iSmart Communications Blog

Lead nurturing refers to the practice of developing a flow of communications (through emails, social media messages, etc.) that seek to qualify a lead, keep them engaged and gradually guide them down the sales funnel. In this post, I will just discuss lead nurturing campaigns for email.

Lead nurturing email campaigns provide you with an engagement safety net which ensures that your leads are engaged during each stage of the buyer’s journey, increasing value, brand recognition and trust.

Before you jump right into lead nurturing email campaign, remember to follow these lead nurturing email best practices.

1. Define Your Goal

As always, you must first define the goal of your lead nurturing campaign. Your purpose may be centred around guiding your leads along the buyer’s journey and earning their business when they are ready. An example would be moving them from an MQL to an SQL.

However, knowing your goal not only applies to your overall lead nurturing campaign but each and every individual as well. The purpose of your email is to add value to them and drive them to take the desired action.

2. Segment Your Contacts

Ever receive an email that was completely unrelated to your interests or something you never signed up for? Yes? You would probably unsubscribe or mark it as spam. This applies to your leads. Therefore, it is important to segment your contacts by classifying them into groups based on particular actions or similarities. An example would be buyer personas, grouped according to particular demographics and psychographics.

With this, you can tailor your lead nurturing emails to the relevant buyer personas. It is also important to consider at what stage of the buyer’s journey is your lead at, and then to deliver the right content at the right time.

3. Targeted Education Content

While you segment your leads, you will also need to ensure that you write targeted content for your lead nurturing emails. Remember to keep your goals in mind so it’s clear what action you want your readers to take in each email. This means that your call-to-action (CTA) should be simple, clear and easily visible. Build trust with your leads and position yourself as an industry leader by including resources such as:

• Blog articles
• Webinars
• Case studies
• Whitepapers

4. Short & Sweet 

Ask yourself. Do you have a long attention span when you are reading a marketing or promotional email? I guess not. So, keep your lead nurturing emails educational and brief. This will encourage people to read the emails all the way through and further your chances of more engagement.

5. Use Personalisation

Personalisation is a great and simple way to make your leads feel more human, like you are conversing with them one-to-one. Personalisation tokens such as name, company, location, industry allows you to make your email feel more personalized. Up your game by using personalization even in the subject line or preview text. They can help to increases the overall open rate for your lead nurturing emails as well.

6. Space Out Your Emails 

An unspoken rule: Don’t set up your lead nurturing campaign to emailing your leads every single day. However, there is also no standard number of days for which you should run your lead nurturing campaign for. It depends on the length of your sales cycle. The longer the buying process, the longer your lead nurturing email campaigns will last.

7. Use Analytics 

Once your lead nurturing campaign is underway, constantly review your analytics to see how it’s performing. Be sure to look at things like open rates, click rates, number of unsubscribes, time spent reading the emails. These types of analytics can provide insights as to which of your lead nurturing emails need refining. If your open rate is low for a particular email, take another look at the subject line and preview text to see how you can make improvements.

As do many other aspects of inbound marketing, lead nurturing requires time and patience as well. Keep making changes and try new things. Simply put, it is the building of relationships with individuals who are currently not ready to buy. So, build that trust and adhere to these best practices for a better lead nurturing email campaign.

Deciding on the SEO metric to focus is essential to marketing success. After all, the point of understanding SEO metrics is to gather insights from the performance data. With these insights, you can understand what’s working and what’s not. Here are 6 SEO metrics you should pay attention to in any digital marketing campaign.

1) Organic Traffic 

Organic traffic has to be one of the most important metrics to monitor. As your traffic continues to grow, you will naturally become more interested in quality traffic over quantity.

Organic traffic comes from search queries through search engines. Amongst the different types of traffic, organic is the most indicative of your website’s overall health. In other words, it represents how well your site ranks for the targeted keywords.

As you introduce more keywords into your content strategy, your ranking increases on the Search Engine Results Page, thereby increasing your organic traffic as well. By posting relevant and optimised content, your organic traffic will also improve.

