: Comparing Sales Totals of Different Products

Say you have a worksheet that contains monthly sales data for three different products — product 1, product 2, and product 3 — and you want to figure out which of the three has been bringing in the most bucks. You could, of course, look through the worksheet and manually add the corresponding sales figure to a running total every time product 1 appears. You could then do the same for product 2, and product 3, until you have totals for all of them. Piece of cake, right?

Now, imagine that monthly sales worksheet of yours has thousands and thousands of rows. Manually sorting through them all could take a lifetime. Using a pivot table, you can automatically aggregate all of the sales figures for product 1, product 2, and product 3 — and calculate their respective sums — in less than a minute.

Scenario #2: Combining Duplicate Data

In this scenario, you’ve just completed a blog redesign and had to update a bunch of URLs. Unfortunately, your blog reporting software didn’t handle it very well, and ended up splitting the “view” metrics for single posts between two different URLs. So in your spreadsheet, you have two separate instances of each individual blog post. In order to get accurate data, you need to combine the view totals for each of these duplicates.

That’s where the pivot table comes into play. Instead of having to manually search for and combine all the metrics from the duplicates, you can summarize your data (via pivot table) by blog post title, and voilà: the view metrics from those duplicate posts will be aggregated automatically.

How to Create Excel Pivot Tables

Now that you have a better sense of what pivot tables can be used for, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how to actually create one.

Step 1: Click a cell to create the table. 

If you’re using a Mac, click anywhere inside your data array, navigate to the Tables tab, and click New. (Alternatively, you can go to Insert > Table via the top navigation). Then, select the Summarize with PivotTable option from the Tables tab and click OK on the pop-up menu.

If you’re using a PC, this process is a little bit simpler: Just click anywhere inside your data array and navigate to the Insert tab. Next, select the “PivotTable” option and click “OK” on the pop-up menu.

Step 2: Drag and drop a field into the “Row Labels” area.

After you’ve completed Step 1, Excel will create a blank pivot table for you. Your next step is to drag and drop a field — labeled according to the names of the columns in your spreadsheet — into the “Row Labels” area. This will determine what unique identifier — blog post title, product name, and so on — the pivot table will organize your data by.

For example, let’s say you want to organize a bunch of blogging data by post title. To do that, you’d simply click and drag the “Title” field to the “Row Labels” area.

Note: Your pivot table may look different depending on which version of Excel you’re working with. However, the general principles remain the same.

Step 3: Drag and drop a field into the “Values” area.

Once you’ve established what you’re going to organize your data by, your next step is to add in some values by dragging a field into the “Values” area.

Sticking with the blogging data example, let’s say you want to summarize blog post views by title. To do this, you’d simply drag the “Views” field into the Values area.

Step 4: Fine-tune your calculations.

The sum of a particular value will be calculated by default, but you can easily change this to something like average, maximum, or minimum depending on what you want to calculate.

On a Mac, you can do this by clicking on the small “i” next to a value in the “Values” area, selecting the option you want, and clicking “OK.” Once you’ve made your selection, your pivot table will be updated accordingly.

If you’re using a PC, you’ll need to click on the small upside-down triangle next to your value and select “Value Field Settings” in order to access the menu.

Digging Deeper

You’ve now learned the basics of pivot table creation in Excel. But depending on what you need your pivot table for, you might not be done.

For example, you may notice that the data in your pivot table isn’t sorted the way you’d like. If were the case, Excel’s Sort function can help you out. Alternatively, you may need to incorporate data from another source into your reporting, in which case the VLOOKUP function could come in handy.

To take a deeper dive into the world of Excel and learn about its various functions, download our comprehensive guide, How to Use Excel.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.