The Proven Impact of Lead Nurturing: Key Statistics
Lead nurturing, done well, can yield TREMENDOUS results. A few stats to consider:
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester Research)
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: The Annuitas Group)
- Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts. (Source: SilverPop/DemandGen Report)
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quota. (Source: CSO Insights)
- Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report)
What Is Lead Nurturing and How Does It Work?
According to Oracle and a few others, lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with leads who are not yet ready to buy.
We agree, and would add a bit more to that sentence.
Once and for all, here you go:
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with leads who are not yet ready to buy, by providing them with valuable information relevant to their specific interests and their decision process, in a sequence of emails delivered over time, so that YOU will be top-of-mind when they’re ready to become someone’s customer.
Now that we have it defined, how, exactly, does it work?
Before diving into the strategy, it’s crucial to understand what to do with new leads once they enter your system.
Why Traditional Lead Nurturing Approaches Fall Short
If you do a web search on “lead nurturing” or “define lead nurturing,” you’ll find a ton of information – and, sadly, much of it is… well, it’s not wrong, but it’s not strong either. Right on page 1 of search results is an article from Oracle that states, “Successful lead nurturing anticipates the needs of the buyer based on who they are (using profile characteristics, such as title, role, industry, and so on) and where they are in the buying process.”
I mean, you *could* do lead nurturing based on profile characteristics (easy to get, so fairly simple to implement), or on where they are in the buying stage (less easy to discern, thus making the job complex and therefore less likely to be done), but why would you do that when there a MUCH better – and much simpler – way to do it? (BTW, this aligns perfectly with the selling without selling approach that focuses on building genuine relationships rather than pushing products.)
Let your leads tell you how to nurture them
As I mentioned above, lead nurturing is a sequence of emails, otherwise known as a nurturing sequence. Nurturing sequences are triggered when a lead takes a specific action (in the case of automated nurturing sequences) or has taken a specific action (in the case of manual nurturing sequences).
That key word there is “triggered.” A “done well” nurturing plan works in response to triggers – the actions that are taken by the people in your list. How is that different from how Oracle suggests?
Action-Based vs. Profile-Based Nurturing: A Comparison
Imagine that you sell leadership training to large companies, and you have a sequence of value-packed emails linking to blog posts designed to deepen the conversation around leadership training.
- A “not wrong but not strong” nurturing plan arbitrarily decides that everyone with the job title of “HR Director” is the decision maker for purchasing leadership training. That could be entirely wrong for a large percentage of your potential clients.
- A “done well” nurturing plan triggers the nurturing sequence based on a known lead’s visit to a specific page on the website, to a specific blog post on the website, or in response to the download of “The Definitive Guide to Leadership Development,” your popular eBook.
See the difference? In the second scenario, you’d be nurturing the people who are interested in leadership training, regardless of their job title. Could that be why, as quoted above, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost? (Yup.)
Lead Nurturing, in Real Life
FitGolf Case Study: Segmentation Success
Take FitGolf as an example. Fitgolf helps golfers with three specific issues – consistency, distance (power), and mitigating pain. After we showed them the simpler way to do lead nurturing, they created a practice of segmenting their leads into those three interest buckets. 
Their words, after implementing the segmentation and nurturing sequences:
“We went from zero engagement and zero active to 600 engaged and 50-60 new leads. We are experiencing click rates are in the upper 30% when they were about 5-10% in the past. There are 600 people engaged, and 10 percent replying with “this article was great”.
FitGolf is exceeding the statistic we quoted above – “Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts.” Zero to 600 in nine emails – can you imagine what that kind of increase has done for their business?
Adaptive Road Case Study: Quality Over Quantity
Or look at Adaptive Road, who hired an outside firm to send emails to a huge list of likely targets. After sending to approximately 14,000 leads, the outside firm had booked 62 meetings for the client.
Sounds great, right? Until you realize that is less than half of one percent (0.4%, to be precise). But that’s not the worst of it… of those 62 meetings, only 8 of the leads were actually qualified. So a sales rep held 62 meetings – 62 hours booked off of his calendar – to basically disqualify 87% of them and only move 8 leads forward (12.9%). When email campaigns produce such disappointing results, many sales teams wonder if they can email their way out of a sales slump at all.
By contrast, however, the marketing team set up a nurturing sequence designed to get people enrolled in the subject matter by providing valuable information over time—specifically using a value-to-pitch email formula to structure each message for maximum engagement. . This approach demonstrates how to transform your marketing campaigns by focusing on data-driven value delivery rather than volume-based outreach. They didn’t get many leads carved out of the big list to experiment on, but look at their results.
They engaged with 328 people, booked 5 meetings (1.5%), and of those 5 meetings, 4 were qualified and moved to the next sales level – an 80% qualification rate. This success demonstrates how proper nurturing prepares leads for conversion, making them ideal candidates for well-designed landing pages that convert when they’re ready to take action.
Based on those statistics, the same 8 qualified leads could have been achieved with 10 meetings, keeping 52 hours free on the calendar for other sales pursuits. No wonder, as quoted above, “companies that excel at lead nurturing have 9% more sales reps making quota.”
Essential Components of an Effective Lead Nurturing Strategy
There are a few things to get right to implement a “done well” nurturing plan, and once you get these pinned down, you’ll have them forever (or until you have a substantial change in your business). The foundation of this success lies in proper marketing automation integration that enables the sophisticated tracking and triggering capabilities we’ll discuss next. Before diving into these implementation details, it’s essential to start with planning your nurturing sequence to establish the strategic foundation. Get these right and you’ll have a “done well” nurturing plan in place in no time.