There are several other types of traffic such as Direct, Social, Paid and more. You should have a data analytics tool in place to help you monitor these figures over time. As organic traffic improves, so will your other traffic sources.

2) Bounce Rate 

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who arrived at your site and left without taking further action. With Google Ads, it can often lead to expensive ads that do not provide value for the campaign.

There are mainly 3 types of bounce rate:

1. Users who visit your site and didn’t like it or need it; clicked on the wrong thing
2. Users who visit your site but didn’t see what they wanted; clicked on the wrong page
3. Users who visit your site but could not interact with the page.

For (i), there is nothing much we can do. However, for (ii) and (iii), we can develop keyword-focused landing page, helping visitors to the relevant answers they might be seeking.

3) Conversion Rate 

To see how traffic adds value to your marketing efforts, we look at the conversion rate. It refers to the percentage of visitors that took a defined action to move toward a sale.

Throughout the buyer’s journey, we have several types of conversions, such as:

• Subscribing to an email newsletter
• Registering for product demo or consultation
• Making a purchase

You may break down your conversion optimisation along the different events to see where conversions fall off throughout your entire marketing funnel.

4) Dwell Time

Dwell time refers to the average amount of time a user spends on your page within a session. It is different from bounce rate since the latter also includes zero-second sessions into your total.

You should be aiming for a higher dwell time.
High dwell time could mean:

• Visitors are finding your content relevant and informative. In other words, they are actually reading it.
• Visitors are consuming important content as they near a buying decision

5) Page Exits

Page exits are useful as they tell us where we ‘lost’ the person. While any user can exit on any page, do keep a look out for a clear pattern.

If there is one page which is driving many visitors to exit, then there is definitely a problem:

• Visitors could not find what they had hoped to
• A poorly designed page which did not make for a good user experience

6) Return Traffic 

Return traffic indicates interest in your content and a growing awareness of your brand. Initially, traffic might not be high. By implementing a content strategy, graphics and video, thought leadership as well as social media, you will encourage return traffic. Moreover, returning traffic might choose to share your content on social media, allowing you to future expand your reach.

There you have, 6 SEO metrics to consider when implementing your digital marketing campaign. However, SEO in itself is not enough to rank well. Remember that SEO works best with a strong content strategy. But don’t just do content for the sake of it, build a connection with the people you want to reach. Unsure how? Start with blogging.

The first thing that comes to your mind when people discuss ongoing SEO content? 

That’s right. Blogs.

Blogging is such an important part of inbound marketing best practice that hardly any Inbound Marketers disagree on this. Google loves websites that regularly update their content and the best way to do this is through blogging. But if your entire SEO strategy is only based on blogs, you’re missing out a lot.

Beyond blogging, there are also other ways to generate content that benefits not only your SEO but also offer value to your readers.

Here are 4 other forms of content you might want to consider.

1. Long form articles

Best practices for content such as blog post used to indicate that condensed information; less than 500 words is the best. In other words, the quicker to digest, the better.

However, it turns out that the attention span of readers isn’t as profound as once thought. Long form content actually ranks well in terms of SEO and people do want to read it. Of course, more words mean more chances for keywords. In fact, Google ranks long form content higher as the article is more likely to provide more insight and value for readers.

Content which is written with more thought and well-researched are also likelier to provide answers and solutions readers are looking for than a more general 500-word article. Readers are also beginning to appreciate more detailed content.

2. Beginner’s Guide

In terms for keeping your website updated, blogs do a fantastic job of generating a series of content regularly. Blog post focuses on a small, specific part of the industry, a particular subject or topic.

You can go big and talk about the most fundamental aspects of the subject you deal with. You can create a “how-to guide” in the form of a 10x pillar content page, demonstrating your expertise in the subject. For example, those working in digital marketing, might be tempted to write “How to Start with Digital Marketing”. Such content gives you the opportunity to include a large number of targeted keywords to boost your SEO ranking.

