Welcome to Part 2 of our Lead Nurturing With HubSpot series! If you caught the first installment, you know that lead nurturing is absolutely essential for B2B companies looking to engage prospects and drive more sales. But what exactly does a high-performing lead nurturing campaign look like?
The answer lies in marketing automation, and more specifically, lead nurturing workflows. When set up strategically in a tool like HubSpot, lead nurturing workflows can be a game-changer for guiding leads through the buyer‘s journey and accelerating the often-lengthy B2B sales cycle.
In this post, we‘ll walk through all the key steps to crafting killer lead nurturing workflows in HubSpot. You‘ll learn:
- What content works best for each stage of the buyer‘s journey
- The different types of lead nurturing workflows to set up
- Best practices for email timing, personalization, and optimization
- How to measure workflow effectiveness and prove ROI
By the end, you‘ll be ready to build your own automated lead nurturing engine that saves time for your team while delivering maximum value to your leads. Let‘s dive in!
Why Lead Nurturing Workflows Are a Must for B2B
Before we jump into execution tactics, let‘s take a moment to reinforce just how impactful lead nurturing can be when done well. Consider these statistics:
- Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads. (Source)
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. (Source)
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source)
Why is lead nurturing so powerful? Because today‘s B2B buyers conduct extensive research online before ever talking to a salesperson. By proactively providing prospects with relevant, educational content tailored to their stage of the buying process, you‘re positioning your company as a trusted advisor and dramatically increasing the chances they‘ll choose you when it comes time to buy.
Marketing automation makes it possible to deliver this type of personalized, one-to-one communication at scale. And with a platform like HubSpot that includes a robust CRM, you can ensure your lead nurturing efforts are tightly aligned with your sales team‘s activities to get the maximum impact.
Now that we‘ve established the "why," let‘s get tactical with the "how."
Mapping Content to the B2B Buyer‘s Journey
The foundation of any effective lead nurturing campaign is having the right content for each stage of the buyer‘s journey. As a quick refresher, the typical B2B buying process includes three key stages:
- Awareness – Prospect is experiencing symptoms of a problem or opportunity and is doing research to more clearly understand and frame it.
- Consideration – Prospect has defined their problem/opportunity and is actively considering different solution approaches.
- Decision – Prospect has settled on a solution approach and is evaluating and comparing specific vendors.
To engage buyers at each of these stages, you‘ll need a healthy library of content assets that provide relevant information and value. Here are some specific content ideas for each stage:
Awareness Stage Content
- Educational blog posts
- Industry reports and ebooks
- Explainer videos
- Infographics
- Checklists
Consideration Stage Content
- In-depth how-to guides
- Comparison whitepapers
- Expert webinars
- Case studies
- Product feature videos
Decision Stage Content
- Vendor comparison guides
- Product demos/free trials
- ROI calculators
- Customer testimonials
- Personalized consultations
By mapping your content to specific buyer stages, you can ensure you‘re providing the right information at the right time, rather than promoting your product prematurely or providing content that‘s no longer relevant to the buyer‘s needs.
Pro tip: Use HubSpot‘s content strategy tool to easily organize and visualize your content assets by buyer persona and stage.
Building High-Performing HubSpot Workflows for Lead Nurturing
With a strong content foundation in place, it‘s time to build the HubSpot workflows that will actually deliver this content to your leads. As we touched on earlier, the power of workflows lies in their ability to provide automated yet highly targeted follow up over time.
Before diving into create mode, consider these core principles of high-performing lead nurturing workflows:
- Segmentation is key. The more targeted your workflows are to specific buyer personas and stages, the more effective they‘ll be. Use HubSpot lists to segment your leads based on key attributes.
- Context is king. Look at a lead‘s past activity and behaviors to inform what workflow content will be most relevant to them. Page views, form submissions, and email engagement are all good signals.
- Timing matters. Find the right cadence for your workflows based on the length of your typical buying cycle. A daily email might make sense for a transactional buy, while a biweekly or monthly touch could be better for an enterprise deal.
- Content quality beats quantity. Focus on providing value with each workflow touch rather than simply blasting out as much content as possible. Leave them wanting more!
- Test, measure, optimize. Regularly review your workflow metrics and make enhancements based on your findings. Even small tweaks to timing, subject lines, and CTAs can have a big impact.
Got it? Now let‘s look at some of the most effective types of HubSpot workflows for B2B lead nurturing.
1. Topic/Interest Workflows
These workflows are triggered when a lead takes an action that signals interest in a particular topic, like viewing a specific product page or downloading an awareness stage offer. The workflow then sends a series of emails with additional content related to that topic.
Example: An accounting software company creates a workflow triggered by leads who view their reporting features page. The workflow includes an educational blog post on KPI tracking, a whitepaper on financial close best practices, and an invitation to a webinar on consolidation and reporting.
