Beefree blog

Turn Leads into Customers: Lead Nurturing Tips for Scaling Businesses

Tony Do
Tony Do
Jul 18, 2023
Turn Leads into Customers: Lead Nurturing Tips for Scaling Businesses
Turn Leads into Customers: Lead Nurturing Tips for Scaling Businesses

For most businesses, the ability to convert leads into customers can mean the difference between profitable operations and unsteady income that causes it to fail. That’s why lead generation and conversion remain a priority.While several tactics can help you achieve this, not all strategies will initiate interest from leads.So, how can you effectively engage leads and turn them into happy customers? That is where lead nurturing can help.Lead Nurturing is the process of building relationships with your prospects with the goal of earning their business when they're ready. Lead nurturing is the third stage of the lead management process. There are five stages or elements of lead management:

  • Lead generation, 
  • Lead qualification and segmentation
  • Lead nurturing
  • Lead scoring and lead routing, and 
  • Measuring success

To help your unique leads solve their challenges or achieve their goals, it's critical to understand who your leads are and why they've shown interest in your company in the first place.This understanding will help you develop a lead nurturing strategy to engage with each individual personally, based on their needs and goals, rather than sending blast emails. That way, you’ll generate more qualified leads with less effort. In fact, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

How Does Lead Nurturing Work?

Let's view an example of lead nurturing from a HubSpot Solutions Partner, Campaign Creators.

Campaign Creators logo

They had a new initiative to target e-commerce businesses, so they created a new buyer persona, named E-Commerce Eric. They developed a new lead nurturing campaign based on this persona, called "E-Commerce Marketing Campaign."A lead would enroll into the E-Commerce Marketing Campaign workflow in HubSpot each time they downloaded the "E-Commerce Marketing: Intro to Lead Generation" guide.Over time, these leads would receive emails that offered a helpful and relevant resource called, "How to Create an E-Commerce Lead Nurturing Campaign." This resource serves the dual purpose of teaching learners how to nurture new leads while also nurturing them for Campaign Creators.Leads also received further nurturing emails to download other helpful offers, like "Your Guide to Filling a Digital Marketing Gap." This resource helped leads determine the right solution to overcome their digital marketing gap, and helped Campaign Creators identify leads that would benefit from their marketing services.After downloading this guide, leads would receive another set of nurturing emails promoting a free marketing consultation that would provide valuable and honest feedback on the best marketing solution for them. The value for Campaign Creators? To gain a better understanding of their leads' challenges and provide tailored experiences during the consultation.If a lead decided to schedule a consultation, the sales team would take over in the process. This marked the end of the lead nurturing campaign.

Campaign Creators lead nurturing strategy.

This multi-tiered lead nurturing campaign is a great example of how you can engage and nurture leads through their buyer’s journey.While some lead nurturing campaigns may differ, the most important aspect is to automate your entire process. This will provide your lead nurturing efforts with timely, efficient, and targeted communication.

Benefits of Lead Nurturing

Let’s explore the benefits described in the above example in more detail. Lead nurturing helps you:

Build a better customer relationship

Building any relationship takes time and effort, and that’s what lead nurturing allows you to do with prospective customers. Maintaining contact with your leads throughout their buyer’s journey and using personalized messaging can lead to increased trust and a sense of commitment from you to these potential customers.

Increase conversion rates

By providing relevant, personalized content with your lead nurturing campaigns, you ensure your audience remains engaged and more likely to click links to your website or online store for more information. This approach is in contrast to sending generalized content that is designed to reach as many people as possible but has no connection with specific audiences.

Identify customer interests or pain points

Lead nurturing is an excellent way to collect feedback that provides insights into your audience’s interests and pain points. This information can assist you in creating accurate buyer personas and products that will better meet your customers' needs.

Boost brand loyalty

The personalized engagement campaigns you use to build a relationship with your audience can also make them loyal to your brand once they take the step to become customers. In fact, 78% of consumers will likely be repeat customers of brands that personalize the shopping experience.

Get more referrals from satisfied customers

One of the objectives of lead nurturing is to ensure customers are satisfied at the end of their buyer’s journey. Happy customers are more likely to refer friends, family, and business associates to your business because of the trust and reputation you built with them.

