Jul 6, 2025
What is Lead Nurturing and Why It's Important
Lead nurturing is the process of providing valuable offers and resources that persuade prospects to advance through the sales funnel. Sales reps capture a lead’s attention and interest with helpful information, then convert leads into customers by deepening the relationship and showing how their product or service can help address critical pain points.
Why is lead nurturing important? Lead nurturing helps you to make authentic connections with your target customers, learn about the challenges they face, deliver valuable information and resources, and earn the right to pitch your solution. It takes time, effort, and heart, but it’s worth it. Here are a few of the benefits:
Learn more about your target customers
Lead nurturing digs deep to uncover pain points, needs and interests (all so you can deliver value). This makes it one of the best ways to understand your prospects.
Build relationships that last beyond the initial sale
Each day spent helping leads solve their problems builds trust, respect, and authentic relationships that last. And when we do, we leave the door open for future sales. Uncover which of your prospects are most valuable and most ready to buy: Not all leads are equal.
When you pay attention to engagement levels, you can identify the most valuable prospects in your sales funnel and gauge the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase. Then, you can prioritise these prospects to improve your chances of hitting (or even exceeding) your sales targets.
What Do You Need to Begin Lead Nurturing?
To establish a solid foundation for your lead-nurturing efforts, it is essential to understand your customers and their sales cycle. You must create helpful content and a plan or workflow that guides prospects toward a sale. Let’s look closer at each of these elements:
Buyer personas
A buyer persona is a characterisation of your ideal customer based on what you know about them. Think about your most common customer types. Where do they work and what is their role? What motivates them and what challenges do they face? Identify these buyers and build a persona for each one.
Reaching Diverse Professional Personas
Note their demographic traits, interests, pain points, and communication preferences. With the right technology, you can even include their likelihood to buy. While you may find success connecting with a marketing leader on social media by sharing videos and blog posts, a technology leader might prefer to communicate with you over email via slide decks and white papers.
The better you understand each of your buyer personas, the more tailored and successful your lead-nurturing strategy will be.
Sales cycle
Next, you need to understand your sales cycle. How long does it typically take for a lead to move through your sales funnel from first contact to closed deal? At my company, the majority of leads take between 12 and 24 months to convert. This means there are many touchpoints across multiple channels before they become a paying customer.
From First Touch to Close
By tracking your average sale cycle, you can understand how long it typically takes for prospects to be ready to buy, all while getting to know them better. You can then build out a lead-nurturing strategy based on this timeline and your prospects’ preferences. (Make sure that you keep those buyer personas in mind when you do this.)
Content for lead-nurturing campaigns
Once you understand your sales cycle and the topics that resonate with your buyer personas, you can:
Create an informed lead-nurturing campaign.
Experiment with content formats and keeping in touch on different channels to see what works best.
Incorporate SMS, video, email, social media, podcasts, and webinars into your strategy to find your sweet spots.
Pay attention to which frequency and cadence works best for contacting leads.
Lead Nurturing Basics
Understanding these lead-nurturing basics and putting them into practice, will help you to improve your sales efforts, build stronger relationships and close more deals.
Building your brand
You’ve probably heard that people buy from people, not companies. I’ve found that to be true. Be intentional about your personal brand. Start to position yourself as an expert in your space. Share helpful content on social media to demonstrate your experience and knowledge. As you build credibility, nurturing leads will become increasingly easier.
Adding value
Rather than solely trying to sell your product or service, focus on your customers first—their needs, challenges and goals. Pay attention to your leads’ behavioural data in your CRM to see what engages them. Then, add value with relevant content and customise as much as you can.
Understanding True Pain Points
For example, when I used to pitch my sales training services to women, I thought their biggest pain point would be meeting their quotas. They were actually more focused on ensuring they were seen and acknowledged by leadership. This information helped me refocus my sales message to cater to my target audience.
Segmenting for Personalized Engagement
Segment your customers into groups with similar characteristics. Doing so will help you personalise your communication efforts, including building and tailoring close plans. Rather than blasting out the same email to every lead in your database, organise customer segments that are likely to share the same pain points and interests.
Your buyer personas are a great place to start, allowing you to create more personalised lead-nurturing campaigns that speak to your leads’ interests.
Nurturing Your Customers
Supporting your customers is just as important as nurturing your leads. Once someone buys from you, focus on your “wow” factor—that thing that immediately enhances my relationship and encourages referrals. Plan nurturing campaigns that remind people why they were initially excited to buy from you, driving long-term loyalty.
Nurturing Loyalty with Delight
Strategically embed “surprise and delight” moments to keep them engaged. Doing this can encourage account expansion and renewals, improving your customer lifetime value (CLV).
According to Gartner, the higher your CLV, the more valuable a buyer is to your business because they tend to generate more revenue and are more likely to be loyal.
How to Nurture Leads
While nurturing leads, deliver value that’s relevant in the moment. You can even use marketing automation to set up nurturing campaigns. Use campaigns to share information about industry trends and provide insights on how to overcome common challenges. Close each interaction with a call to action that encourages movement to the next stage in the sales funnel.
Here’s a simplified version, going from product awareness to consideration, evaluation and purchase:
Awareness
Before they enter the awareness stage, a lead is cold. They haven’t yet entered your funnel, so target them where they are. Keep in touch to help them learn something practical or actionable. Then show that you understand their pain points without going into the nitty-gritty details of your product.
