What is Lead Nurturing and How to Nurture to Get the ‘Right’ Customers?

Have you ever found yourself constantly receiving content from a brand or service you once subscribed to via email, your news feed, or a website you regularly visit?

Do you realize what that content is… and why it keeps following you around? Even worse (or better), many of those offers and topics seem to speak to you personally.

That’s exactly the idea behind Lead Nurturing—which we’re going to explore today. What is it, and how can this strategy help you turn prospects into actual customers? By the end of this article, you’ll clearly see how to nurture the right leads effectively.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a proactive strategy that helps to nurture, cultivate, and build strong relationships with high-quality leads or ‘potential’ customers who have the likelihood of eventually becoming customers or buyers in the future. This is achieved by delivering relevant and carefully selected information to them until they are fully ready to make a purchase willingly.

How is Lead Nurturing Different from Lead Generation?

We have previously discussed Lead Generation in the article Lead Generation: Building a List of ‘Potential’ Customers in Your Hands, which focuses on “creating leads” by converting interested visitors into leads, resulting in a list of prospects in your possession.

This differs from Lead Nurturing, which is a similar process but can be applied to people who are potential customers but may not need your product today. They might lack the budget, be unable to make a decision yet, or it might be a continuous process following Lead Generation, aiming to build relationships (Lead Nurturing) with the leads obtained.

Therefore, the intensity of the target group in Lead Nurturing may not immediately reach the stage of becoming customers, but we can nurture, cultivate, and maintain relationships with them continuously until they are ready to purchase from us.

How Does Lead Nurturing Help Businesses?

Believe it or not, marketing automation within the lead nurturing process can increase sales opportunities, and more companies are starting to seriously focus on planning, strategizing, and analyzing lead nurturing efforts.

According to data from HubSpot, 74% of companies worldwide prioritize lead nurturing and conversion because they understand that not all leads will result in conversions. Investing in nurturing and cultivating leads to create sales opportunities is essential.

A survey by demandgenreport examined lead nurturing efforts from marketing and sales teams and found that lead nurturing increased sales opportunities by 10%. This suggests that using lead nurturing is more effective than rushing all prospects into the sales process, such as cold calling or offering trials, which can often annoy potential customers.

Besides increasing the number of quality leads, lead nurturing also helps in several other ways, such as:

• Reducing the cost per lead and the customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Increasing the average order value (AOV), since sales are made to people who are ready to buy
• Growing the number of customers who trust the brand
• Achieving response rates that are 4 to 10 times higher

How Can You Do Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a process of nurturing and managing relationships with target customers, helping them gradually move through the stages of the buying decision—from lead to customer.

We can use the marketing framework called the Inbound Funnel, which is a conceptual framework or marketing workflow, to better understand and segment the target audience according to each stage. This allows us to create appropriate nurturing strategies for each group and build relationships until we can close the sale and convert them into customers.

Example: Applying Lead Nurturing Alongside the Inbound Flywheel in 3 Stages

• Attract: Turn strangers into prospects by building awareness, especially among those not ready to purchase. Video content works best at this stage for nurturing initial interest.
• Engage: When leads show interest or engage with your content, they are ready to become customers. You can present relevant promotions without overwhelming them because the content aligns with their needs.
• Delight: After a purchase, continue nurturing through after-sales service to build loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and turn customers into advocates.

Now that you understand the concept, let’s look at practical lead nurturing ideas that are proven to work.

Ideas and Examples of Lead Nurturing

1. Email Nurturing

Email marketing remains a powerful and reliable tool for nurturing leads—even after decades of use. According to HubSpot’s 2020 data on email performance among small businesses, effective campaigns can achieve an open rate of 26% or higher. This proves that Email Nurturing is still an essential and effective communication strategy in modern marketing.

According to a Databox survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents stated that email nurturing is the most effective method for re-engaging leads.

For example, you could set up a welcome email that’s automatically sent when someone follows your page, using a marketing automation tool. You can then track recipient behavior—such as whether they open the email—to better segment your leads. This allows you to deliver more relevant content, nurture their interest over time, and ultimately guide them toward making a purchase decision.

If the system detects that a lead has opened the welcome email, it can automatically trigger a follow-up email containing a “Next Steps” piece of content. If the recipient also opens the Next Steps email, the system can then send a sales page or a meeting booking link—indicating that this lead is likely ready to learn more or make a purchase.

