Lead nurturing is one of the most essential disciplines in modern marketing and sales. It’s about creating relevant and personalized experiences that build trust and nurture your leads into becoming customers. With HubSpot, you can automate and optimize this process using advanced and effective tools like segmentation, workflows, lead scoring, and data-driven analysis.
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your potential customers through valuable and relevant communication throughout their buyer’s journey. The goal is to deliver the right message at the right time to build trust and make leads more sales-ready. With a well-thought-out lead nurturing strategy, you can shorten the sales cycle, increase conversion rates, and ensure that your leads are effectively nurtured until they are ready to make a purchase decision.
Many leads are not ready to buy immediately—in fact, research from HubSpot shows that 96% of your visitors are not ready to make a decision the first time they encounter your brand. Without a strategy to nurture these leads, you risk losing their interest or having them choose a competitor.
Some of the key features that make HubSpot the ideal choice for lead nurturing include:
Lifecycle stages:
HubSpot's lifecycle stages allow you to classify your contacts into different stages—such as ‘Subscriber,’ ‘Lead,’ ‘Marketing Qualified Lead’ (MQL), and ‘Sales Qualified Lead’ (SQL). This helps you tailor your communication based on where your leads are in the sales funnel.
Lead nurturing flows:
With HubSpot's marketing automation you can build workflows that send personalized emails to your leads based on their behavior—for example, a download, visiting a key webpage, or interacting with a previous email.
(Note: Ensure that you have marketing consent and the correct subscription type before proceeding.)
ou can also enhance personalization further by supplementing workflows with sequences.
Tracking and personalization:
HubSpot’s tracking code enables you to monitor your leads’ behavior on your website. You can use this data to send tailored content that matches their interests and needs. For example, you can leverage Smart Rules, which allow you to display different versions of content based on individual users or audience segments.
In HubSpot, lead nurturing is not just a strategy but a systematic process supported by the platform’s advanced features.
This ensures that you:
Stay top-of-mind with your leads by consistently delivering relevant content.
Increase your conversion rate by guiding your leads further down the funnel.
Save time by automating manual tasks using HubSpot’s tools.
Effective lead nurturing starts with precise segmentation.
When you segment your audience in HubSpot, you ensure your messages are targeted and relevant—boosting engagement and conversion rates. According to HubSpot research, segmented campaigns achieve an average click-through rate of 14.31%, compared to 7.16% for non-segmented campaigns.
Segmentation involves dividing your leads based on data such as behavior, demographics, and interactions so you can communicate with them according to their unique needs and buyer’s journey. Instead of sending general campaigns, you can use HubSpot's tools to target specific groups of leads with relevant content that speaks directly to their interests and challenges—your perfect opportunity to build strong relationships.
HubSpot offers several tools for segmentation to help tailor your communication:
Properties
HubSpot also allows you to use both standardized and custom properties for segmentation.
Some relevant properties include:
Lifecycle stage: As mentioned earlier, you can segment leads based on where they are in the buyer’s journey (e.g., Lead, MQL, or SQL).
Industry: Divide your leads by industry to send content tailored to their specific field.
If you want to take your segmentation to the next level, you can also leverage:
Lead scoring:
With HubSpot's lead scoring, you can assign points to your leads based on their behavior and engagement. Once leads reach a specific score, they can be automatically moved to a new list, lead nurturing flow, or even a new lifecycle stage.
For instance, leads who have visited your demo page and downloaded an eBook should be given higher priority in your sales pipeline.
Behavior-based segmentation
With HubSpot’s website tracking, you can also create segments based on specific behavior.
For example, you could create a list of leads who have spent more than 5 minutes on your e-commerce site and then send them a personalized email about the products or services they’ve shown interest in.
A successful lead nurturing flow in HubSpot is the cornerstone of an automated and efficient lead nurturing strategy. With lead nurturing flows, you can create advanced automation processes that nurture your leads by sending relevant messages and performing actions based on their behavior, interests, and position in the buyer’s journey.
This is where your segmentation and data collection truly shine!
How to get started:
Define triggers for your lead nurturing flows
A trigger is an action or property that activates the workflow. You can set triggers based on:
Form Submissions: When a contact fills out a form (e.g., for an eBook or demo).
Page Visits: When a contact visits a specific landing page, such as a pricing page.
List Membership: When a contact is added to a dynamic list based on behavior or data.
Lead Score: When a contact reaches a specific lead score, such as 50 points, indicating high purchase intent.
Set up automated actions
Once a trigger is activated, HubSpot can execute a series of actions to nurture your lead:
Emails: Send a series of automated, personalized emails with valuable and relevant content.
For example, after downloading an eBook, you could send a thank-you email with a related case study.
Internal Notifications: Notify your sales team when a lead shows high interest (e.g., by visiting your pricing page).
It is ideal to leverage lead nurturing flows.
Not only do they allow you to scale your lead nurturing efforts without compromising personalization, but they also ensure that your leads’ behavior is addressed automatically at the right moments. This saves time for both marketing and sales teams.