Moreover, you’ll be able to generate a high number of internal links back to the guide in future – another factor that helps in your SEO ranking.

3. Glossary of terms

Does your industry utilise a lot of jargons? Or do you find yourself using words to that you and your colleagues understand? Jargons should be avoided whenever possible. However, businesses should take advantage of this especially for those working in a particular niche industry.

Everyone loves a glossary, one is that quick to scroll through, quick to read. So, if your industry uses a lot of terminologies, create a page where people can understand it. A glossary enables you to put together a range of keywords more than a blog topic could achieve. It creates great opportunities for further internal linking as well. So, the next time you use a piece of jargon, you can simply link to the relevant glossary entry.

These are great for your SEO and spares you the effort of redefining words and concepts every time you write about them in future.

4. Landing Page

Landing pages act as entry-points into your website. Users usually “land on” the page from search engines before they visit the rest of your website.

They are beneficial for your SEO as they allow you to dedicate an entire page to one specific search term, which increases the chances of it ranking. However, this also means you can control how and where the readers enter your website.

As most readers don’t tend to spend too long time on landing pages, it would be best to keep the copy short and make it very clear where your CTAs to drive the user to complete the desired action.

Stay Fresh

So, remember to keep your content updated and relevant as it is fundamental to any decent inbound marketing strategy. Also, regular blogging is the foundation of your content strategy which is key for your SEO. However, there is an abundance of other types of content available to enhance your SEO, there is no one best way. So, continue to discover and exploit the gap to give you an edge over your competitors.

For businesses, automation is the way to go as we look to remove the constraints of human limitations. With every new development, we are moving a step closer to a more connected and digital future. The use of chatbot allows businesses to automate their sales and support services to provide a more personalized experience for customers.

Have you implemented chatbots into your website? If not, here are 4 reasons why you should get started.

1) Cost Effective 

With the implementation of chatbot, companies can cut down their expenses of hiring customer support representatives. In fact, it is also cheaper to invest in a chatbot. Moreover, new employees would require training and time, eating up more resources. It can cost up to thousands for dollars to employ one. Furthermore, not forgetting the additional cost of training and onboarding. And with problems of workforce attrition, the expenses will only continue to increase. With chatbot, it offers greater time and cost savings.

2) Faster Response Rate 

If your business receives a lot of inquiries, chatbots can take the load off your customer support team. The chances of losing a customer is instantly reduced by replying through an automated chatbot. They can also act as the first point of contact, by screening calls from customers and only redirecting them to human agents when required.

Also, people are now more smartphone-friendly and demand more responsive services. They prefer to do their own research before inquiring about your services. Ensure you are keeping with expectations by creating an experience which caters to the modern-day customer. Therefore, investing in a chatBot will be a prudent investment for you.

3) Uninterrupted Customer Service

According to chatbotsmagazine, 91% of unsatisfied customers never come back to you again.

Using a chatbot, you can acknowledge your customer with an automated reply. It lets them know that their complaint or inquiry has been received. Furthermore, this also gives your customer support representative ample time to structure a detailed response to the customer’s request. Thereby, allowing companies to attain a customer’s goodwill. 

After office hours? No problems! 

Chatbots can provide uninterrupted customer service 24/7, even in different time zones or public holidays, giving an approximate time period of when customers should expect a response. Most importantly, this communicates your dedication to helping your customers – be it your prospects or even current clients.

4) Ensure a closed-loop circle of learning 

The more interaction with your customers, the more a chatbot can learn about them. Build your chatbot such that it allows them to learn from you while adding to their knowledge. This way, live agents can work together to deliver an improved customer experience that nurtures your customer throughout the entire lifecycle. With a hybrid set up, the potential knowledge your chatbot can learn from chatting with customers is immense.

There you have it, 4 reasons to use chatbot to improve the user experience. 