Step 1: Understand Your Lead Segments
This is more than demographics, as we’ve discussed in prior posts. Personally, I like to think about segments in terms of the different conversations I might have with someone based on what they’re interested in, what particular problem they’re trying to solve, or what motivation they have to make a change or learn something new. For example, if I were selling workforce development programs, I might have a different conversation with someone who is trying to advance in their career versus someone who is trying to break into a new career.
Step 2: Let Leads Self-Identify Their Interests
Get leads to tell you what segments they’re in. You can do as Fitgolf has done – send a segmentation email and/or add a “choose here” section to your website, or you can simply watch what pages people view, what documents they download from your site, what posts they read, and what they click in an email. This approach enables interest-based email targeting that’s far more effective than demographic assumptions. (You should be able to do all of that automatically. If you can’t, get a system that allows that, like ours does).
Step 3: Create Sequences and Set Up Triggers
We went deep into how many emails and their content in another post. Learn more about nurturing sequence length and timing. The most critical thing is to set up the triggers so that you capture the people who are actually interested in a specific topic. Once you understand these fundamentals, you’ll be ready to implement your nurturing sequence with the proper technical setup and automation. You can (or should be able to) trigger a nurturing sequence when:
Common Trigger Types for Lead Nurturing
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- A known lead views a specific page or post on your website
- A new or known lead fills out a form on your website
- A new or known lead opts in to receive a download
- A lead clicks through a particular link in an email you’ve sent
- A lead completes another sequence
- A lead lands in a particular lead type (list) for some other reason
The Power of First-Party Data in Lead Nurturing
Bottom line – when you leverage the data you collect from what leads tell you by their actions (also known as first party data) – which is the essence of purpose-driven data collection – you can engage leads based on their interests. No more assumptions based on demographics. No more blasting the list to get people to do something. No more guessing about what interests people. They’ll tell you everything you need to know when you “listen.”
Lead Nurturing vs. Drip Campaigns: Key Differences
Lead nurturing campaigns and drip campaigns are not the same thing. A drip campaign (fortunately that term seems to have fallen out of common use, but still) is simply a series of emails, delivered over time. The emails in a drip campaign might not even be connected to each other, and likely are related to what the marketer wants to say, not what the lead is actually interested in.
Nurturing campaigns and autoresponders are also not the same thing. We provide that background in this post: An Autoresponder Is Not What You Want.
Automating Sequence Suspension: The Cherry on Top
And finally, the cherry on top of this lead nurturing sundae:
Just like you want to automate the triggering of nurturing sequences, you also want to be able to SUSPEND nurturing sequences if a lead takes the action you want them to take.
That’s right. Think about it. How much do you love getting emails asking you to do something that you’ve already done? (Not at all, right?) So if you have a nurturing sequence designed to move people along their buying journey – and they BUY before the nurturing sequence is complete, you want to have an automated way to turn off the nurturing sequence (and maybe start a new one related to their purchase). Easy when you’ve got the right system.
The Foundation: Why Valuable Content and Opt-ins Matter
And finally – guess what? You can’t do ANY OF THIS AT ALL if you don’t have valuable content that people want and that they opt-in to get. Fact: if you don’t know who they are, you can’t nurture them. While you can keep being visible, you can’t proactively do anything. There are some big voices in marketing suggesting that opt-in forms are dead – to which we say, “NO THEY ARE NOT.” Find out more about our position on this particular matter – and why content is so incredibly valuable as a means of attracting new leads, in Kim’s rant, I mean post, Opt-In Forms are Dead – Is This is the Future of Lead Generation?
The ROI of Effective Lead Nurturing: What Results Can You Expect?
Is it worth building a “done well” lead nurturing strategy? You bet it is. It’s proven in the case studies we’ve shared and borne out in the statistic we’ve gathered from a variety of sources.
Potential Results: What Lead Nurturing Can Do for Your Business
What would happen to your business if any or all of these things came true? What if…
- You could generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost?
- Your customers made 47% larger purchases than they did before you were using “done-well” lead nurturing?
- Your lead nurturing emails were getting 4-10 times the response rate compared to your standalone email blasts?
- You had 9% more sales reps making quota?
- Your leads represented a 20% increase in sales opportunities?
Do lead nurturing well, and these types of results could be yours.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is lead nurturing and how does it work?
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with leads who are not yet ready to buy, by providing them with valuable information relevant to their specific interests and their decision process, in a sequence of emails delivered over time, so that YOU will be top-of-mind when they're ready to become someone's customer.
Why is action-based lead nurturing better than profile-based nurturing?
A 'done well' nurturing plan triggers the nurturing sequence based on a known lead's visit to a specific page on the website, to a specific blog post on the website, or in response to the download of a popular eBook. In the second scenario, you'd be nurturing the people who are interested in leadership training, regardless of their job title.
How should leads be segmented for a lead nurturing strategy?
Personally, I like to think about segments in terms of the different conversations I might have with someone based on what they're interested in, what particular problem they're trying to solve, or what motivation they have to make a change or learn something new. New leads either choose their primary interest (bucket) right on the website, or they receive an email (called a segmentation email) asking which issue they feel is impacting them the most.
What results can a business expect from effective lead nurturing?
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate compared to standalone email blasts.
Should lead nurturing sequences be automatically stopped when a lead converts?
Just like you want to automate the triggering of nurturing sequences, you also want to be able to SUSPEND nurturing sequences if a lead takes the action you want them to take. So if you have a nurturing sequence designed to move people along their buying journey — and they BUY before the nurturing sequence is complete, you want to have an automated way to turn off the nurturing sequence (and maybe start a new one related to their purchase).