Guiding Prospects Down the Funnel
Conclude each interaction with a call to action that encourages them to move deeper into the sales funnel while building their customer profile. For example, include a form that invites blog visitors to download a guide in return for sharing their email address. Marketing and sales work together to pull leads into the awareness stage, using tactics such as publishing blog posts and articles about relevant topics.
Running ads that lead to your content or website. These can include:
Physical ads like billboards, direct mailers, and display ads on websites
Sending emails and newsletters with announcements and content roundups. A lead will often require many different touchpoints in the awareness stage before they’re ready to consider your product as a solution for their problem:
Clicking ads
Downloading gated assets like e-books
Having initial conversations with a sales rep
Interest
When a lead shows initiative and starts taking proactive steps to learn more about your solution, they’ve advanced to the interest stage of your sales funnel. Start sharing more about your point of view and offer product- and company-specific content, such as downloadable guides and invitations to company events.
End each interaction with clear calls to action that encourage you to learn more about what you offer. Here are examples of activities for this stage:
Send long-form, downloadable content like guides, reports and workbooks.
Host events such as company conferences and dinners.
Lead a discovery call to learn about your lead’s challenges and motivations.
Consideration
Once the lead has learnt about offering and agrees that you might be able to help, they begin to consider your company as part of their solution. Walk them through the features of your product, demonstrating how it can deliver results and alleviate their pain points. Here are examples of lead-nurturing activities in the consideration stage:
Send detailed product content, such as datasheets, demos, and product tours.
Give a personalised sales presentation that names your prospect’s challenges and shows how your product can solve them.
Evaluation
At this stage, your prospect has a genuine interest in making a purchase. Now you can get detailed about how your product stands out from the rest of the pack. Differentiate your product and company from the competition, and give your prospects the chance to try it. You may also create urgency to switch to your product rather than keeping with the status quo. Consider these offers:
Free trial
Free consultation
Customer reference calls, where prospects speak with current customers.
Lead-Nurturing Strategies to Improve Your Sales Efforts
Use these lead-nurturing strategies to help you to prioritise your time, focus on leads most likely to close and improve the results of your sales lead generation.
1. Use High-Touch Tactics on Leads With The Most Promise
Invest your time on the leads that have both a high interest level and high revenue potential. To identify leads with high interest, look at who’s completing enough activities in a given sales stage to become ready for the next one, especially those that do so faster than other leads.
For example, a lead who has downloaded a guide and registered for an event may be ready for you to follow up with a discovery call or to schedule a demo. It can also be helpful to measure each lead’s revenue potential. Look at specific sales metrics such as:
The dollar amount of the product you plan to sell to them
The dollar amounts of upsell opportunities
The amount of time you expect to retain them as a customer
Prioritizing High-Value Leads
This is a quality that becomes particularly valuable in a subscription model. When a lead demonstrates both interest and high revenue potential, that lead requires high-touch engagement. So, deliver more frequent, personalised interactions and resources. For example, research their company and craft a personalised email with unique insight on how you can help.
You may also consider creating ROI calculations that demonstrate how your product will deliver long-term value, both for the company as a whole and for individual teams and departments.
2. Nurture The Rest of Your Leads With Low-Touch Offerings
Continue to nurture your less engaged leads without being too intrusive. For example, pre-schedule a monthly newsletter with timely updates about your company or weekly blog posts on topics relevant to common buyer pain points.
Nurturing Mid-Tier Leads
There will also be leads who fall in the middle, those who have low interest but are great fits for your product with high revenue potential and those who show interest but have lower revenue potential. You won’t have enough time to give these leads the same level of personalisation that you give to the high-touch leads in the section above, but I can find a middle ground.
Scalable Personalization Strategies
Create targeted lead-nurturing campaigns that involve light research and personalisation, but can also be sent out at scale. Try a batch of InMail messages sent over Linkedin that deliver a relevant and timely message. Keep an eye on engagement and prioritize any leads who raise their hand.
3. Make Every Interaction Stand Out
There’s no such thing as a bad lead. So, while it makes sense to focus on the hottest leads, don’t neglect the rest. Someone who isn’t an excellent fit for your product may refer you to your next great customer. Another lead might currently work for a company that can’t afford you, but what you don’t know is that in six months, they’ll switch to a company that can.
Build and deepen relationships across the board, even if there isn’t an apparent reason for it yet. Every great sales representative can tell a story about a time when focusing on the relationship, without an ulterior motive in mind, resulted in a big sale.
4. Experiment With Different Tactics and Measure The Results
Try new lead-nurturing tactics for each funnel stage and track success metrics. You might discover a new tactic that surpasses your previous strategy. Every week, review the analytics for your nurturing activities to ensure they are effective.
Look at:
Email open rates
Event registrations
Free trial sign-ups
Optimize and Iterate
If an activity isn’t performing as well as you’d expected, make changes until it succeeds or retire the activity altogether. And when an activity performs well, continue to invest in it. You can also try A/B testing. Let’s say you’re hosting an event.
Create two different promotional videos for it, each with its script and message.
Send each one to different (but similar) groups and measure which video has a higher conversion rate.
Then, send the higher-performing video to the rest of your network.
Now that you know it’s a winner, you may even put some promotional spending behind it, too.
What Is a Lead Nurturing Tool?