However, it differs from business to business. Both machine learning chatbot and command based chatbot have their pros and cons. While command based chatbots can give more reliable and grammatically correct answers, they fail to provide questions out of their knowledge base. As for machine learning chatbots, they become smarter with time, learning from past questions and answers but require a vast amount of learning data. The benefit of both is it allows you to engage your customers in meaning conversations, offering quicker and more accurate support service. As chatbot technology advances, we move back towards a more conversational way of doing things.

Social Media is undoubtedly an extremely useful tool for lead generation. It serves as a platform to interact with different viewers and engage with them. If used properly, it can potentially outgrow your business within no time. Very often, marketers tend to make mistakes while using certain social media strategies. This can sometimes tarnish the image/reputation of your brand. So, in this exercise, we will highlight some of the social media no no's.

1. Social Media Over-engagement

It is important for your company to engage with users on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.

-Be interactive with your followers.
-Respond to users’ comments and their direct message.
-Make use of hashtags relevant to your particular business/industry
-Track people who have mentioned or tagged you in posts, try to communicate with them, understand their needs.

This is a very important element of Social Media Marketing, one that focuses on providing a personalized customer experience and maintaining service quality in order to build good relationships with your customers.

However, this does not mean that the more engagements you have, the more successes you achieve. Sometimes, over-engagement can provoke people into thinking your company is annoying. You need to know how to keep conversations appropriate to the context otherwise, people will tend to feel strange and have nothing to respond.

2. Missing out the CTA button

While using social media, most companies only emphasise on promoting their campaigns or products but sometimes forget to add a call-to-action button. This will greatly limit the process of lead generation. Almost everyone use social media to share interesting content, catch up with long-lost friends or message friends. They are generally not too serious about the promotions they see online. So, after they finish watching your brand promo/advertisement, they might be puzzled as to why there is no link to your website/product. In this scenario, although they are interested in your products, they will leave it aside because they are not prompted what to do next. Usually, social media users will not go out looking for your website or product. Rather, they might get caught up by other advertisements on social media. In fact, since there is loads of information for people to absorb in social media, it's not too surprising if they forget about your company real soon.

So, always remember to add a simple call-to-action button. It can be a link that directs users to your website/landing pages or, it could be a request to follow your social media page. It really depends on what action you want your viewers to take. Bear in mind, a good call-to-action enables more effective lead generation.

3. Dealing with Negative feedback

Do not assume that social media is always a great place, where people have a positive attitude and enjoy your posts. Social media platforms can be a cruel place for companies since there are people who will express negative or harsh comments. If you don’t handle them those comments properly, the reputation of your company can be severely affected.

-You need to be able to respond to these comments effectively.
-Don’t delete these negative comments.

Companies may think that deleting comments will solve the problem but that is a misconception. Deleting negative comments may attract unwanted attention and create a bigger hurdle.

Sometimes, when the opposing comments are reasonable you must be patient and find a solution to solve the user's dilemma. This in turn can convert those negative feedback into a positive one and thus the situation can be reversed. But, when comments are posted by haters, they can be pretty unreasonable and therefore, you must first analyse the situation, and then take quick action. Hope you enjoyed the read!

Read more: 3 Thing Your Competitors Can Teach You About Lead Generation

As more industries continue to move their marketing campaigns online, how can you continue to stay competitive and ensure you optimise your lead generation process? We look at one of the most important tool: an effective landing page. It is important as it aims to entice visitors and drive them down further down your marketing funnel. So how can you design a landing page that’s effective enough to convert visitors and get them to subscribe?

Here, I will share with you 6 quick tips to consider when creating an effective landing page.

1. Use Video

Video has become synonymous with people today. In fact, more than 50% of people watch a video every day. Video has become one of the most powerful content in recent years. Not only do videos increase the duration of time a user stays on your page, but it’ll also be able to better communicate a message you are trying to get across.

Videos aid you in explaining complex concepts with visuals and also allows you to explain a service in detail. Moreover, with the right content, context and tools, your video will help your brand leave a good impression on your user. So, include one on your landing page to improve your chances of conversion!

