Undeniably targeted cohort-based lead nurturing followed by lead nurturing is of utmost importance for any business. The practice brings more visibility to your brand, making it credible in the consumer market.

Usually, businesses use Google Analytics to track their leads to know which channels generate the most leads. But the question is, which channels are actually sending you qualified leads? Leads that might become your customers. This is where cohort analysis comes into play.

Cohort-based lead nurturing segments your website users into specific groups based on comparable patterns and common characteristics to check which group converts better. Hence, we will look into Google Analytics’ new standard cohort-based report for better lead generation.

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Identify high-performing customer cohorts

Here you need to identify the customer profiles that have been maintaining higher retention rates. Aside from this, you need to also check their LTV with your brand and their rate of engagement. These parameters can help to create high-performance cohorts. Let us learn how!

The cohort analysis for the group with high customer retention helps you learn about the exact number of customers who are consistently active with your brand. This cohort analysis considers customer retention in days/weeks/months to give you a detailed report.

Further, LTV cohort-based lead nurturing analysis enables you to assess the customer behavior of a particular user group over their lifetime. Thus, higher LTV means more profit generation via this particular cohort group. Performing lead nurturing through targeted marketing for this cohort group can re-attract similar customers.

A higher engagement rate cohort implies you have considerable touch-points bringing success to your retention marketing as well as upsell and cross-sell proceedings performing well.

Break your entire consumer base into cohorts to gain more granular information through these parameters. Every user in a particular cohort needs to have distinct characteristics that make them different from other cohorts.

For example, specific demographics, product usage, or statistics. Here, you can consider aspects regarding the user's proficiency, including novice, intermediate, and advanced levels. Or the users’ country, use cases, product usage frequency, and customer’s company size (small. Medium, and enterprise-level).

Depending on ideal customer profiles for each cohort, use multiple digital channels to connect with your diverse ideal prospects through campaigns. Some of the popular channels you can use include email, websites ( I.e., blogs, landing pages, display advertisements, etc.,) social media (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter), phone calls, and SMS. Make sure to make your outreach campaign personalized by providing valuable data to your prospects based on your research.

You can optimize your digital channel outreach by using today’s popular strategies like QR codes. By adding QR codes in your emails, posts, or flyers, you can redirect your customers to your products’ landing pages, social media accounts, or other promotional ads that can help convert your visitors. Also, you can create a QR code using a reliable QR code generator website easily.

Once you optimize your outreach campaigns using different strategies i.e., personalization, and easy access through QR codes, move ahead to measure overall sales funnel conversions. Use suitable metrics to measure conversion rates and the performance of your lead nurturing campaigns. Some of the conversion rate metrics you can use are:

● Traffic sources

● Return visitor conversion rate

● New visitor conversion rate

● Interactions per visit

● Value per visit

● Cost per conversion

● Bounce rates

● Exit pages

Here are the lead nurturing performance metrics you can consider:

● Click-Through Rate

● Return on Investment

● Cost Per Lead

● Cost Per Click

● Conversion rate

● The number of marketing qualified leads etc.

Improving Cohort-based Lead Nurturing and Lead Nurturing

Select high-performing channels for lead generation

As per a report by Ascend2, email marketing is the top effective channel for lead generation. Personalized emails can improve conversion rates by 10% and CTR by 14%. Content marketing campaigns using whitepapers, videos, blogs, podcasts, and infographics can bring more sales to your brand. Around 93% of B2B companies agree that content marketing can generate better numbers of leads in contrast to conventional marketing tactics.

Make use of popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. As per research, LinkedIn generates more than 80% of leads for B2B businesses, making it a great place to find B2B leads.

Further, you need to track your campaign’s performance by using optimal metrics such as profits, ROI, sales, customer satisfaction, and review. Also, keep a check on the overall quality of service as well as your brand’s reputation in the market.

You need to optimize your campaigns to boost the performance of your sales, so put more focus on SEO aspects. Use SEO tools to get the best phrases and keywords relevant to your website. Make your official website mobile-friendly. Add relevant inbound links to your content. To make the process easier for you, we advise you to connect with a qualified SEO expert.

Identify lead generation campaigns and tweak parameters for improving lead generation

An effective lead generation and lead nurturing requires well-planned strategies. Before laying out the campaigns, it should be well thought out.

Here you need to consider your consumer persona to identify your target audience. A suitable lead generation campaign should meet the interests and requirements of consumers who are at different stages of their buying journey.

So your campaign should be specific for those stages. Such as:

Awareness stage: Create an educational campaign that delivers relevant information to customers who are looking for specific solutions through video tutorials, blog posts, infographics, etc.