2. Engagement Workflows
Rather than being tied to a specific topic, engagement workflows are triggered based on a lead‘s general activity level or lack thereof. They‘re used to accelerate leads that are highly engaged or re-engage leads who have gone cold.
Example: A marketing agency sets up a workflow for leads who have downloaded multiple offers and visited key pages on their site. The workflow sends increasingly conversion-oriented emails, like an invitation to a free discovery call or a personalized website assessment.
3. Lead Lifecycle Stage Workflows
These workflows automatically update a lead‘s lifecycle stage in HubSpot based on specific behaviors, demographics, or a lead scoring threshold. With this key information syncing to your CRM, sales can prioritize their outreach efforts.
Example: A SaaS company creates a workflow that automatically moves leads to an MQL stage when they reach a lead score of 100. Sales is notified so they can initiate personalized follow up while marketing continues to nurture the lead with content.
4. New Customer Onboarding Workflows
The sales cycle doesn‘t end when a deal closes. Use workflows to welcome new customers, share helpful resources, and provide training to drive product adoption and retention.
Example: An IT managed services provider enrolls new customers into a workflow that includes a personalized welcome video, links to their knowledge base, an invitation to a live training session, and details on how to get support.
To give you a sense of what a full lead nurturing workflow might look like, here‘s a sample workflow for the awareness stage:
Trigger: Lead downloads awareness stage ebook
- Email 1 (Instant): Deliver ebook, thank them for downloading, share link to related blog post
- Email 2 (3 days later): Provide useful, relevant tips from the ebook, link to infographic on same topic
- Email 3 (7 days later): Invite to register for a related educational webinar
- Email 4 (2 days post webinar): Send recording, promote a consideration stage whitepaper
- Email 5 (7 days later): Share customer success story/case study, CTA to book a demo
See how each touch builds on the previous one while providing standalone value? You‘re educating the buyer, building credibility, and guiding them to take the next step.
Once you‘ve built out your workflows, don‘t forget to enroll existing leads in addition to having them triggered by future lead actions. This will ensure both your current database and new leads are being nurtured effectively.
Analyzing and Optimizing Your Lead Nurturing Workflows
To make sure your workflows are having the intended impact, it‘s important to regularly assess your key metrics and make data-driven optimizations. HubSpot‘s analytics make it easy to track workflow performance at both an individual email level and an overall workflow level.
Here are some of the most important metrics to focus on:
- Open rate: The percentage of recipients who opened the email. Aim for 30-40%.
- Clickthrough rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who clicked a link in the email. Aim for 4-5%.
- Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of recipients who unsubscribed after receiving the email. Keep it under 0.5%.
- Goal conversion rate: The percentage of enrolled contacts who completed the workflow goal (e.g. booked a demo). Track improvements over time.
In the HubSpot workflow tool, you can easily view these metrics for each workflow email:
Source: HubSpot
If you see a particular email with low engagement or high unsubscribes, don‘t panic. Instead, use that data to make strategic tweaks such as:
- Adjusting the subject line and preview text to be more compelling
- Changing the time of day or day of week it‘s sent
- Shortening the content and focusing more on the value to the reader
- Improving the CTA copy and design to drive more clicks
To go deeper on reporting, you can also create custom reports in HubSpot that show how many leads are becoming marketing qualified (MQL) or sales qualified (SQL) through your workflows over time. You can even tie workflow activity to closed deals and revenue to prove full funnel ROI.
Pro tip: To get a holistic view of your lead nurturing program, consider blending data from HubSpot with data from your CRM and other marketing channels in a centralized dashboard using a BI tool like Databox or Domo.
Real-Life Lead Nurturing Examples to Inspire You
Want to see what successful B2B lead nurturing looks like in practice? Here are a few examples from real HubSpot customers:
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Trello: The popular project management software company uses HubSpot workflows to send personalized email "nudges" to free trial users who haven‘t completed key onboarding tasks yet, increasing trial-to-paid conversion rates.
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Hotjar: The conversion optimization platform created separate lead nurturing tracks for its marketing and product management personas, resulting in open rates over 40% and a 33% increase in sales.
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DivvyHQ: The content planning software brand uses topical lead nurturing workflows combined with smart content to seamlessly continue conversations from email to website to sales call, contributing to 100%+ annual revenue growth.
Sources: HubSpot customer case studies
There‘s no one-size-fits all approach to lead nurturing, but hopefully these examples provide some inspiration as you build out your own workflows.
Go Forth and Nurture
There you have it! A deep dive into building effective B2B lead nurturing workflows using HubSpot. We covered a lot of ground, but just remember – the key to success lies in delivering the right content to the right leads at the right time, then continuously tweaking and optimizing based on performance.
Effective lead nurturing through marketing automation requires effort to set up, but the payoff can be substantial, from shorter sales cycles to larger deal sizes to improved customer retention. So what are you waiting for?
Map out your content, build your first workflow, and start accelerating leads through the funnel and driving more revenue for your business. Your sales team will thank you, and your future customers will too.
