5 Lead Nurturing Mistakes to Avoid in 2024

However, as a resource-intensive strategy, achieving stakeholder buy-in for more complex aspects of lead nurturing campaigns can be challenging (especially in the case that lead nurturing is run in-house and requires more spending).

This difficulty is compounded if marketing teams are not equipped with the right tools to track and assess lead nurturing performance and showcase its positive impact.

Therefore, planning ahead and prioritizing resources when devising B2B lead nurturing strategies is essential, as is keeping close track of campaign performance.

Furthermore, the rise of the defensive buyer and increasingly complex buyer journeys places a greater emphasis on identifying the right messaging and optimizing lead nurturing strategies. This includes staying ahead of the trends shaping the B2B marketplace and buyer priorities, and ensuring that lead nurturing campaigns adhere to best practices.

This article explores five common lead nurturing mistakes to avoid to ensure the performance of your lead nurturing strategies in 2024.

This is a common misconception concerning lead nurturing and its role in the buyer’s journey. While effective B2B lead nurturing should support and encourage conversions, its primary function is not to directly focus on driving sales, but rather, deliver prospective buyers value.

For this reason, lead nurturing must prioritize relationship building with potential buyers. Anchor this approach by developing a detailed understanding of your audience’s pain points and behavior. This will help ensure that your messaging and outreach strategies are accurate and efficient.

Your lead nurturing can also support conversions by delivering a remarkable client experience (CX) to both avoid client churn and keep leads from dropping out of the sales funnel. CX also encourages brand advocacy, which increases renewals and upsells, while also boosting word-of-mouth marketing and referrals.

Furthermore, acquiring new clients costs 5 to 7 times more than retaining existing ones (Forbes, 2022). These aspects of B2B lead nurturing are therefore critical for organizations looking to leverage the the role of client loyalty in boosting revenue.

Personalized marketing is crucial for the success of lead nurturing campaigns.

According to Salesforce, 80% of buyers emphasize that the experience provided by a company is as important as its products, and 73% of them have come to expect better and increased personalization as martech evolves.

Therefore, generic messaging is no longer effective for engaging potential buyers. Companies must create B2B lead nurturing campaigns based on timely and specific client pain points and challenges. Personalized marketing outreach is highly beneficial for achieving business goals, such as increased loyalty, reduced churn, higher pipeline activity and conversion rates, and, consequently, a welcome revenue boost.

Below are two fictional versions of emails a translation company could send to a prospect in the hospitality industry:

The personalized email speaks directly to the prospect’s unique needs, and highlights how your services may benefit them while also sharing valuable content to enable prospects to tackle their challenges. This demonstrates that the company has taken its time to research and understand the client’s unique challenges, and is genuinely interested in helping them achieve remarkable results.

Acquiring and leveraging lead intelligence is crucial to guide the creation of these assets.

By routinely collecting lead intelligence, companies can ensure that messaging continues to meet potential buyers’ evolving pain points while delivering relevant content to their preferred channels at the most appropriate timing and frequency.

Aggressive, sales-oriented marketing has long been out of fashion. Mistimed outreach risks being perceived as pushy, which can be damaging to brand perception and demand generation.

Recent developments, however, make it even more important to enable buyers to progress in their journeys at their own pace.

Without question, the unstable economic scenario of the last few years has had a remarkable impact on buyer behavior. Although the forecasts for tech spending in 2024 are slightly more optimistic compared to 2023, buyers remain defensive and risk-averse.

As a result, B2B buyers are looking for solutions that align with business goals to ensure ROI, are compatible with existing systems, and are low risk. Solutions must also be streamlined, reducing the chances of tech stack bloat.

These trends have also resulted in a lengthier and more complex buying process for decision makers. Indeed, most buyers (40.4%) take from 6 to 12 months to reach a final purchase decision, with 15.4% of buying processes lasting over a year (INFUSE Insights Voice of the Buyer 2024 Report).