A lead nurturing tool keeps your business in the hearts and minds of your potential customers. These tools automate follow-ups and keep conversations going, ensuring your leads remain interested. A lead nurturing software uses behavioral analytics to trigger tailored communications based on specific actions or milestones. Here’s how it helps:
Personalizes communication
A lead-nurturing solution customizes messages based on customer actions and preferences, making each interaction feel special.
Tracks behaviors
Keeps tabs on potential customer behaviors and interests, making it easier to understand what they’re looking for.
Automates tasks
It frees you from repetitive tasks, helping you focus on the more creative aspects of your business.
Why Investing in a Lead Nurturing Tool Is a Smart Move?
Using a lead nurturing tool can supercharge your sales and marketing strategy. Here are some compelling reasons:
Sixty-six percent of people who use marketing automation do so to improve their lead-nurturing processes.
77% of companies register increased conversion rates when they use marketing automation for lead nurturing.
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases compared to non-nurtured leads.
Lead-nurturing emails yield a response rate up to 10 times higher than standalone email blasts.
Still on the fence? Here’s why an investment in lead-nurturing solutions makes sense:
Streamlines the sales process: Automates follow-ups and tracking, helping your sales team focus on high-impact activities to accelerate the sales cycle.
Delivers personalized content: Analyzes lead behavior to provide tailored content, increasing engagement and building stronger prospect relationships.
Saves time: Automates repetitive tasks, freeing teams to focus on planning, strategy, and relationship building.
Prevents lead loss: Ensures consistent communication, reducing the risk of leads falling through the cracks or losing interest.
Improves conversion rates: Provides timely and relevant info to prospects through the buyer’s journey, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Related Reading
• Cold Sale
• Cold Prospecting
• How to Re-engage Lost Customers
• Outreach Methods
• Professional Email Example
• Collaboration Email Template
• How to Get Email Address From Facebook Url
• Email Audit
• Targeted Lead Generation
• Cold Email Personalization
35 Best Lead Nurturing Tools to Improve ROI at Every Sales Stage
Using the right tools is essential for scaling lead-nurturing efforts efficiently. This section highlights 35 standout tools that help automate, personalize, and manage outreach across channels.
1. Inframail
Best for: Agencies, Recruiters, and SDRs Who Need Scalable, Reliable Cold Email Infrastructure
Building Outreach Infrastructure
If you're serious about lead nurturing through cold outreach, you need more than a great email template; you need bulletproof infrastructure. Inframail is built for scale. While most providers charge per inbox and require you to manage complex technical configurations on your own, Inframail offers unlimited inboxes at a flat rate, backed by Microsoft-grade deliverability and dedicated IP addresses.
The platform automates your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup, eliminating the typical setup bottlenecks that slow down teams. You get dedicated email servers, not shared pools, so your domain reputation stays strong, and your messages stay out of spam folders.
Powering High-Volume Outreach
Whether you’re an agency scaling outreach across multiple brands, a recruiter reaching out to top talent, or an SDR driving pipeline, Inframail gives you a seamless way to send more with less hassle. With dedicated servers for every user and 16-hour daily support, agencies, SDRs, and recruiters can focus on building relationships rather than battling bounce rates or blacklists.
In short, it’s not just about sending emails; it’s about building a rock-solid, scalable infrastructure that supports your lead nurturing in the long term.
Standout Features
Unlimited inboxes for one flat monthly rate
Microsoft-backed deliverability + dedicated IPs
Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup
Dedicated email servers for each user
16-hour daily priority support
Built specifically for agencies, recruiters, and SDRs
Why It Stands Out
Unlike traditional email providers, Inframail removes per-inbox pricing and replaces technical overwhelm with a smooth, done-for-you setup. It’s the silent engine behind reliable cold outreach, helping you reach more leads, build better relationships, and ultimately close more deals.
Bottom line: Inframail powers your lead nurturing at the infrastructure level, ensuring every email reaches its intended recipient, every time.
2. Campaigner
Campaigners are a good choice for business owners in email marketing. It is considered one of the top alternatives to Mailchimp. This tool allows businesses to create, send, and track targeted, personalized email campaigns to their prospects. Campaigner includes features like:
Email list management
Email templates
Campaign creation
Scheduling, automated email sequences
A/B testing
Reporting
High ROI & Personalization
An email marketing software for the business to design visually appealing personalized emails, segment their leads, and test and optimize their campaigns for better results. Compared to other marketing channels, email marketing has a higher ROI, as it has a more targeted approach and a higher chance of converting leads into paying customers.
Automate for Efficiency & Growth
Utilizing automation tools, such as an email marketing platform, can help your business save valuable time by automating repetitive tasks and enhancing productivity. Campaigner offers a 30-day free trial, allowing you to utilize the platform to its fullest extent. After that, you can choose from any of the four available pricing options that best fit your needs.
3. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a great sales pipeline management software that helps businesses manage customer interactions and track leads throughout the sales pipeline stages. It creates a database of customer information that allows businesses to track customer interactions, preferences, and buying patterns.
Holistic Customer View & Automation
Pipedrive also provides a comprehensive view of the customer, including their contact information, purchase, and communication history, allowing you to identify the right sales engagement model to approach them. Plus, it can also automate and streamline various business processes such as:
Sales
Marketing
Customer service
Support to offer an all-around service
Strong CRM Alternative
Pipedrive is also one of the top alternatives to Salesmate. If you’re looking to know the key differences between these two platforms, you can check out our blog on Pipedrive CRM vs Salesmate CRM. If you’re a Freshsales user, then Pipedrive can be a great alternative platform for you.