How to Launch a Successful Lead Nurturing Campaign

There are five fundamental elements to launching a successful lead nurturing campaign:

1. Buyer Personas

A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some educated speculation about demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals.Creating buyer personas will help you understand your potential customers’ needs, behaviors, and concerns. Understanding these details will help you tailor your content and messaging in a way that resonates with each lead.In the previous example, the lead nurturing campaign targeted the persona, ECommerce Eric. Not only did understanding ECommerce Eric's needs and goals inspire the different content offers, it also helped drive the messaging in the emails. If you don't have buyer personas, you can get started with HubSpot's Make My Persona Tool​.

2. Content 

The content you create should be strategic. It should showcase your thought leadership in certain topics, educate your audience, address their concerns, and inspire them to take action. You do this by creating content for each stage of the buyer's journey.The Buyer's Journey is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase.This process is broken down into three stages: awareness stage, consideration stage, and decision stage. Creating content for each stage allows you to educate and nurture leads closer to a purchase, no matter where they are in the buyer's journey.

The three stages of the buyer’s journey.

Once you've developed your content, it's time to share it with your leads.

3. Emails 

Emails will serve as the main communication between you and your leads. They enable you to educate and nurture your leads by providing tailored messaging and content offers.HubSpot provides email marketing tools that make it easy to publish your nurturing emails. You can also incorporate personalization tokens to personalize each recipient's email copy and content.But, building effective emails is only part of the process. You have to send the right content to the right person and schedule when the emails should arrive at their destination.

4. Segmentation 

Lead nurturing is the happy union between content and context. Email is how you provide the content, while segmentation is how you provide context.Segmentation is the process of dividing your contacts into sub-groups (known as segments) based on some type of shared characteristics. It works together with your nurturing emails by providing tailored and relevant content for each individual.For example, you can segment your leads by their buyer personas. Your leads will often have different challenges or goals, affecting the personas you create for them. You can create different email campaigns with relevant and compelling content for each of these personas .Another strategy is to segment leads by where they are in their buyer's journey. Leads in different stages of the buyer's journey are seeking specific information.For instance, leads in the awareness stage may be interested in content about the different types of products that are available, while those in the consideration stage may be more concerned about the pros and cons of each product that they are interested in. You can help more of your leads find the right content by segmenting emails by their buyer's journey stage.Try segmenting leads based on their online activity. A great example of this is automatically sending a welcome email every time a visitor subscribes to your newsletter.Lead nurturing is the happy union between content and context. Email is how you provide the content, while segmentation is how you provide context.

5. Automation 

The final element of a successful lead nurturing campaign is automation. Automation makes it easy to send the right content, to the right person, at the right time. HubSpot offers a workflow tool that can help automate your entire lead nurturing process. This tool can help you:

  • Set enrollment triggers that automatically enroll leads based on set criteria.
  • Add relevant emails and content that will be sent to enrolled leads.
  • Indicate when those emails will be sent to each lead.
  • Remove leads once they've met the workflow goal.

Implementing automation into your lead nurturing will not only make the entire process feel seamless, but it will also help you scale your lead nurturing efforts in the future.Incorporating these five fundamental elements into your lead nurturing process will give you the foundation needed to implement campaigns that turn more of your leads into happy customers.

Nurture Your Leads to Create Happy Customers

It takes just a few steps to turn leads into happy, returning customers, and it all starts with thinking of them in the buyer’s journey.Ask yourself what their interests or issues are and what solutions your company has that impact their values, needs, and desires. Then, strategically create your content and send it to your leads in a sequence that moves them from awareness of their problem to the decision to buy your solution.Lead nurturing takes time. Segmenting leads based on their buyer persona and the stage they’re in of the buyer’s journey can help you nurture leads more effectively. Automation can help manage a lot of this process and sendails to the appropriate people at the appropriate time with the appropriate content to move them in the right direction.Are you ready to start nurturing your leads? Use HubSpot’s Marketing Hub to create and launch your campaign today, and turn those leads into customers.