Content Is the Driving Force Behind a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy. It is through valuable and relevant content that you build trust, position yourself as an expert, and guide your leads further along their buyer’s journey. In HubSpot, you can not only create and distribute content but also leverage the platform’s tools to personalize and measure the effectiveness of the content you produce.
To engage your leads effectively, your content must be tailored to their needs and stage in the buyer’s journey.
HubSpot enables you to categorize and distribute the following types of content based on your leads’ behavior and segment:
Top-of-funnel: Content that creates awareness, such as blog posts, guides, and checklists.
Middle-of-funnel: Content that educates and builds trust, like webinars, whitepapers, or customer success stories.
Bottom-of-funnel: Content designed to convert leads, such as product demos, pricing comparisons, and special offers.
HubSpot also offers several features to help you plan, produce, and deliver content that drives engagement:
Content strategy tool
Use HubSpot’s SEO tool to identify relevant topics and create content optimized for search engines. The tool helps you pinpoint keywords your leads are searching for and suggests topics for blog posts and landing pages.
For example, if many leads search for “The best e-commerce platform,” you could create a blog series about a system like Shopify.
Smart Content
With HubSpot’s Smart Content feature, you can personalize content based on your leads’ segment, lifecycle stage, or previous behavior.
For instance, you can display a unique call-to-action (CTA) on your website for leads who have already downloaded an eBook—such as encouraging them to book a demo, the natural next step in their buyer’s journey.
Once your content is created and distributed, it’s important to measure its effectiveness.
HubSpot provides access to a detailed analytics layer that shows how your content is performing through various types of reports, which can be consolidated into dashboards. You can create custom reports based on the criteria relevant to your strategy and/or KPIs.
Lead scoring is a method where you assign points based on criteria that indicate a lead’s likelihood to convert. Not all leads are ready to engage with your sales team—some are still in the research phase, while others are close to making a purchase decision. With lead scoring in HubSpot, you can assign your leads a score (typically 1-100) based on their behavior, demographic data, and engagement. This gives you a clear overview of which leads are most sales-ready, allowing you to prioritize your efforts and maximize your conversion rate.
HubSpot enables you to set up an automated lead scoring model that evaluates leads based on:
Behavior: Which pages have they visited? Have they opened your emails? Have they filled out a form?
Demographic data: Does their industry, title, or company match your ideal customer profile?
Engagement: How often do they interact with your content or website?
With lead scoring in HubSpot, you categorize various actions into one or more engagement scores and fit scores.
But how do you get started with lead scoring?
Start by identifying the actions and attributes that indicate purchase intent. HubSpot offers standard fields as well as the option to create custom properties.
Positive criteria add points and can include actions such as visiting important pages, downloading eBooks or whitepapers, or clicking on CTAs.
Negative criteria subtract points and may include invalid or generic email addresses, lack of engagement, or visits to job pages, which suggest an interest in employment with your company rather than making a purchase.
Set up your lead scoring in HubSpot using the new lead score function under Marketing or manage it manually under "HubSpot Score" in Properties.
Make sure to continuously adjust your lead scoring to ensure it is always up to date and provides the insights you need.
For example, it may be relevant to know:
Lead to MQL: How many leads are being qualified as marketing-ready?
MQL to SQL: How many qualified leads are being contacted and converted into sales opportunities?
Timeframe: How long does it take to move leads through the funnel based on their score?
Measuring the effectiveness of your lead nurturing campaigns is essential for understanding what works and where you can improve your strategy. HubSpot offers a range of advanced analytics and reporting tools, enabling you to track the entire customer journey—from the first interaction to the final conversion.
By tracking and analyzing customer data and campaign performance, you gain valuable insights that can help you optimize your lead nurturing flows, content, and lead scoring models.
There are several ways to measure your results:
Use HubSpot’s campaign reports
Campaigns consolidates all elements of a campaign—such as emails, landing pages, blog posts, CTAs, and more—into a single report. This makes it easy for you to get an overall view of how your lead nurturing strategy is performing. It also allows you to monitor everything from open and click-through rates to form conversion rates, and more.
Følg med i workflow præstationerne
HubSpot giver dig også mulighed for at analysere effektiviteten af dine automatiserede lead nurturing flows direkte i platformen. Du kan bl.a. se hvor mange leads der er gået igennem workflowet, hvor mange e-mails, der er blevet åbnet og klikket på og antallet af leads, der har konverteret til en ny lifecycle stage.
Reports: Discover what works
HubSpot’s reports and dashboards allow you to identify which parts of your lead nurturing strategy have had the greatest impact on conversions. For example, you can dive into attributions such as "first-touch" to see which channel or activity attracted the lead, or "last-touch" to track which interaction contributed to closing a deal.
Lead nurturing requires a solid strategy, the right tools, and a structured approach—and that’s exactly where we can help.
At MCB, we have extensive experience implementing lead nurturing and inbound strategies that deliver value to your leads while increasing your conversion rate. We know how to leverage HubSpot’s advanced features like segmentation, automation, and analytics to build effective campaigns that guide your leads all the way from initial contact to becoming customers.