Pipedrive for Insurance Agents
For a detailed comparison between the two, check out our blog on Freshsales CRM vs Pipedrive CRM. Although Pipedrive is a great tool, we suggest also checking out Pipedrive’s top alternatives for comparison and making an informed decision. For insurance agents, this is one of the best insurance CRM software programs on the market.
Key Features
The sales pipeline is user-friendly and includes a drag-and-drop functionality.
Software automation allows you to automate mundane tasks.
Communication tracking capabilities to ensure no email is left unread.
Pipedrive’s entry-level plans cost $9.90 per user/month and go up to $59.90 per user/month. You also get a 14-day trial for any plan you choose, and you can freely switch between plans within the trial period.
4. LeadSquared
LeadSquared is a comprehensive lead management and marketing automation platform designed to help you capture, nurture, and manage leads throughout the sales journey. It is also an excellent tool if you are looking for alternatives to Monday CRM software. It provides tools and features to streamline lead management processes and facilitate effective lead nurturing.
Comprehensive Lead Management
LeadSquared enables you to capture leads from various sources, including websites, landing pages, social media, and events. It also allows you to segment leads based on specific criteria, ensuring that your nurturing efforts are personalized and targeted.
Automated Engagement Campaigns
The platform facilitates the creation and automation of email marketing campaigns. You can also set up drip campaigns to boost sales engagement. Drip campaigns consist of sending a series of pre-designed emails at specific intervals to engage leads and provide valuable content that addresses their needs.
LeadSquared offers various pricing packages tailored to different use cases. If you want CRM and management functionality, you must choose from its CRM pricing options. And if you want automation capabilities, then you need to select a plan from the marketing automation plans.
5. TextMagic
TextMagic is an SMS marketing platform that enables you to send text messages and multimedia messages directly to prospects’ mobile devices. SMS has a higher open rate than email and is more likely to be read within a few minutes of being sent.
Targeted SMS Messaging
TextMagic allows you to send messages to your leads based on specific criteria, including demographics, location, or behavior. This ensures that messages are personalized, thereby increasing the chances of leads responding positively. It can be used for a wide range of marketing purposes, such as:
Promoting sales
Announcing new products or services
Offering exclusive discounts
Key Features
Send online and bulk SMS to your prospects.
Create SMS marketing lists to manage your leads’ details.
Analytics and reporting panels to monitor your campaign’s success.
TextMagic offers a 30-day free trial with free credits to send test messages. Once your trial ends, TextMagic operates on a pay-as-you-go structure, where you are charged a fixed amount per message. This amount varies depending on the country to which you’re sending the messages.
6. Semrush
Semrush is a marketing analytics software that helps you track and analyze the performance of marketing campaigns across various channels, including:
Email
Social media
Search engine advertising
Marketing Performance Insights
Semrush provides insights into the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, enabling you to make data-driven decisions that optimize your marketing efforts and drive growth. It collects data from various sources such as:
Website traffic
Social media engagement
Email campaigns
Actionable Data & Pricing
The data is then analyzed to provide insights into customer behavior, market trends, and campaign effectiveness. The software presents the information in a visually appealing format, making the decision-making process more manageable. Semrush offers three pricing plans, starting at $108 per month and increasing to $416 per month.
Semrush also offers a free plan, which allows you to use the platform, but your access to all features and data is limited.
7. AWeber
AWeber is an email marketing platform and one of the top alternatives to Brevo, enabling you to create, manage, and automate email campaigns. It provides tools to help organizations build rapport and earn the trust of their prospects, subscribers, and customers through targeted email communications.
Nurturing Leads with Automated Emails
AWeber is beneficial for lead nurturing, which involves cultivating and engaging potential customers over time to guide them toward making a purchase. It enables you to create automated email sequences that nurture leads by delivering valuable content, educational resources, and personalized messages.
AWeber offers four pricing plans for standard users, including a free one. You can start using the software for free and upgrade as your company or subscribers scale.
8. Highspot
HighSpot is one of the sales enablement tools that help businesses provide their sales team with the right content, tools, and information needed to engage with leads and close deals effectively. This B2B sales platform features a range of tools to support the sales process, including:
Content management
Sales training
Analytics
Communication tools
Highspot also allows you to create, manage, and distribute content, such as presentations, case studies, and product information to sales teams easily. This software offers insights into how sales teams utilize content and identifies areas for improvement.
Key Features
A robust sales enablement platform to allow your sales team to engage prospects and close deals.
An in-built content management system to collect all the relevant sales content in one place.
Dynamic and customizable analytics to optimize your sales performance.
9. Keap
Keap is a CRM and marketing automation software designed to help you manage customer interactions and marketing efforts more effectively. It is one of the best alternatives to Salesforce for small businesses. Formerly known as Infusionsoft, Keap offers a range of tools to streamline the lead nurturing process.
Keep allows you to store and organize all lead information in a centralized database. This enables you to have a comprehensive view of each lead's interactions, preferences, and history, facilitating personalized communication.
Feature Comparison
Pipedrive and Keap are both excellent tools for lead nurturing. If you’re confused about which one to choose among these two, you can check out the detailed comparison between Pipedrive CRM and Keap CRM that touches upon every feature. If you’re a Folk user looking to switch, Keap is a good alternative to Folk CRM.
