Marketing Analytics and Lead Nurturing – A Strategic Combination
- marqeu
- Aug 17, 2024
- 5 min read

Marketing Analytics and Lead Nurturing is a strategic combination across all revenue marketing organizations. A well-thought-out lead nurture strategy backed by data-driven insights through marketing analytics frameworks is a game-changer. While others see nurturing as a series of emails, we see nurturing differently.
For us, nurturing is a data-driven, meticulously planned contextual, and hyper-personalized strategic marketing tactic to drive engagement in pursuit of influencing pipeline generation.
Understanding Lead Nurturing
Lead Nurturing is an ongoing process that plays a crucial role in the sales and marketing ecosystem. This process is designed to prepare engaged leads for meaningful sales conversations by leveraging their interactions and engagements with various phases of nurture campaigns. The effectiveness of lead nurturing lies in its ability to track and respond to the specific behaviors and interests of potential customers, ensuring that the communication remains relevant and timely.
Importance of a Customized Nurture Strategy
For marketing teams, it is of paramount importance to develop an engaging and relevant nurture strategy that is tailored to different personas. Each persona represents a distinct segment of the target audience, characterized by unique needs, preferences, and behaviors. These personas can be at different stages of the buying cycle, which typically includes four key phases: awareness, consideration, preference, and purchase.
Awareness: In this initial stage, potential customers are just beginning to recognize their needs or problems. Marketing efforts should focus on educating these leads about the challenges they face and introducing them to potential solutions. Content such as blog posts, infographics, and introductory webinars can be effective in this phase.
Consideration: Once leads are aware of their needs, they enter the consideration phase where they start evaluating different options available to them. Here, the nurture strategy should provide more detailed information, such as comparison guides, case studies, and product demos. This content should help leads understand the value of the product or service and how it addresses their specific needs.
Preference: At this stage, leads are narrowing down their choices and leaning towards particular solutions. The nurture strategy should focus on reinforcing the value proposition of the organization’s offerings. Personalized emails, testimonials, and targeted offers can help solidify the lead’s preference for a specific product or service.
Purchase: Finally, in the purchase phase, leads are ready to make a decision. The nurture strategy should aim to eliminate any remaining doubts and encourage the final conversion. This can be achieved through limited-time promotions, direct sales outreach, and clear calls-to-action that facilitate the purchasing process.
Diverse Goals of Lead Nurturing
The objectives of lead nurturing campaigns can vary significantly, depending on the overarching goals of the marketing team and the specific needs of the leads. Depending on these goals and objectives, marketing analytics can play a significant role in optimizing the results. These goals may include:
Spreading Awareness: One of the primary goals of lead nurturing is to create awareness about the organization’s products and services. This can be accomplished through thought leadership content that positions the brand as an authority in its industry. By sharing insights, research findings, and expert opinions, organizations can build trust and credibility with potential customers.
Driving Engagement: Engaging potential customers is essential for maintaining their interest and moving them further down the sales funnel. Effective nurturing campaigns utilize various channels, such as email marketing, social media, and webinars, to foster interaction between the brand and the leads. Engaging content, such as quizzes, surveys, and interactive webinars, can significantly enhance this relationship.
Accelerating Leads Through the Funnel: Another critical goal of nurturing is to expedite the movement of leads through the sales funnel. This involves strategically delivering the right content at the right time, addressing potential objections, and providing incentives that encourage leads to take the next step. By closely monitoring lead behavior and preferences, marketing teams can tailor their messages to effectively guide leads toward conversion.
Given that email messaging and contextual CTAs are the core part of the nurture campaigns, traditionally most marketing organizations have been focused on looking at vanity email metrics (email opens, email clicks, etc.) to track the results of nurture campaigns. As most revenue-focused marketing leaders would agree, these metrics do not cut it anymore when it comes to demonstrating the impact of nurture campaigns on the pipeline. This is where
our nurture performance analytics frameworks, data models, and dashboards have been extremely helpful at not only showing the impact of the nurture campaigns on the pipeline but at providing valuable insights to the marketing teams when it comes to optimizing the nurture content, offers, cadences, and targeting.
As part of our engagement and nurture analytics services, we work with the marketing organization to understand the sales and marketing operating model and the buyer’s journey. We then build and implement nurture analytics data models to provide visibility into understanding the performance of all nurture campaigns across 2 broad areas:
The ability to drive engagement with the contacts added to the nurture campaigns. Opening and clicking a nurture email is a positive indicator of the relevancy and targeting of the nurture campaigns. Our approach has been to go beyond these metrics and further narrow down the criteria when it comes to tracking the true impact of the nurture campaigns on driving engagement with the contacts who influence pipeline generation. While the definition of the “engaged” contacts can vary across different companies but broadly it covers these data points:
The number of email engagements in a given time frame (usually past 90 days). Analyzing the frequency and recency of the engagements together is a strong indicator of qualification.
The number of responses to the CTAs in the nurture emails – the higher the number, the better it is.
The funnel status/stage of the engaged contacts.
The recency of sales conversation and sales activities.
The ability of the nurture campaigns to influence pipeline generation. The importance of demonstrating how marketing activities are impacting the pipeline has grown manifolds in recent times. With the pipeline attribution frameworks, marketing teams can quantify the engagements driven by the nurture campaigns across the accounts and relate them to the pipeline generation. These pipeline correlations of the marketing activities (including nurture campaigns) provide valuable insights when it comes to understanding “when” the new opportunities were created in the marketing engaged accounts and for the accounts with existing opportunities, how marketing campaigns were able to influence deal expansion and accelerate deal closures. Pipeline influence data models also provide details into the metadata for nurture campaigns. These granular data points enable detailed comparison analysis among different nurture campaigns to better understand which nurtures are driving engagements across the accounts from different demographics. These insights further help with aligning the content and the CTAs of the nurture campaigns to drive higher engagement.

The set of these pipeline-focused KPIs provides insights to the growth marketing leaders so that they can objectively evaluate the performance of different nurture campaigns, leverage actionable data to continuously optimize the performance, and above all, confidently demonstrate the impact that their campaigns are making on the pipeline. As is demonstrated by this graph (with data till mid-July’21),
we leveraged our nurture marketing analytics frameworks to drive increased engagement and hence pipeline influence for one of our customers,
which like most of the B2B marketing organizations have lead nurturing as the core part of their marketing mix.

We are always on the lookout for inputs and examples from the marketing community to keep providing unparalleled value for our customers. We welcome the inputs from other marketing, revenue operations leaders, and practitioners around what metrics they are using to demonstrate the impact of nurture campaigns? What challenges do they face when it comes to accessing the data for nurture campaigns and how are they co-relating the nurture engagements with pipeline influence?
Let’s discuss how marketing analytics can transform your lead nurturing and segmentation strategy and make it a cornerstone of your marketing success. Reach out today, and let’s build your next big win together!
With our marketing analytics consulting services, let us evaluate your current stack and give you a roadmap to advanced marketing analytics capabilities.
Comments