What Are Email Security Gateways? A Guide to Secure Communications

Are your newsletters being marked as spam? Discover all you need to know about email security gateways and how to create emails that pass all the checks.
Beefree team
Mar 12, 2025

Getting Started with Beefree: A Guide to Streamlined Email and Landing Page Creation

Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.
Beefree team
Feb 26, 2025

8 Common Email Spam Triggers That Can Damage Your Sender Reputation

Whether you’re employing a lifecycle email marketing strategy or simply confirming an order, we’ve outlined the basics of how spam prevention works, why it matters, and how to avoid running afoul of some commonly used triggers.
Beefree team
Feb 14, 2025

What Are Email Security Gateways? A Guide to Secure Communications

Are your newsletters being marked as spam? Discover all you need to know about email security gateways and how to create emails that pass all the checks.
Beefree team
Beefree team
12 Mar
2025

Email is king when it comes to talking directly to your customers. Sure, we might send texts or share voice notes, but we all still check our emails. It’s how we keep in touch with work and the businesses we connect with. 

As an email marketer, this puts you in prime position to get your business’s brand right into the hands of your customers. The problem, however, is that you must first get past the metaphorical guard dog known as the secure email gateway (SEG). 

SEGs use sophisticated methods to identify and block spam and phishing emails from ever entering a person’s inbox. While your email newsletters should go through, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will. That’s why businesses need to know what a secure email gateway is and how it works. Know this key info, and you’ll be able to improve the chances of your emails reaching their destination. 

What are email security gateways? 

Protecting yourself from cyber threats is the basis of all cybersecurity risk assessment services. One of the biggest gaps in any security armor is phishing emails. If they get through and someone clicks a link they shouldn’t have, it’s almost impossible to stop the damage. 

The victim could be anyone. The link could lead to a ransomware virus that holds your data captive or be the start of a data breach. It could even lead to a traditional scam that has you input your credit card details so a thief can steal them. 

For all these reasons and more, email providers consistently invest in security features to help protect their customers. One such feature is an email security gateway. 

A secure email gateway uses AI and machine learning to screen incoming emails, identify spam, and stop it from entering. If there’s any doubt, the system quarantines the email in your spam box for review. 

Why are secure email gateways important?

While we are getting better at filtering out spam emails, an estimated 45.6% of emails sent in 2023 were still spam. This poses a massive security risk for consumers, businesses, and governments alike. 

According to IBM, businesses are hit the hardest, with the global average cost of each successful phishing attack increasing to $4.88M USD. The attacks don’t just hit businesses, either, with attacks targeting individuals and even charities.

Just as phishing and spam emails have become more sophisticated, so have the tools designed to protect against them. All providers, including big names like Gmail, use SEGs to secure communications and other features, such as Gmail’s unsubscribe feature

What do SEGs flag as spam? 

SEGs continually update their parameters. This means that what they check for is constantly in flux. What SEGs look for today, for example, could include: 

  • Strange or suspicious subject lines
  • Highly urgent capitalization or excessive exclamation points
  • Strange URLs
  • Poor grammar and/or spelling
  • Generic greetings that don’t address the recipient 
  • Suspicious email addresses
  • The volume of emails sent at once
  • Attachment types 
  • Image-heavy content 

SEGs are far more advanced than just ticking boxes, but that doesn’t mean your emails can’t get blocked or sent to spam. After all, you might put together a great email campaign, but if your email is too image-heavy, it might get quarantined or sent to spam. 

The good news is that once you know what the SEGs look for, you can work to design better emails. Beefree can help you get started, with a range of templates for responsive email designs.

How to create newsletters with secure email gateways in mind 

The good news is that you can implement and send out most, if not all, of your newsletter ideas without issue. So long as the emails are well-made and are sent at a reasonable frequency, you’ll be golden. 

Start by first improving your security methods

In general, you should always look at ramping up the security measures in your business. You can use one of the top types of risk assessment matrix to understand your business's threats and how to resolve them. Then, since you already have that information, you can use it to create better newsletters and emails. 

Make sure the personalization feature works

One of the biggest red flags for an SEG is a generic greeting. Adding Dear Sir/Madam at the start isn’t going to fly in today’s world. Even if your email gets through, it’s unlikely the recipient will open it. 