Key Features
Sales and marketing automation to quickly connect with your leads.
Email marketing campaigns are used to send broadcasts or personalized emails.
Text marketing capabilities to ensure all-around engagement.
Keap offers a 14-day free trial, with its starting plan costing $159 per month.
An additional plan is available for $229 per month, which includes more features and contacts as needed.
Keap is a great choice, but you can’t ignore some other really good alternatives to Keap. Before making a decision, don’t forget to check them out.
10. Proof
Proof is a web personalization software that allows businesses to personalize their website content for each visitor based on their:
Browsing behavior
Location
Other data points
This pre-sales engagement data helps in increasing the chances of converting leads by providing a tailor-made experience for each prospect.
Behavior-Based Personalization
If a visitor views several pages related to mobile devices and gadgets, web personalization software can track this behavior and use it to recommend relevant products and offers. Personalization can help businesses optimize their marketing campaigns by delivering targeted messages and ads to the right audience.
Proof only offers one pricing plan, starting at $24 per month, which scales as your website visitor count increases. It also provides a 14-day trial, allowing users to explore the application and its features.
11. Carrd
Carrd is a customizable landing page builder that enables you to create optimized landing pages for conversion without requiring specialized coding skills or technical expertise. The builders provided by Carrd have a user-friendly interface with customizable templates that can be used to create landing pages that are tailored to specific:
Campaigns
Products
Services
Personalized Landing Pages with Carrd
By creating a tailor-made landing page for specific audiences, the business can increase engagement and conversion rates, ultimately leading to more sales. Carrd is free to use, and you can create up to three sites per account. Nevertheless, if you need custom domain names or access to paid templates, you must purchase the Pro version. The Pro plan starts at $ 9 per year and goes up to $ 49 per year.
12. Hootsuite
Businesses can manage their social media presence and engage with prospects using a single social media management tool. Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool that provides a range of features to help marketers:
Create
Schedule
Publish content
Engage with followers
Track performance metrics
Instead of logging into different social media accounts, you can manage multiple social media handles from a single dashboard. This helps save time, increase efficiency, and drive sales on social media websites.
Key Features
Pre-plan and automate the content you want to publish across all your social media accounts.
Create content calendars for social content with ease.
Stay up-to-date with recent market trends to optimize your content strategy.
Hootsuite has four pricing packages and offers a free 30-day trial. You can also schedule a demo with their sales team to receive customized pricing tailored to your specific requirements.
13. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a powerful tool that allows businesses to automate repetitive marketing tasks and streamline their lead generation and nurturing process. This tool will enable businesses to automate their marketing campaigns across multiple channels, including:
Email
Social media
Websites
Advanced Lead Management & Analytics
In addition to lead scoring and nurturing, it also includes tools for lead tracking and analytics. This helps you to gain insights into their lead nurturing processes and make data-driven decisions to optimize their campaigns for better results. For those seeking a powerful HubSpot alternative, ActiveCampaign is the ideal choice.
Suppose you’re undecided between ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp and would like to know the key differences between the two in-depth. In that case, we suggest checking out our blog on the ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp platform.
Key Features
Automatic segmentation of your prospects according to their behavior.
Assign scores to your leads to identify the highly-qualified ones for quick conversions.
Set up alerts in the automation process or nurture campaigns to notify reps of follow-ups.
The CRM and Sales Engagement plans of ActiveCampaign cost between $19 and $49 per user per month.
14. Nutshell
Nutshell is a CRM software that helps you manage your sales processes. It provides tools to manage leads and facilitate collaboration among your sales teams. Nutshell offers features designed to enhance lead nurturing, making it easy to build and maintain relationships with potential customers throughout their journey.
Automated Email Nurturing with Nutshell
Nutshell allows you to send automated emails for lead nurturing. You can create personalized email templates and schedule them to be sent at specific intervals. This ensures that leads receive relevant information and updates consistently, keeping them engaged. It also offers a 14-day trial, after which you can select any of the four packages it provides.
The entry-level plan starts at $16 per user per month, and the high-end plan costs $67 per user per month.
15. Intercom
Intercom Chatbot is designed to use natural language processing to understand user queries and provide accurate responses. This helps in creating a more engaging and personalized experience for website visitors. The chatbots can help businesses stay engaged with prospects and provide customized assistance 24/7.
Lead Capture & Qualification
In addition to engaging with website visitors, chatbots also include features for capturing and qualifying leads. This is achieved by asking visitors for their contact information and qualifying sales leads with relevant questions. Chatbots can be integrated with other lead-nurturing tools, such as:
Email marketing platforms
Customer relationship management (CRM) software
This helps streamline the lead nurturing process and provides a seamless experience to potential leads. If you’re looking for an alternative to Yellow.ai, then Intercom could be a great choice.
Pricing & Trial Options
Intercom offers three plans, and you can start a free 14-day trial before committing to a plan. The Starter plan costs $74 per month, and the Pro plan is $395 per month. To obtain more customizable pricing, you need to contact their team.
16. Zixflow
Zixflow is a lead nurturing platform that offers customizable and simple solutions to convert your leads into customers. With its clean interface, Zixflow has made it easy for you to keep track of your leads. It offers centralized lead management functionality, bringing all lead-related information into a single, organized platform.
With all lead data in one place, your sales team can easily retrieve relevant information about each lead. This quick access ensures that salespeople are well-prepared for conversations, fostering personalized engagement.