Additionally, the increasing number of Millennial and Gen Z professionals that influence purchases (up to 64% of B2B buyers, according to Forrester) has resulted in the growing need for effective buyer enablement, as well as lower sales interaction, with a greater emphasis on buyer-led research so prospects can discover the brand and its solutions at their own pace.

In this scenario, forwarding prospects to salespeople prematurely can result in churn if they have yet to reach the decision stage in their buying journey. Long-term lead nurturing is therefore essential for supporting lengthy buying processes.

Your nurturing must deliver resonant, high-quality content that provides actionable value. Indeed, the majority of buyers (45.8%) consume more than 7 content pieces during their purchase process, according to the same INFUSE Insights report.

Gauging your prospective buyers' engagement levels with your nurture streams, adjusting cadences accordingly, and striving to provide value in every touchpoint are also essential strategies to cater to the modern buyer’s expectations. Companies that invest in enabling buyers to navigate the increasingly complex buying journeys of today will secure competitive positioning, ensuring greater client loyalty and lifetime value.

Closing a deal is no longer the end goal for B2B lead nurturing, but rather striving to form a meaningful relationship with clients, based on offering continued support and delivering them value.

Considering the costs involved with client acquisition, continued lead nurturing is a priority strategy for encouraging client loyalty and achieving higher CLTV.

In essence, post-sale nurturing must focus on supporting a positive user experience. For instance, you can offer clients consultations and training, or a loyalty program with exclusive discounts and content, as well as request feedback on your products or solutions.

While this requires resources and investment, existing clients are more likely to renew contracts and purchase additional offerings (up and cross-sells) when delighted with the quality of support and service.

A mere 5% increase in client retention can result in a whopping 25% to 95% increase in profits (Forbes, 2022). This is due to a 50% higher likelihood of these clients trying new products from the same brand, spending up to 31% more than new clients.

Marketing models such as the bow-tie model, illustrated below, emphasize the importance of post-sale marketing initiatives, increasing client lifetime value (CLTV) with upsells and renewals.

Source: Winning By Design

Data-driven marketing has evolved from a pioneering advantage over a decade ago to a must-have to keep up with industry trends and competitors. Currently, nearly 70% of leading marketers state that their decision-making is backed by data (Think With Google).

However, only 24% of executives describe their companies as data-driven (New Vantage Partners, 2021)—which highlights the importance of gathering feedback and evaluating campaign results whenever possible to achieve better outcomes. Naturally, this principle should also apply to lead nurturing.

Bolstering your lead nurturing strategies with data helps teams act quickly and with greater accuracy, ensuring better outcomes and increasing ROI. Furthermore, data-driven lead nurturing enables companies to deliver highly personalized experiences to clients.

One of the first steps to iterate your lead nurturing with optimizations is to closely track KPIs, selected prior to the campaign launch according to your overall marketing or specific nurturing goals. Email open rates, CTRs, and unsubscribes are some KPIs that can shed light on aspects of your lead nurturing that need improvement.

Low conversion rates and CTRs, for example, can indicate a need for better personalization, as well as improving the copy of CTAs and other elements conducive to engagement. Open rates signal the need to improve subject lines or audience segmentation, and unsubscribes can highlight the need to adjust the frequency of content drips, as well as take steps to ensure the relevance of content.

A/B testing different nurturing streams with similar audiences can help you locate points of improvement with greater accuracy.

If your audience demonstrates high engagement with your messaging, they may be primed to receive survey invites. Although these surveys must be carefully planned, they can provide a wealth of insights to improve your marketing initiatives.

It is also important to highlight that necessary adjustments can be made while the campaign is in flight. For example, low engagement rates displayed by certain audience segments in the first weeks of receiving nurturing might indicate low accuracy in targeting that needs to be addressed—focus on quick actions that ensure the next touchpoint leads receive is relevant and encourages engagement.