How to Acquire, Qualify and Nurture Leads With Interactive Content

Leads are oxygen for businesses. No leads, no chance for survival.

But let’s talk real; a funnel full of irrelevant leads who never intend to buy from you has little value.

Irrelevant or useless lead data accounts for anywhere between 15-40% of online leads. That’s why I’m sharing some actionable ways to acquire, qualify, and nurture leads with interactive content.

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Are you acquiring customers or just generating leads?

Interactive content is going to make you question that! While these two ideas seem closely related, it is important to distinguish between them. So, let’s get you some answers!

If you’ve ever taken a quiz like “Which FRIENDS character are you?” or used a calculator to find out your loan EMI, you’re already familiar with interactive content. But in case you’ve been living under a rock, fasten your seat belts.

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What’s the difference between Acquire, Qualify, and Nurture?

Firstly, lead acquisition, lead qualification, and lead nurturing are all part of a 360º marketing strategy. Let’s break them down on the basis of their specific roles and importance.

A customer acquisition strategy helps transform cold leads into clients. This process involves lead generation, but it is much more than that. This step has the client’s needs and interests in mind from the beginning with the goal to further qualify and nurture the leads rather than dumping a potential list on the sales team.

Next, lead qualification classifies and scores the potential leads on the basis of their interest shown in your offering and their willingness to buy. It also considers the stage of the prospect in the buyer’s journey. This process scores them based on the actions they take on a website and their reaction to the marketing actions.

Lastly, lead nurturing focuses on creating campaigns to boost your leads’ engagement and interest to speed up their purchase process. This builds a relationship with users by offering them a constant flow of valuable and quality content through marketing automation and other campaigns.

As per The Annuitas Group, firms that nurture their prospects with marketing automation witness a 451% growth in the number of qualified leads they have.

Stage 1 – How to Acquire

Quizzes

Quizzes are like donuts – they are hard to resist! Apart from being known for entertaining netizens across the globe, quizzes work great for lead acquisition as well. They offer interactive, personalized, and relevant content that builds strong relationships with prospects and gives them something of value before you ever ask for any info in return.

This is why quizzes work as great lead magnets; not just for lead info but for getting detailed preferences through the quiz itself. In fact, they are super easy to create using a quiz maker.

For example, Inventrom is a fully integrated IoT platform for all types of projects. They wanted a tool that would help them acquire and qualify leads. For this, they smartly built an “IoT & ML Training Scholarship’ quiz with the help of Outgrow.

Results? They generated 52,454 leads, 79,309 visits, and a 66% conversion rate!

Contests and Giveaways

Contests have been around even before the internet and till now are a “go-to” tactic for many marketers.

Over the years, contests have proven to be great lead-gen tools due to their highly shareable nature.

For example, Hawaii.com strategically placed the lead gen form right beside the contest. The CTA is also precise: ENTER FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN. It’s FREE!

Surveys and Polls

Surveys are one of the most effective yet cost-efficient ways of lead acquisition. Why? Because people love offering their opinions and giving feedback. These tools gather a lot of data in very little time and with very little effort. They also don’t just generate leads but also get feedback for your products and services.

For example, have a look at this “Brand Awareness Survey”. Whether it’s a new brand or an established one, brand awareness is always a part of the marketing journey. Hence, this survey aims at understanding the perception and positioning of a brand, collecting the target audience’s details at the same time.

eCommerce recommendations

What if you can directly boost sales while acquiring leads?

Have you ever taken a “Which Sunglasses Suit Your Face the Best” quiz? They aren’t just quizzes; they are virtual sales assistants. They take your customer preferences and show personalized product recommendations. Simply link your products to your website, and you are done.

80% of shoppers prefer buying from a company that offers personalized experiences.

Have a look at this experience by Airbnb “Airbnb Trip Matcher”. This personalization quiz tells users what kind of traveler they are and then recommends perfect destinations for them. It also displays and links the best Airbnb properties for their accommodation. This way, any potential customer may share the details to get the best deals.

Calculators

You’d be hard-pressed to find someone not interested in money; making it an obvious reason as to why interactive calculators are so popular. From loan EMIs to insurance to mortgages to taxes and everything in between, calculators are highly valuable tools. When you provide value, prospects will be more than willing to give their details.

For instance, a car company like Tesla can use this “How much can you save by buying a TESLA?” calculator to target customers considering a car purchase.

Similarly, prospects in the later stage of the funnel can be targeted with something like an Auto Lease calculator.

To master the marketing funnel, you should make sure to get a detailed understanding of how to acquire customers at all stages of the funnel.

Chatbots

Chatbots have become expert tools for analyzing customer preferences. They can act like shopping assistants for your website visitors. This provides real value to your prospects, increasing their chances of conversion.

Chatbots are predicted to bring massive growth in retail sales (reaching $112 billion by 2023).

Have a look at this H&M chatbot. It helps with the selection process as per the customer’s preference. This live chatbot provides a human-like experience, whereby generating relevant information from the customer looks like a natural process.