Zixflow’s Automation Features: Set It Once, Nurture on Autopilot
That is not all. Automation is a crucial component of lead nurturing, and Zixflow provides tools to automate communication based on predefined triggers. This is done via setting up sales cadences.
These cadences allow you to automate follow-ups, ensuring that leads receive timely responses and relevant information. For example, if a lead downloads a whitepaper, Zixflow can automatically send a follow-up email with related content.
If you’re just starting, then adding more expenses to your monthly budget is not a good idea. That’s why Zixflow offers a lifetime free plan that you can use until you’re ready for an upgrade.
17. BIGContacts
BIGContacts is one of the most intuitive and affordable lead-nurturing tools I have come across. It is easy to use, customize, and scale. Plus, the forever-free plan is the icing on the cake. It allows you to send personalized drip email campaigns tailored to the specific stages and preferences of your prospects.
The platform also provides effective pipeline tracking to manage lead progression visually and incorporates built-in meeting scheduling to enhance communication with leads, all accessible from a single dashboard.
Round-the-Clock Support: BIGContacts’ Commitment to Customer Success
BIGContacts offers many flexible features. I can edit almost anything to fit my needs, such as:
Fields
Workflows
Processes
The platform’s strong reporting tools are incredibly helpful; they let me see exactly how my sales team is performing.
What I liked most about this deal tracking software, though, is its user-friendly interface. And, if you ever need help, their customer support is available 24/7 via chat, call, or email.
18. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the most popular names in email marketing.
The tool provides marketing and sales professionals with an intuitive interface that includes eye-catching email templates, one-click automation, and a detailed analytics dashboard, everything you need to nurture your leads effectively.
Maximizing Free Features on MailChimp Before You Scale Up
Want to elevate your marketing game? The Mailchimp platform offers users additional tools, including a website and landing page builder, the ability to schedule and monitor social media content, and a postcard design service for direct mail campaigns.
No discussion on MailChimp is complete without mentioning the price. Mailchimp users are allowed to have up to 2,000 email subscribers and enjoy basic functionality for free. After that, rates start at $9.99 a month.
19. MailerLite
MailerLite has been in the email marketing game for much less time than the other email tools mentioned in this article. But don’t hold that against them! The platform takes pride in being feature-rich and easy to use.
Use the tool’s drag-and-drop editor to send stand-out email campaigns easily, automate them to send at the perfect times, and track your results with personalized reports.
How to Capture and Convert Leads with MailerLite’s Built-In Tools
Do you need more than just a way to contact your leads? Use MailerLite to build websites and landing pages and populate them with embedded sign-up forms and pop-up subscribe forms. Then, manage all the leads you acquire in-app as well.
The best part? You can get access to all this impressive lead nurturing functionality for an incredibly affordable price. Your first 1,000 subscribers won’t cost you anything. After that, prices start at just $10 a month.
20. Salesforce Pardot
Salesforce is one of the world's leading sales and lead generation software solutions, focusing on the motto "Work smarter, not harder." Salesforce is one of the best sales lead generation tools, with tools for:
Lead generation
Customer management
Sales teams and more
It integrates with a wide range of sales and marketing software to help businesses sell more and serve their customers better.
Personalized Engagement at Scale: AI-Powered Lead Nurturing with Pardot
Key Features:
The key features of one of the top AI lead-nurturing tools, Salesforce, are:
Automates lead qualification: Salesforce Pardot's AI can effectively identify and qualify potential leads based on their interactions and behaviour.
Personalizes lead engagement: The AI component tailors communication and engagement strategies to match the lead's preferences and interests.
Tracks lead interactions: By monitoring lead interactions across various touchpoints, Salesforce Pardot's AI provides valuable insights for sales teams.
Provides lead scoring insights: Through its AI capabilities, Salesforce Pardot assigns scores to leads based on their activities and engagement levels, prioritizing high-value prospects.
21. EngageBay
EngageBay is a powerful, award-winning CRM software that provides marketing and sales professionals with everything they need to nurture their leads effectively.
Contacts are easily analyzed in EngageBay, allowing you to glean valuable insights about your target audience. Once a prospect is in your system, you can nurture them with automated emails, SMS messages, and scheduled social media posts.
Key Features That Make EngageBay a Versatile Lead Nurturing Tool
Then, track every lead in the Visual Deal Pipeline so you always know how close they are to making a purchase. EngageBay also includes several other handy features, such as landing page creation, appointment scheduling, and in-depth sales and marketing reports.
Prices for EngageBay start at $7.79 per month per user, depending on the specific features required. This lead-nurturing tool also offers a free plan with limited functionality.
22. Marketo
Marketo and Adobe are top-rated automation software that includes lead management, email marketing, and revenue attribution tools. Many large brands, such as CenturyLink and GE, utilize the platform to nurture their leads more effectively.
Your company can use Marketo to automate emails based on audience behavior and notify you when specific actions are made on your company’s website. That way, you can follow up with them promptly.
Exploring Alternatives to Marketo for B2C Businesses
All in all, Marketo gives businesses better control over the entire buyer’s journey, which is precisely what a best-in-class lead nurturing tool should do.
Marketo is mainly aimed at the B2B crowd. If you operate in the B2C niche, consider a different lead-nurturing tool.
23. Zapier
Zapier is the “easiest way to automate your work.” In a nutshell, this tool enables users to connect various apps that otherwise wouldn’t “speak” to each other. Doing so will allow your company to set up complex lead nurturing workflows in minutes.