Consideration stage: This campaign should focus on providing exact solutions to your customers’ problems. Therefore redirecting them to ebooks, case studies, and webinars will be appropriate.

Decision stage: Encourage your customers to convert by providing options to enjoy demos of your service or product as well as free trials.

Plan your lead nurturing campaigns depending on your marketing and sales goals

The first thing you should be clear of is your marketing and sales goals. It will help you to strategize suitable lead nurturing campaigns.

You will be able to deliver the most relevant content to your qualified leads with a goal-based campaign.

Make use of multiple marketing KPIs that are relevant to your goals. Using the appropriate KPIs will help you create quality content that will fulfill the needs of your qualified leads.

Identify and create lead nurturing campaigns for specific cohorts across different channels

As mentioned earlier, you have access to several effective lead-generation channels, including emails, content, social media, and so on.

Create the most appropriate cohort-based lead nurturing campaigns based on different sections of your consumer base as per data from your cohort analysis.

The topmost well-known and effective lead nurturing campaigns include:

● Drip campaigns for email newsletters campaigns.

● Creation and distribution of personalized and targeted emails.

● Making sales calls.

● Using direct mail.

● Creating informative and educational blog posts and articles through content marketing campaigns.

● Social media marketing.

● Pay-per-click and retargeting advertisements.

Improve engagement with gamification, and interactive marketing

The inclusion of gamification within a brand’s marketing strategy brings the benefit of continuous sharing and engagement. Hence your brand will also be able to acquire user-generated content.

It also increases the chance of your brand's name getting spread through your customers' recommendations.

Dominos provides one of the great examples of marketing through gamification. There has been remarkable growth in ROI after Dominos incorporated gamification with its brand.

A 30% boost in revenue was seen after the launch of a game application called create-your-own-pizza.

Here's how you can increase your customers’ engagement by using gamification marketing tactics for your brand:

● Create different levels of achievements and provide points, coins, rewards, or certificates. Also, launch prices or leaderboards and enable your users to unlock them by fulfilling certain activities with your brand.

● Encourage users to further share their experiences and winning points with their contacts. Make your game application easily shareable.

● Ask your users to provide their game-related content so that you can include user-generated content in your marketing campaign.

● Try to provide a gaming experience that resembles some popular games that Generation X and millennials usually enjoy.

● Utilize the game application to advertise your new product launches and services that are specific to unique users.

Track performance metrics and optimize campaigns to improve sales conversions

Keep tracking performance metrics and follow campaign optimization to enhance sales conversions.

Some examples of metrics that you must focus on include conversion rates, total customer acquisition, revenue generated, and return on marketing investment.

You need to compare numerous metrics to learn about the phases where your qualified leads are not moving forward to become your customer.

Compare the total number of impressions that a campaign delivers and the total number of customer acquisitions and clicks generated. It will help you to discover whether your advertisement campaign needs improvement.

In case you are getting high clicks but low conversions, then you need to improve your offer or the check-out procedure relevant to the campaign.

Continue customer engagement and nurturing post conversions to improve retention

You need to reconnect with your customer and improve your relationship with them. There are the following tactics you can use:

Using a communication calendar

Adopting a communication calendar can be helpful in creating higher chances to cross-sell and upsell.

A communication calendar helps you to stay updated with your customers' communication. You can get insights on the most recent time a user reached out to your brand. Also, you will be able to know if your existing customers have not contacted your brand.

Sending a company newsletter

Make use of email automation to distribute new offers and updates of your brand to your consumer base.

You can employ an RSS feed and set it to a predefined frequency. It will help you to send the updated content automatically. Newsletters help your brand remain relevant to your customers.

Starting a consumer education program

The consumer education program is going to be a long-term investment for your business. With this initiative, you can build a variety of tools that allow your customers to self-help.

Some examples of the tools include community forums. With this, customers can find solutions on their own regarding your brand's service or product.

Providing exceptional services

It is not a simple and easy task to always offer superior services or products to your customers than your rivals in the industry. But doing so will be absolutely beneficial for your brand.

If you have already branded your business that provides robust services to solve customers’ issues, then you are already on the right path. Quality services are equal to more customer retention.

Conclusion

Maintaining good conversion sales is the dream of every e-commerce marketer. However, it's harder than it sounds. Especially due to increased competition in the industry, businesses need to continuously optimize their marketing campaigns and business practices and use cohort-based lead nurturing. Actively working on these aspects will keep your business moving forward to success.

Author Bio

Akshay Deogiri

Akshay is a digital marketer and a startup enthusiast exploring the myriad avenues of everything marketing. At Beaconstac, he enables companies to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds through the use of custom QR codes.

Guest Post: How can cohort-based lead nurturing help you close more sales

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