How to Qualify and Nurture Those End-of-Year Leads
Every holiday season, brands pour heart, soul, and budget into chasing new customers. They lure them in with deals, win them over, and then drop them like last season’s inventory in January.
Many B2B and B2C companies fall into the same trap. They obsess over acquisition, forget about retention, and then wonder why they’re always starting from zero. All that work for short-term payoff.
One of sales’ most overused sayings is that it’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones. And it’s true, but most businesses still act like it isn’t. Because in the end, the quality of your lead data will determine the efficiency and profitability of your sales and marketing.
Ideal Customer Profiles
Your strategy is only as strong as your priorities. You may gladly take purchases from many sources, but your targeting and selling need a main focus. And this is where you get to dream a bit.
ICPs answer this:
Out of everyone who could buy from you, who do you most want to win as a customer?
The factors that play into your ICP decision should be both demographic based (what makes them them?) and behavioral based (what do they like?).
LoKey Pro Tip: Keep ICPs to 2–3 profiles. You can create “tiers” for how much you’d like to win these audiences based on likelihood to spend, frequency, or strategic value.
Aligning Your Audiences
This is where the lead stages from the first section come into play. Once you have your lead stages, you need to segment your database into those different designations. It’s going to take a bit of manual effort to set up your initial stages in your CRM if you don’t have anything to start with. Then you can use marketing automation to have your platform update in real time.
Segmentation Methods
Alignment shouldn’t end with your lead stages. There are plenty of ways to segment, and ideally many of your good leads belong to more than one segment. Because customers aren’t one-dimensional. They’re moms, breadwinners, and fans of the outdoors. They’re CMOs who are interested in AI and work in the healthcare field.
Nurturing and Converting
This is where so many fall off. When we think of customer retention, we’re dealing with a marathon, not a sprint. So once leads are qualified and scored, don’t let them go cold.
There are two types of nurturing you should have in your playbook:
Always-on nurtures: Regularly cadenced newsletters, lapsed-customer messages, etc.
Campaign-specific nurtures: Targeted messaged around a specific offering, sale, event, etc.
Always-on nurture programs are to ensure you don’t lose touch. Campaign-specific nurtures let you strike while the iron is hot.
Ex.: You may get monthly “digests” or other emails with the brand’s latest products, content, etc. that run like clockwork. That’s always-on nurturing. But you’re also a regular sneaker purchaser and when a new release drops, you get a save-the-date email with a chance to pre-order. That’s the campaign nurture. Once that’s over, you’re back to receiving your monthly digests.
Get the Full Lead Management Kit
If you want more of these insights (with a complete breakdown of the entire lead journey) as well as frameworks, templates, and a segmentation worksheet), get our Lead Generation Self-Service Kit here.