How to Build Custom Workflows That Align with Your Sales Strategy
For example, you could use Zapier to connect your Facebook Ads account to your MailerLite and Gmail accounts. That way, when you acquire a new lead on Facebook, MailerLite will automatically send them a welcome email, then notify your sales department via Gmail so that they can follow up at the appropriate time.
The best thing about Zapier is that it allows you to nurture your leads in the way you want to. Easily set up custom workflows that work for your business for $19.99 a month.
24. Hunter
Marketers often question the quality of their email lists, the legitimacy of domains they’re targeting, and whether they’re reaching the right people.
Our advice? Stop second-guessing and start verifying with Hunter.io. This powerful tool assigns a confidence score to each email address and domain by cross-referencing 67 million verified public sources. With Hunter, you can reach out to individuals and teams with confidence.
Validating Large Prospect Lists: A Smarter Approach with Hunter
Hunter offers bulk search capabilities, making it easy to validate large lists efficiently. It also includes a Chrome extension and a Google Sheets add-on, streamlining the verification process within your existing workflow. With a database of over 200 million professionals, Hunter is a trusted resource for accurate lead information.
Daniel Cameron of Intersection Co., a marketing and advertising agency, relies on Hunter to verify email addresses before uploading them into his CRM. He calls it one of the most reliable tools for cleaning and validating sales prospect lists at scale.
25. SalesHandy
Once you’ve gathered a list of verified email addresses, the next step is clear: it’s time to nurture those leads. Consistent, personalised communication is key to building top-of-mind recall and guiding prospects through your funnel.
With SalesHandy, lead nurturing becomes effortless. This email automation tool lets you schedule personalized campaigns with up to 10 automated follow-up stages, triggered by recipient behavior, such as:
Not opening
Not replying
Email being sent
Follow-ups run on autopilot, allowing you to engage leads at the right time without manual effort.
Boosting Email Deliverability: Getting into the Inbox, Not the Promotions Tab
Personalisation is critical. Emails tailored to the recipient can boost open rates by 26%, and 74% of marketers agree that targeted personalisation significantly improves engagement. SalesHandy’s Mail Merge tags make it easy to customise each message, increasing your chances of a response.
One standout feature: SalesHandy helps ensure your emails land directly in your recipient’s inbox, not the Promotions tab. Plus, it provides detailed analytics so you can monitor performance and continuously optimise your campaigns, such as:
Emails sent
Open and reply rates
Link clicks
Bounce rates
Instant notifications
26. Sendinblue
Now that you have a comprehensive list of the leads, what should you do? Send them a carefully drafted email with fresh images (and consider hiring a designer), add your logo, and invest time in the effort. You can use the Sendinblue email marketing feature and let it handle the work for you. It offers over 70 bespoke design templates that can be tailored, resulting in high open rates.
Send perfect cold emails with a subject that invokes interest. Want newsletters to woo the leads about your latest offerings? Well, Sendinblue has got you covered! Use A/B testing to identify the most effective message and send it at the optimal time, as the tool suggests. Watch this video to learn how to personalize your emails.
27. CleverTap
Many e-commerce sites have transitioned their websites to apps, with the latter now being their primary focus. Mobile marketing is ubiquitous and an ex officio. The tools facilitating mobile marketing automation are the talk of the town, and the clamor is only rising every day. One such tool is CleverTap, which cleverly taps the end-user and keeps the relationship going and growing.
With CleverTap, you can campaign across 12 different channels, including:
SMS
WhatsApp
Facebook and more
Remind your users at the right time through the apt channel and engage with them without compromising their privacy. You can also consolidate the users’ data from online and offline sources and segment them. You study their life cycle and behavior analysis. This is one lead nurturing tool you can’t miss out on!
28. Aritic PinPoint
Aritic PinPoint is a full-stack marketing automation platform designed for marketing operations teams and SMEs. It helps you build relationships with leads, automate campaigns, and convert prospects into paying customers with ease.
Built to be mobile-friendly, PinPoint enables you to track lead activity from any device, eliminating the need for a desktop. Its intuitive landing page builder makes it easy to create custom pages, while advanced features like lead scoring, tracking, and nurturing offer more profound insight into user behaviour and intent.
Optimizing Email Performance with Automation and A/B Testing
PinPoint also supports powerful email marketing tools, including campaign management, automation, A/B testing, and website tracking. With its robust marketing file and library management system, you can efficiently guide leads through every stage of the sales funnel, all the way to conversion.
Capturing Leads Everywhere: CRM Sync and Social Media Integration
Seamless integrations with Salesforce, Zoho CRM, and SugarCRM make it easy to push qualified leads directly into your CRM. Social media integrations enable lead capture across communities and groups, including:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram and more
Ideal for marketers seeking a quick start, Aritic PinPoint is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and features a smooth sign-up process. Try it free, and explore premium features when you're ready to scale.
29. Omnisend
Omnisend‘s marketing platforms are popular for their minimalistic interface. It’s built for experts and beginners alike with easy-to-use features that require no learning curve. Its lead-nurturing platform enables marketers to create aesthetically pleasing and compelling marketing campaigns, as well as personalize the message.