That’s why you need personalization. Linking your email marketing tools to your customer relationship management system means you can offer easy personalization, like addressing your customers by name, or even offering personalized recommendations based on their order history. 

Avoid image-only emails 

Image-only emails are tempting for an email marketer. They’re striking, they look good, and you can fine-tune what they look like in Photoshop or another image editor. 

They can also be a red flag for SEGs.

Thankfully, the solution is simple: enrich your emails. The best part about this approach is that it also improves the accessibility. Improving email accessibility will help ensure that all your customers can engage with your emails on their terms. Those emails will also load faster, look great on all devices, and be more engaging. 

Align your emails with the landing pages 

SEGs look out for suspicious links. A link might be suspicious if there’s a misspelling or if the link doesn’t sound like the content in the email. So, how do you ensure that SEGs don’t see any of your links as suspicious? 

You make them predictable. 

An easy way to do this is to create a landing page from an email. On top of aligning the landing page with the content of the newsletter, you’ll want to: 

  • Make a custom URL for every link that matches the content of the page 
  • Ensure there’s no misspelling
  • Don’t use urgent language around your link

Use 2FA to boost security

Do you need 2FA to get past SEGs? No, but it’s a great way to help protect you and your customers. 

You can protect sensitive data by adding user identity verification. For example, a customer may get an order confirmation email but wants to cancel or change the delivery details. Including a two-factor authentication step ensures only the customer can request changes. 

Building in extra security features puts your customers at ease. It also protects your endpoints and, in turn, your business. So, no, you don’t need 2FA to get past SEGs, but it’s worth looking into for you and your customers’ protection. 

Avoid urgency 

Urgency can be a flag for SEGs. So: 

  • DON’T WRITE IN ALL CAPS
  • Minimize the use of exclamation points

Think of the copy in your newsletter as a chance to win over your audience, not scare them into clicking the link. Doing this will improve your relationship with your customers since they’ve come to you on their terms. It’s also essential to get emails past the SEG.

Key takeaways 

Secure email gateways are a primary defense against spam and phishing attacks, but they can pose a problem for email marketers. By working to understand the security risks associated with email scams, you can then understand what your email needs to make it into inboxes. 

From there, you’ll want to make your emails more personable, accessible, and secure. Once you’ve found that sweet spot, your newsletters will be more likely to get past the secure email gateway and into your audience’s inboxes. 

Getting Started with Beefree: A Guide to Streamlined Email and Landing Page Creation

Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.
Beefree team
Beefree team
26 Feb
2025

Creating professional emails and landing pages can be challenging for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're designing a newsletter, promoting an event, or driving a marketing campaign, ensuring that your emails and landing pages are visually appealing, engaging, and efficient to produce is no small task. That’s where Beefree comes in.

Beefree is a robust tool for designing emails and landing pages with ease, offering templates, automation features, and seamless integrations. Regardless of your industry or goal, Beefree empowers you to craft high-quality communication and marketing materials quickly and effectively. By providing an intuitive and user-friendly experience, it helps businesses transform their creative ideas into polished campaigns without requiring extensive technical expertise.

source

Why use Beefree for professional email campaigns?

Before we jump into the nitty-gritty of using Beefree, let's quickly go over why this tool is worth your time. There are a lot of email marketing tools out there, but Beefree stands out from the crowd for a reason. Let’s break down the unique benefits that make it an invaluable asset for anyone serious about email marketing:

Design made easy:

According to HubSpot, well-designed emails can drive open rates as high as 30%. Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. But you're finding yourself stuck because crafting professional emails and landing pages that capture attention is no easy feat.

With Beefree’s intuitive design tools and a library of over 1,700 templates tailored for various industries and purposes, you can achieve professional results without the guesswork. The wide variety of pre-designed options ensures that you can find a solution that aligns perfectly consistent with your brand.

source

Time-saving features:

Speed is key, especially if you’re running time-sensitive campaigns. Beefree simplifies the design process with reusable content blocks, real-time collaboration tools, and the ability to transform emails into landing pages with a single click. These features enable you to produce high-quality materials in less time, allowing you to focus on strategy and content rather than struggling with technicalities.