Boost Your Marketing With Interactive Content – Try Outgrow Today

Stage 2 – How to Qualify

Now that you have learned ample ways to acquire customers, let’s jump into understanding how you can qualify them.

You can qualify leads on the basis of consumer behavior, demographics, location, psychographics, and other such parameters.

Demographics

This segments the audience on the basis of income, education, race, occupation, etc. Factors like age brackets and gender are super useful in qualifying your leads. This segmentation helps marketers understand what content would be relevant for which part of the audience.

Have a look at Lucchese’s email below. The brand uses demographic segmentation to check the effectiveness of their email campaign. They highlight their products as the “Roy,” a men’s boot, and the “Gaby,” a women’s boot. And through this gender content qualification, they noticed a boost in clickthrough rates.

Geographics

This segmentation qualifies leads on the basis of location. In fact, this gives marketers the perfect opportunity to localize content for their different audiences. Say, there is a local event coming up or you want to personalize the content on the basis of the weather. Once you qualify leads like that, you will know where to focus your nurturing (next step) efforts.

Geographic segmentation can even let you know what weather your subscriber is experiencing or what events they are likely to have.

Have a look at the Grubhub email below, which uses the rainy weather to tempt and convince users to just stay home and order food conveniently. When you qualify leads like this, customers are bound to convert!

Prospective ROI

Going further, you can segment your prospects on the basis of how much ROI they are going to get out of your product or service. This segmentation helps your sales team qualify leads by figuring out which leads to pursue first.

This can be done by sending your bottom of the funnel leads, a simple ROI calculator. Calculators are a very effective tool in providing instant value to customers by giving real-time answers to them.

A great example is this How Much EMI Would I Pay For Jaguar XF?

Depending on the model of the car someone chooses, this calculator helps understand the cost structure. The prospects will know how confident they are for the purchase, and so will you. 

Psychographics

You can even segment leads based on prospects’ preferences, lifestyle, and personality traits. Try qualifying on the basis of their choices, beliefs, and opinions. It is a necessary qualification step as these factors affect purchase decisions greatly.

A quiz or a poll can be helpful in finding out the preferences or personality traits of your prospects. Look at this personality quiz “Which Car Best Fits Your Personality?”.

When your prospects take this test, not only do they become sure of their preference, but you also understand what type of products to pitch them.

How do you Qualify?

For this, you can head over to the ‘Analytics’ section of the interactive marketing tool you use. Any interactive tool should have this section letting you analyze your strategies and performance. You can simply create a filter on the basis of how you want to segment your leads.

The best part is that you can even segment your leads on the basis of their responses to the interactive content. Some tools even have the power to qualify prospects on the basis of their position in the funnel.

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Stage 3 – How to Nurture

Interactive emails

I can’t talk about lead nurturing without mentioning interactive email marketing.

Emails are a highly-effective tactic for lead nurturing – add interactivity and personalization, and your lead nurturing process will be easy-breezy. This step becomes even more effective once you qualify your leads. In fact, stats reveal that segmented email campaigns have a 14.32% higher open rate.

Once a prospect submits your interactive content like quizzes through any channel, make sure to send them personalized emails as an acknowledgment.

Here is an interactive email example. For a restaurant marketer, embedding a quiz like “Build Your Own Burger Menu” in their email campaign can prove excellent. The ability to directly place customized orders from the email saves a lot of time and decision-making hassles for the customers. And this way, you can boost sales, too.

Social Media

Nothing inspires engagement like interactive content. Following up with your customers with personalized content is a potent way to take them one step ahead in the buyer’s journey.

There are ample ways to use interactive content in social media marketing for nurturing leads. KettlewellColours utilizes this opportunity with their “What Is Your Kettlewell Style Personality?” quiz on Facebook. This is a good way to nurture prospects and help them discover the styles that most likely suit them.

Display Ads

Display ads are quite a popular tool for retargeting prospects. How many times have you checked out a watch on a website and been showered with reminder ads on Facebook?

I’ve been there too. However, interactive content can help you revolutionize the way you retarget your customers. Instead of static non-engaging ads, use interactive content for display ads. These ads can nurture your leads without annoying them.

Let’s have a look at a live social media ad that includes interactive content. Mercedes Benz was looking to increase the engagement on their social media pages. They created an interactive calculator Facebook ad that allowed their users to determine the insurance premium cost. This ad helped them gather 6.7k likes and numerous views within 7 days of going live.

Wrapping up

Lead acquisition, qualification, and nurturing are all critical pillars of your inbound marketing strategy. Interactive content offers you competitive advantages for all three stages.

Above are some great tactics to acquire, qualify, and nurture leads with interactive content to give your business a boost. These experiences are fun for customers and useful for you at the same time. It’s time to act.

Once you create one interactive experience, I promise there will be no stopping you. Try it out now!

Boost Your Marketing With Interactive Content – Try Outgrow Today

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