2. Carefully constructed copy

A landing page is there to persuade a user to convert. Visuals are important and can enhance the way visitors engage with your offer just like text. You could spend hours and hours on your landing page, making it the best-looking landing page ever created. However, if the copy isn’t as persuasive, your efforts are just going to be for naught. So, take some time to construct your copy.

3. Call-To-Actions

This really is a no-brainer. After all, your CTA is going to be the last thing your user interacts with when converting on your landing page. Remember to make it short, sweet and obvious! Don’t make your user search for your CTA, they would simply bounce if it is such a hassle.

Consider these:
- Size
- Contrast
- Image
- Location

Also, make sure your CTA benefit-oriented.
For eg.
- Get My eBook
- Give Me More
- Watch Right Now

Such CTA triggers emotions and makes your prospects more inclined to convert. Let them feel they have something to gain in return.

4. Simple

A good landing page is minimalistic yet appealing, presenting information in a non-intrusive manner. Use a clean and simple design with lots of white space to avoid distraction. Ensure your design does not increase the page loading time and keep the focus towards your subject of interest and CTAs.

If you do have a form, keep it short and request only essential information. Less is more. Your users will not convert if they find it takes up too much of their time. Test it yourself to see what form length works best for your business.

5. Mobile

Since half of all web activity comes from mobile, ensure that your landing page is mobile-compatible. It should have a responsive design to help increase your conversion rate. An effective landing page should look great on mobile devices and loads quickly.

6. A/B testing

Test your landing page with different versions to check whether it can drive conversion. Perform A/B testing to collect valuable analytics on how users interact with your landing page. With analytics, you can also tell how users landed on your page or what type of device they were using. Ultimately, your goal is to drive conversions by optimising your landing page.

You can implement A/B testing on:
- Headings
- CTAs
- Images and graphics
- Buttons
- Placement of page elements

More companies are realising the importance of having an online presence to connect with their users.
But homepages also do the same thing, how are they different?

The difference is that landing pages present a unique opportunity for business to build focused, customer-oriented marketing campaigns. Remember that while having an appealing landing page is great, they must also have well-structured content to increase the conversion rate. Every single detail will have an impact on your visitors. So, keep these 6 tips in mind when designing your next landing page!

For just about any question or fix to a problem, Google is your answer. There, searchers look for answers and click through to websites which are relevant to their interest. One of the best things you can do to improve your chances of ranking high in search engines is to start a blog. Here are 5 ways how blogging helps with your SEO.

1. Keeps your website fresh and current

As a user, if you ever chanced upon a website which hasn’t been updated for years, you probably wouldn’t trust the information you are receiving. The company as represented by the website could have gone out of business or the information provided could be obsolete.

Google web crawlers constantly look for new web pages. Websites that are regularly pumping out new content signals to them that the website is alive and offering fresh content. Thereby, giving more reason to index your website more often, keeping it more on their radar over time.

As there is no reason to frequently update your homepage, a blog is a more practical tool for adding new content to your website on a regular basis. In other words, search engines would love to “feature” you more often!

2. Helps you target long-tail keywords

You should already know this: SEO is really competitive. Unless you are the biggest brand in the country, you’re probably going to have a hard time landing a top spot for particular keywords. Your best bet is to rank for longer specific keywords that people are searching for that are relevant to your business.

These are called long-tail keywords and are extremely important for any SEO strategy. While they are awkward to fit into product pages, they’re perfect to use in blog posts.

3. Internal Linking

Good SEO involves internal linkages between your content. Failing to include internal links on your website is one of the simplest SEO mistakes you can make.

While there are good internal linking possibilities on the main pages of your website, the real magic starts when you start publishing a blog post. As you add more pages relevant to your topic cluster, you add more opportunities to link those pages together.

Every time you do so, you strengthen the connection to your targeted keywords, thereby increasing your ranking. In other words, Google determines that you are an expert with regard to a particular topic. With that, they see you as an authority and grants you higher rankings in the results pages for that topic (or your targeted keywords)

4. Opportunity for external links

The hardest part of SEO is earning external links. In order to Google to see your website as trustworthy and authoritative, other sites have to link back to yours. While it’s possible to get external links without blogging, it is very difficult.