According to a Beefree report, 82% of users report faster email creation. The ability to save and sync reusable content blocks means you can replicate what’s working without reinventing the wheel each time. Once you find a winning format, you can use it again and again with minor tweaks to fit the audience or campaign.

Maybe you’re following up with leads from a recent webinar or you want to reach potential clients after a product launch. With Beefree’s templates, you can get those messages out quickly and make sure your brand stays top-of-mind for your audience.
Using email cadence software like QuickMail ensures that outreach campaigns maintain a structured and effective flow, preventing overwhelming inboxes while keeping engagement high.

source

Increased engagement:

A significant 64% of Beefree users report an 11% or more increase in click-through rates after using the platform. By enhancing the visual appeal and personalization of your emails, Beefree helps you achieve better engagement with your audience. The ability to test and iterate your designs ensures continuous improvement in performance.

source

Getting started with Beefree templates

Alright, now that you know why Beefree is so powerful, let’s talk about how you can get started with their massive library of templates. This section will walk you through choosing and customizing a template that works for you.

1. Choose your template

The first thing you want to do is pick a template. Beefree’s catalog has templates for just about every sector—whether you're in retail, healthcare, SaaS, you name it. With a variety of options, you can find something that suits your goals perfectly, whether for a simple newsletter or detailed marketing report templates. Say you're promoting a webinar—just pick a template that’s built to highlight your CTAs, and you're off to the races.

The best part? You’re not starting from scratch. You save hours by picking a pre-designed template, and then it’s just a matter of customizing it to fit your brand. Beefree's templates are super flexible—add or remove elements, change colors, switch up the fonts, rearrange layouts—make each email uniquely yours without the hassle. This flexibility is especially beneficial for maintaining a low code architecture in website design.

2. Personalize

Consistency is key to building trust, and when your emails have a cohesive look, it helps recipients recognize your brand. It is also important to follow a brand style guide for your email campaigns so that the audiences can associate elements like your logo, colors, and fonts easily with your brand.

When using a template, customization is key to making your emails and landing pages feel unique and relevant. With Beefree’s drag-and-drop editor, you can easily tweak templates to align with your branding. Adjust colors, fonts, and layouts, or add personalized content such as recipient names and company details. The flexibility ensures that your final output is as distinctive as your brand’s voice.

Plus, with so many people opening emails or landing pages on mobile devices, Beefree’s mobile design builder guarantees that they look great no matter what device they’re on. When your emails look good, people trust your brand more, and that makes them more likely to click through and take action.

Personalization isn’t just a nice touch; it’s essential for engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized subject lines can increase open rates by 26%. By tailoring your designs to speak directly to your audience, you can create a more impactful experience. Furthermore, the platform’s collaborative features allow team members to provide input and make edits in real-time, enhancing efficiency and creativity.

1. Export

So, you’ve picked and customized your template—now it’s time to send those emails.

One of the coolest things about Beefree is that it plays nice with just about every major email platform out there—Mailchimp, HubSpot, Outlook, Quickmail—you name it. This means you can create a killer email in Beefree, connect it to your favorite email platform, and schedule it all from one place. For more advanced needs, many businesses choose a CRM with email integration, to seamlessly combine customer management and automated outreach.

Start designing for free

Beefree simplifies the process of creating visually appealing, professional emails and landing pages, saving you time and boosting engagement. Whether you’re looking to streamline your workflow or enhance your marketing efforts, Beefree offers the tools and flexibility to meet your needs.

The best part? You’ll save time and see increased engagement, connecting with your audience in a meaningful way. In a world where everyone’s fighting for inbox space, Beefree helps you stay ahead of the game by simplifying the process while delivering professional results. So, why wait? Dive into Beefree today and see how it can transform your email campaigns.

Stay informed on all email trends

From the latest creative design strategies that inspire your next campaign to industry best practices and tech advancements, our newsletter is the go-to for all things creation.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
By clicking Subscribe you're agreeing with our Privacy Policy
Beelo here 👋 Got questions?
1