Five tools to automate lead nurturing in sales

Lead nurturing is crucial for businesses looking to increase their conversion rate.

As most buyers are not ready to proceed to a purchase from the first brand interaction, lead nurturing facilitates a more personalised approach, increasing the chances of a conversion. The aim is to build a relationship with each prospect through genuine interest and gradual trust. However, this takes time – and requires significant investment. Which is why the potential benefits of automating some or all of that process are significant.

According to Ascend2’s report, 57% of marketers believe that lead nurturing is the most valuable feature for them in an automation software.

Five tools for effective lead nurturing automation

1. BuzzBuilder Pro

BuzzBuilder Pro is described as a “prospecting platform for sales pros” and it’s focused on automating tasks in email marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing. When it comes to increasing conversions, it facilitates lead generation through:

• automated cold email campaigns
• trigger events throughout the web
• business intelligence

When it comes to lead nurturing, it uses automation and intelligence to move the conversation forward. It makes it easier for marketing and sales teams to keep their leads organised, while ProspectPulse helps to score leads according to interest.

One of the most useful features is the ability to send automatic follow-up emails to warm prospects. Moreover, HotLead Alerts notifies you in real time about the most interesting leads, helping you connect with them as soon as possible.

2. LeadSquared 

LeadSquared is a lead conversion platform blending marketing automation and sales CRM to nurture leads and enable new sales.

Its most popular features include:

• Lead tracking
• Lead scoring
• Email integration
• Lead qualification
• Drip marketing
• Lead intelligence analytics

When focusing on lead nurturing, LeadSquared allows you to set up personalised approaches, depending on the actions that each lead completes. For example, a prospect who downloads an ebook is having a different approach compared to someone who visited the Pricing page. This way, the automated process becomes more sophisticated, increasing the chances of moving each lead further down the funnel.

Moreover, it allows you to design easy and visual lead nurturing workflows, while lead nurturing analytics can offer the right insights on your most effective campaigns.

If lead assignment is a challenge for your team, then LeadSquared can speed up the process by assigning the leads to each person based on geography, interests, or any other criteria.

One of the most interesting features in LeadSquared is the ability to use machine learning to increase the efficiency of a marketing and sales strategy. Conversion prediction collects all the historical data and learns from every lead to create a prediction model that helps you identify top prospects. Leads are marked according to their conversion probability – either high, medium, or low – helping teams focus their interest on the most likely to convert.

The pricing is offering three options, depending on your team’s needs, one for Marketing Automation, one for Sales and Mobile CRM and one that combines both of them, along with the feature of Conversion Prediction.

3. Jumplead

Jumplead is an all-in-one marketing software that aims to facilitate the process of turning prospects into customers.

It offers several templates that can be adjusted to create personalised messages. Moreover, a series of behaviour-triggered actions can be customised to create multi-step schedules in the interaction with each contact. This increases the chances of having a conversation with time at the optimal moment.

Jumplead can become even more powerful when integrated with Salesforce, Zapier, Pipedrive, WordPress, Google Contacts and Shopify among others.

It seems like a useful addition for a small business, with the price being very appealing. In fact, you can try the software for nothing up to 200 visits and 200 contacts, which can be ideal for a business trying out marketing automation for the first time.

4. LeadRocket

LeadRocket aligns marketing and sales with the use of automation, accelerating conversions with a simple and sophisticated interface.

It can help your business nurture leads through personalised engagement, focusing on building a relationship until the prospects are ready to make a purchase.

This is achieved via an automated lead nurturing program. Using proprietary data – from your CRM and website analytics, for example – it offers an improved understanding of each lead, classifying them accordingly and even notifying the sales team when a warm lead arrives.

It allows teams to run personalised lead nurturing campaigns with action-based triggers – as well as using social media for improved insights about customers and prospects. Business intelligence technology can provide feedback on how to improve the customer experience, creating an even more personalised approach.

LeadRocket integrates with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, Zoho, SAP CRM, SugarCRM, making it easier to involve lead nurturing in your existing CRM.

5. NoCRM.io

NoCRM.io is a unique lead management software that aims to help marketers and salespeople without the need of an additional CRM software.

It allows you to engage with prospects, improve the sales cycle and improve your team’s productivity, helping a lead move through the customer journey faster and more reliably.

NoCRM.io promises to get your team organised with minimal effort and this can certainly be achieved with its lead nurturing features. Your business can set reminders, add notes for each prospect, use tags to organise them, along with prioritising the most important prospects.

Another useful feature is the ability to retrieve additional information about each prospect through LinkedIn with the use of Lead Clipper, while you can also connect the software to your site’s contact form to obtain each prospect’s details. Moreover, it’s also possible to capture leads from email, simply by forwarding them to nocrm.io.

It seems to be a useful tool, especially for small businesses that need to stay organised without having a big budget to spend on it. NoCRM.io offers two editions, Starter and Expert, starting from £7 and £12 per month for each user.

How to pick the best tool for automated lead generation

Every tool offers different features and these five suggestions indicate that the shift of focus on each one depends on the needs of each team.

For example, a smaller team may focus more on the cost of the software and its efficiency, justifying the ROI to invest in it, or even the time required to start using it.

However, a larger business with a bigger team may be more interested in the integrations, the customer support, or even the results and how automation can truly help them through their increased number of prospects.

Lead nurturing is an important part of the marketing and sales process, so it may be a good idea to experiment with the demos of several tools until you decide which one fits your needs.

Here are some questions you may want to ask before picking the right one for your team:

• Will it help my team save time?
• Are the personalization tools easy to use?
• Are there any additional costs?
• How will you measure ROI?
• What challenges have other brands faced with implementation?
• Is there training provided from the vendor?
• Is customer support available?