Taking a casual visitor and turning them into a paying customer is not a task that should be taken lightly. It takes time, effort, and care. It’s also not a straightforward, obvious process. There’s no linear route that a prospect might take toward the conversion goal. In fact, it’s more of a carefully choreographed dance. With a great deal of leading and hand-holding from you, the business.
It’s that leading and hand-holding that forms lead nurturing. Taking the time to encourage and develop a relationship from scratch is a big undertaking. It is, however, one that can be made more efficient and effective when paired with lead nurturing software.
This software helps you to maintain communication, craft relationships, and turn strangers into customers. You can carefully accompany them at every stage of their journey. It helps you to deliver just the right information or content at just the right time and place. That might mean via a certain channel or in a specific medium. Whatever the outcome, the software can point you in the right direction streamlining your efforts.
In this article, we’ll explore why you should consider using a piece of lead nurturing software and some options that you might want to consider. We’ll also look at what you might want to consider as you’re picking software.
- The Case For Lead Nurturing Software
- 4 Lead Nurturing Software Options
The Case For Lead Nurturing Software
For a long time, lead generation was focused on numbers. The more leads generated, the more likely you were to garner success. To some degree, there’s some truth in that. You certainly do need to hit a particular volume to attain progress. There has, however, been something of a shift in consumer behavior that has changed the game.
People are looking for an experience that feels more like a genuine connection. That’s no surprise. With the advent of online shopping and a digitally connected world, many people feel more connected than ever. Yet without any genuine connection happening. People yearn for a meaningful purchase experience, and that’s what lead nurturing can offer.
It’s a method of giving businesses the power to foster connection through personalized marketing campaigns. Beyond that, it’s a method of crafting automated and personalized marketing campaigns. These are far more engaging and relevant than ever before. These campaigns aren’t just great for the consumer. They’re great for business too. A deeper connection built on mutual respect and a real sense of engagement tends to deliver a much more favorable conversion rate.
Lead nurturing takes place across an ever-growing number of digital touchpoints. There are social media, email, webinars, websites, and digital conversations. That’s just to start. Keeping track of all of these conversations and relationships is more than most can manage. Lead nurturing software makes it far easier. It takes everything and puts it in one easily accessible place. This increases efficiency and dramatically improves a business’s ROI.
4 Lead Nurturing Software Options
There are certainly plenty of options for you to pick from when it comes to lead nurturing software. We’ve collated what we feel are the best options on the market. Remember to consider your own specific requirements when taking the following into consideration. Then you’ll end up with a tool that works for you and your business.
Instantly
Using Instantly as a lead nurturing tool is a compelling choice. Yes, Instantly is, first and foremost, an email marketing tool, but it can certainly be used to nurture leads too. Especially now that Instantly offers a comprehensive B2B lead finder.
The B2B lead finder allows you to find, grade, and filter leads using AI-powered workflows and a huge database of contacts. Once you’ve selected your leads, you can begin to launch dedicated, personalized, nurturing email campaigns. These cold email outreach campaigns can be tailored to a specific segment of your audience, and then you can follow up with them. This follow-up could be automated using the powerful email sequencing that Instantly provides.
The software is incredibly user-friendly, with an ease of use rating of 9.9 through G2.
Pricing:
It’s completely free to get started with Instantly. There are then two sections of pricing. The leads section gives you access to 1000 leads a month at $47 a month or 10,000 verified leads a month at $197 a month.
You should then combine that with the sending and warmup side of the software. The Growth tier of pricing gives you the ability to add and nurture 1000 active leads, send 5000 emails a month, and add unlimited email accounts. That costs $37 a month. The higher-priced Hypergrowth tier adds more leads and emails for $97 a month.
Key Features:
- Automated email sequencing makes nurturing leads via email easy.
- The email warmup feature means that your nurturing emails will land in the recipient’s inbox without going to spam.
- Expansive personalization features in your email campaigns mean a more tailored and connected relationship with your recipients.
Marketo (by Adobe)
Marketo is part of the Adobe family and brings with it the quality that you’d expect from an Adobe product. It’s a dedicated marketing suite that focuses on automation with a high level of personalization. The aim is to reduce lead chasing and minimize missed opportunities.
An impressive feature is the AI-assisted automation that works in tandem with real-time “listening.” This feature keeps an eye on certain triggers (triggered by a prospect) across the web. That might include how they interact with the web, email marketing, social, and your website. It then feeds this information into the CRM.
The extensive audience creation and segmentation options mean that you can get a genuine view of a prospect. As well as insightful data on their sales process so far. This then allows you to work with your sales team to score and qualify leads as they move onward. With this information, you’re able to properly plan your nurturing process.
Pricing:
Pricing for Marketo is not readily available on Adobe’s website. Instead, you need to enquire through an extensive form.
Key Features:
- Extensive audience creation and segmentation
- Cross-channel personalization options
- Lead scoring
- Automation through triggers
Pardot (by Salesforce)
Pardot is the lead nurturing arm of Salesforce. It forms a platform that offers marketing automation with a focus on the B2B sector. It works at its best when integrated with the Salesforce CRM. When combined, it is able to manage leads, perform nurturing activities, and even help prospects convert.
Pricing:
Pricing starts at $1,250 a month and is billed annually, pricing out many businesses. This allows you to find and manage up to 10,000 contacts a month with some marketing automation. That’s it for the lower tier. The higher Plus tier is priced at $2,500 a month. It's also billed annually. It includes “hot lead” identification, data management, integrations, and training for your team.
Key Features:
- Personalization through audience segmentation
- Lead scoring and grading at higher pricing tiers
- Landing page creation
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is another lead nurturing software that leans into email marketing. It also comprises email sequencing and some CRM functions. It’s more accessible than the previous two pieces of software from an ease-of-use and affordability point of view. ActiveCampaign aims to take complex lead nurturing sequences and methods and make them more simple. The idea is that by doing so, it naturally creates a deeper connection with the customer.
Pricing:
To achieve the best from ActiveCampaign, you need to combine both the sales and marketing sides of the offering. That means the base package starts from $93 a month billed annually. This includes many of the core features that you’d need, but you’d miss out on many of their new AI-powered features. At the Plus tier, for $386 a month paid annually, you get predictive sending, sentiment analysis, and lead win probability thrown into the mix too.
Key Features:
- Dedicated email marketing software with personalization
- Machine learning-based campaign data
- CRM integration
Key Takeaways
Lead nurturing software allows you to build relationships with your prospective customers in an efficient way. What previously would have taken endless hours can be automated and delivered in a smoother way. These carefully nurtured relationships don't only improve your conversion rate. They will also improve your connection with your audience.
- Consider exactly what you need. Some of the software offers multiple tiers of features and options.
- Ensure that the tool can easily integrate with your current tech stack.
- Look for options that allow you to nurture relationships at scale.
Of the options available, Instantly offers some of the best value for money, considering the level of nurture that you can achieve. Why not see what it can do for you and try it out for free?