The tool provides all the necessary features to nurture relationships with potential clients, including:
Tracking engagement
Scheduling timely follow-ups
Advanced segmentation
Automated workflows
Streamlining Post-Sales and Reactivation Campaigns with Omnisend
Omnisend offers a partner program that enables freelancers and marketing agencies to close more deals and improve their retention rates. It doesn’t require much focus and allows sales to automate most of their tasks, from post-sales follow-ups to reactivation emails.
It aids in developing email newsletters by leveraging a drag-and-drop email builder, ready-made templates, and a built-in email list cleaner feature. Omnisend is a simple choice for lead nurturing. Its best feature? In-depth analytics with heat maps and intelligent segmentation.
30. Salesflare
Want to follow up and nurture your leads flawlessly? You need a reliable sales CRM system, such as Salesflare. Most CRMs require a significant amount of work to track leads effectively. You may need to update your customer data, including conversation details, the date and time it took place, etc.
And there’s no point taking so much effort despite having a dedicated tool for it, isn’t it? To ease your customer conversion journey, Salesflare automates lead tracking, allowing you to follow up on your leads without errors. It’s an excellent tool for small businesses and is extremely well-integrated with Google Workspace, allowing one to manage the entire lead-nurturing process seamlessly.
31. BotPenguin
BotPenguin is a user-friendly AI lead nurturing, no-code chatbot platform that allows you to create an AI lead nurturing chatbot for many different platforms. This makes it the perfect lead-generation tool for businesses of all sizes.
The key features of one of the top AI lead-nurturing bots, BotPenguin, are:
ChatGPT Integration: Easily connect your ChatGPT account to BotPenguin
Pre-built templates make the setup quick and easy.
Live Chat: Automatically connect your customers to a live chat agent for immediate help.
CRM Integration: BotPenguin offers over 60 native integrations, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Agile, SimplyBook, and more.
Create Unlimited Chatbots: Create as many chatbots as you need. Voice Support: Integration with Twilio for voice capabilities.
32. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
If you use LinkedIn to connect with your B2B audience, this AI Lead Nurturing tool is for you. LinkedIn Sales Navigator enables you to target specific individuals and organizations, track leads, and connect with potential customers. It also offers advanced lead and business search capabilities to find the most relevant prospects.
The platform can also recommend leads based on your preferences, which is excellent for finding the right contacts within your target accounts. Plus, it integrates with CRM platforms.
How LinkedIn Sales Navigator Integrates Seamlessly with Your Sales Tech Stack
Key Features:
The key features of one of the top AI lead-nurturing tools, LinkedIn Navigator, are:
Real-time Stats: Get real-time sales updates through LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Advanced Network Access: Unlimited searches, saved searches, and people who viewed your profile in the last 90 days
Access to LinkedIn Subscriptions:
Job Searcher
LinkedIn Learning Integration with Sales Tools: SNAP
Outlook Web Integration
Sales Navigator - Mobile App
Centralized invoicing for contracts sold through LinkedIn Corporate Sales
CRM Sync: Auto-save, activity write-back, ROI reporting for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
33. Close
Close CRM is designed to boost sales operations by integrating direct communication channels like calling, emailing, and SMS within the platform. This integration ensures that every customer interaction is tracked accurately, continuously updating each contact’s record, which I found invaluable for maintaining up-to-date client information.
What You’ll Like:
Enhanced HTML email functionality for richer, more engaging communication.
Two-way email sync for seamless communication tracking across devices.
Built-in VoIP feature, offering valuable phone integration.
Dynamic lead lists with “Smart Views” that are customizable through search queries for efficient lead management.
34. Act-On
Act-On offers an intelligent and user-friendly approach to marketing automation to boost prospect engagement and lead nurturing.
Best for:
Enterprise marketers
B2B companies
Marketing agencies
Act-On logo
The platform offers tools for multichannel marketing automation and sales alignment. Its lifecycle marketing tools enable businesses to anticipate and meet buyers’ needs across their preferred channels. With an intuitive automated journey builder, create elaborate omnichannel automation to guide prospects from consideration to purchase.
Key Features:
Visual journey builder with conditional logic
Lead automation flows
Lead scoring tool
AI content creation tool
Sales and marketing alignment tools.
35. Zight (formerly CloudApp)
We use Zight (formerly CloudApp), a visual communication tool that includes a:
Screen recorder
GIF creation
Image annotation features
Properly nurturing leads requires companies to create personalized content and distribute it at opportune moments. With Zight (formerly CloudApp), you can easily create custom video messages or annotate screenshots to clarify complex topics for your leads.
Then, using Zight (formerly CloudApp)’s seamless integration with Zapier, you can automate the sending of your content via platforms like MailChimp and Constant Contact, ensuring your unique messages are delivered precisely when they should be. Many of Zight (formerly CloudApp)’s features are available for free. To access premium capabilities, you’ll need to pay $9 per month, per user.
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Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today
Inframail revolutionizes cold email outreach with unlimited inboxes at a single flat rate. The email infrastructure company provides Microsoft-backed deliverability, dedicated IP addresses, and automated technical setup to help agencies, recruiters, and SDRs scale their outreach efforts efficiently.
How Does Inframail Work?
Inframail streamlines the cold email process by simplifying the technical setup, improving deliverability and outreach speed.
Users purchase email domains before signing up for the Inframail service. This reduces the chance of getting flagged by spam filters.
Inframail then automates tools to configure the domains for optimal email deliverability before providing the user with access to a dedicated inbox.
The entire process takes less than an hour, so users can start reaching their prospects quickly.
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