Holiday Gated Content Series Part 2: Nurturing
‘Tis the season to turn your leads into sales! Now that you’ve whipped up a super sweet lead generation strategy, you’re probably wondering how to nurture these prospective shoppers and turn them into customers. The good news is you’ve already gotten their attention. Now, you just need to take advantage of every touchpoint, leveraging each to drive these potential shoppers down the buyer funnel.
The secret ingredient to success? A top-tier middle funnel marketing strategy from the experts at CakeCommerce! Here’s our recipe for nurturing leads.
How to Nurture Middle-of-Funnel Leads
You’ve probably already put a lot of elbow grease into your holiday lead generation efforts. However, what you might not be aware of is that those efforts are only reaching the top-of-funnel (TOF) prospects who are just starting to browse the vast eCommerce market. The can’t-miss next step is to guide these audiences – who are hanging out at the awareness and interest stages – down the buyer funnel to develop their interest in your brand (and their intent to purchase with it!).
Your middle-of-funnel (MOF) efforts are just as important as lead generation since the messages you send to these audiences will help you bridge the gap between the funnel phases and build purchase intent. The TOF phase is when potential shoppers are just being introduced to your brand’s existence. They’re in the very early stages of learning about your brand and what it has to offer.
This next MOF phase is important because you’ve already caught the eyes of prospective buyers; now, you have to nurture them further down the sales funnel. It’s important to note that MOF audience members aren’t just new customers; they might also be shoppers who have purchased from your brand before and whom you need to now re-engage. Maybe you want them to make repeat purchases, or perhaps it’s time to introduce them to a totally new product. In either case, your nurturing efforts have big shoes to fill, so let’s get started.
What Does Middle-of-Funnel Content Focus On?
Mid-funnel content focuses largely on one concept: education. Your audience has already found you, and they’re taking the time to sample all their options until they find a brand that satisfies their sweet tooth. This is why your content should focus on what your customers need to know so they can make an informed purchasing decision.
The Ingredients of Middle-of-Funnel Marketing
Our recipe for audience nurturing is made of sugar, spice, and everything nice! Here is everything you’ll need to whip up a super sweet MOF marketing strategy for the holiday shopping season.
Remarketing
Paid social remarketing gives your potential customers confidence and ease of purchasing by showing them the exact products they viewed with Facebook DPA ads. This plus a sprinkle of programmatic remarketing – which offers those who have previously clicked through an incentive for their first purchase – and you’ve got a chef’s kiss strategy to target and remarket great content that’ll hit where it needs to.
Google search remarketing is also an option. With this feature, you can leverage Google display remarketing to serve ads to those who have searched for you or your products.
Checkout Experience
You might be surprised to find out that the average checkout abandonment is between 60% and 80%. To avoid as much cart abandonment as possible during the holiday shopping season (and the sweetest sales of the year), it’s important to ensure your checkout is simple. In other words, make sure the process is short, sweet, and to the point. Long checkouts are highly discouraged!
At the same time, ensure you’re not throwing any additional, unexpected fees onto your users that they find out after they’ve spent time going through the shopping cart experience.
We’ll keep this one plain and simple: Set up email abandon cart and browse abandon automations. While you’re at it, be sure you create rich content emails that help guide users to their purchasing decisions, such as flowchart emails or pop quizzes.
Organic Social
Organic social is a fool-proof way to build brand awareness, which is more of a top-of-funnel strategy, but it doesn’t stop there. You can also use your social channels to assist in conversions by using the following best practices:
- Make your feed shoppable. For instance, Instagram has now rolled out its in-app checkout.
- Update your bio link. Showcase the latest happenings on your site and communicate these events with your audience by updating the content within your bio link.
- Post user-generated content. People love seeing user-generated content (UGC), and, as a brand, it can help you build your reputation with your audience. Use UGC and testimonials as social proof to showcase the amazing things your company does for your existing customers. This can go a long way in swaying someone who’s on the fence into going a little further into the sales funnel.
Segmentation
Use the tools you have at your disposal to segment your audience in relevant ways. This is super important because it helps you really tailor the buyer’s journey based on what data you’ve collected. For example, when you do this work on the backend, you can send segmented emails with dynamic products users have viewed, pages they’ve visited, and form fields they’ve supplied.
Make Your Holidays a Little Sweeter with CAKE
Need a little help perfecting your recipe? We’ve got you covered. To learn more about our services and how CakeCommerce can take your brand top-tier this holiday season, contact our sweet team of eCommerce marketers!