However, if the Next Steps email goes unopened, it might suggest the lead isn’t highly interested yet. In that case, you could follow up with educational content like a video or an e-book instead, to provide more value and build trust over time.

2. Retargeting

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is another widely used marketing strategy. It’s designed to re-engage customers who have previously purchased, visited your website, or interacted with your brand through various channels. The goal is to reignite their interest, create a sense of need, and encourage them to make a purchase—or even make a

You can run retargeting campaigns across various platforms, including:

Social Media

You can retarget users on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, LINE, or Facebook. Most of these campaigns appear as advertisements. For example:

• Facebook: Retarget users who previously clicked on or viewed your product through campaigns managed via Facebook Ads Manager.
• Twitter: Promote tweets to targeted audiences through various ad formats—Account, Post, Moments (short-form video with hashtags similar to Instagram), or Trends.
• YouTube: Run video retargeting ads with formats like skippable and non-skippable ads to re-engage viewers who have shown interest.

Google

Retargeting on Google Search can be done in two main ways:

• Display Network: Show banner ads to users who visited your website but didn’t purchase, on sites that are Google partners.
• Search Retargeting: Deliver text ads on Google Search when users revisit the same keywords you’re targeting, reminding them of your offering.

Although retargeting as a lead nurturing strategy can be challenging, it’s highly effective when done right. Understanding which stage your audience is in and delivering the right message at the right frequency can significantly boost conversion rates.

3. Personalization

Personalization is a marketing strategy that uses technology to analyze data and understand customer behavior. It can be applied in Lead Nurturing by targeting specific audience segments to deliver more relevant advertising campaigns or content. This helps nurture prospects and encourages them to choose your products or revisit your website.

The approach of Personalization is similar to Retargeting, where it tracks and re-engages customers who have taken certain actions across various channels and shown interest in products but have not yet made a purchase. This continuous encouragement helps guide prospects toward making a buying decision. Personalized marketing accelerates sales by showing products that match individual interests, thereby selling based on consumer needs.

An example from Blueshift discusses journey-based personalization communication, which is often used in B2B businesses because customers have a long sales cycle. This method maps customers to the marketing journey (funnel), for example:

• The Attract stage, which focuses on building awareness, communicates with credibility by emphasizing brand-level messaging.
• Customers in the Engage stage, who are more likely to make a purchase, may receive discounts or in-depth information to help convince them and build confidence in the product.

4. Content Marketing

Of course, Content Marketing is an essential strategy for Lead Nurturing because it is a communication strategy where you can prepare content in advance based on the behavior of each recipient by delivering relevant information.

Content formats range from articles, eBooks, infographics, to videos, which help nurture relationships with potential customers and encourage them to become buyers. Instead of just sending regular newsletters, you can set up your Content Marketing system to keep your leads from forgetting your brand or products through various owned channels.

Additionally, you can use Content Marketing to nurture relationships with existing customers, such as following up on satisfaction, which helps maintain ongoing interaction with customers. This method also reduces the workload of Marketing/Sales teams in tracking each lead as the customer base grows.

Content Shifu creates content in various formats, such as:

• Educational articles on the website contentshifu.com
• Sharing articles through the Content Shifu Facebook Fanpage
• Producing videos on the Content Shifu YouTube Channel

The content provides knowledge for people interested in Digital Marketing to nurture and cultivate leads likely to purchase Digital Marketing courses, including sending emails tailored to the lead’s stage through Email Automation.

Summary

Finally, what we want to leave you with is this: before you can do Lead Nurturing, you must already have a list of leads in hand. Of course, you need to have your own owned channels where you can collect leads.

Therefore, creating the right channels and content that attract your target audience is another essential step. Content Marketing itself also plays a key role in helping you acquire quality leads and allowing Lead Nurturing to naturally nurture customers. It will also help you offer products and services that better match the experience of your target audience.

Now, Your Turn!

Now it’s your turn to take Lead Nurturing and try applying it to your marketing efforts. But don’t forget, besides the strategies you’ve learned, management is equally important. Do you already have the tools to support you? Do you have a content system aligned with the customer life cycle? Feel free to explore more in our other articles or courses :)