Blogging gives you the opportunity to fill your website with pages of valuable information. By producing informative and engaging content, other sites are compelled to backlink to your blog post if it provides useful information to their readers.

5. Helps you connect with your audience

When a reader loves your blog post, they are more likely to share it, helping you get more traffic. They are also more likely to revisit your website again to see more of your content and maybe even sign up for your email list. As your traffic and repeat visitors increases, Google understands that people like your website and would further rank you higher in terms of SEO.

As your readers feel more connected to your content, they might be persuaded to take the next step by completing a form or downloading an ebook, thereby becoming a lead.


There you have it, 5 reasons how blogging helps with your SEO. While good SEO is fundamental to your lead generation efforts, blogs can contribute to your marketing efforts as well. They are excellent drivers of inbound marketing. They also make excellent materials for fresh content on social media pages. To remain competitive in this digital landscape, companies realise that they must provide some sort of value to their customer base. This is where blogs come into play. And who says blogs have to be only words, engage your readers with gifs, infographics or even videos! Start by building a connection with the people you want to reach.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term “meta descriptions”, it is a short paragraph that provides a brief explanation of the content of the website. It is the snippet of information found below the link of a search result.

So, it helps to describe the contents of the page to the searcher. The objective is to convince and persuade the searcher to click through to your website.

While meta descriptions don't exactly count towards SEO ranking, they shouldn't be ignored!

Instead of thinking of them as a ranking factor, think of them as a conversion factor. These short paragraphs are an opportunity to advertise content to searchers and let them know what the given page has with regard to what they’re looking for. So, here are 3 reasons why you need a good meta description.

1) Increase Click Through Rate (CTR)

While keywords used in the meta description may not lend a hand in search ranking, the results of a well-crafted meta description can boost a page’s ranking. When a link is frequently clicked on, it sends a signal to search engines telling them that a page is important and is relevant to searcher’s preference.

Therefore, having a relevant or an eye-catching meta description is important. In essence, the better it is, the more likely it is for you to have good click-through rates from organic searches.

2) Bolded Keywords in Search Results

Notice how Google bolds a particular keyword or phrases which you are searching for? Use it to your advantage. Think of your personas. How would they search? Include relevant keywords or phrases in the meta description. Allow Google to help you stand out.

Don’t be the one that has no bolded keywords for that search. So, include your top keyword phrase in your description as well. (and of course, in your meta tag) And ensure that it is written in a way that encourages the searchers to click on that result.

3) Social Networks Use It

Social sharing sites such as Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn, commonly uses a page’s meta description when the page is shared on their sites. The meta description will usually be shown in its entirety, but the first sentence or two of your post may be cut off. While it can be edited, not everyone sharing your post will do so.

If your first sentence or two does not sum up your page well, your shared content might not hit it well with people. This might not create a good user experience for users encountering your content via social sharing. So, if you want your shared content to get more clicks, consider creating a strong meta description to help you reach your goals.

But what constitutes a good meta description?

Answer: It should do everything possible to drive someone to make that decision and click.
Here are some of the things to take note of:

A. The optimal length
In order to be displayed fully on Google, keep your meta descriptions between 135 and 160 characters.

B. Use an active voice
Keep searchers interested and which enables them to visualise and understand.

C. Include a call to action
Encourage your searchers to take the next step.

D. It should be unique
Produce unique meta description for each page title to create a better user experience.

E. Provide value propositions
Be mindful of your user and clearly articulate what you have to offer in relation to what your page content promotes.

In conclusion, a meta description is very crucial for every page and is actually an important aspect of SEO. While they may not count towards the ranking process, it is your bridge to your customers. Just like with SEO, writing a good meta description isn’t a one-time process, it requires frequent optimisation. Strengthen your bridge and stand out more. Don’t settle for an okay meta. After all, SEO counts toward your lead generation efforts. Lastly, always remember to write for the user FIRST and then search engine next.