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Lead nurturing

Lead nurturing is keeping in touch with leads who are not ready to buy yet, with messages worth their time, so you are the one they call when they are ready. It runs over weeks or months and follows what each person does.

Updated November 2026 · 4 min read · GetSales team

How lead nurturing works

A nurture program reaches a lead several times over weeks or months, and each touch should be worth reading even if the person never answers. What you send moves with the lead: a piece on the problem early, a customer story later, an offer of a call once they show interest.

Marketing tools build this as a pool of content each person works through. In Adobe Marketo Engage it is an engagement program: content sits in streams, the stream cadence sets when the next piece goes out, and a person who has received everything in a stream is marked exhausted.1

Kinds of lead nurturing

  • Drip. One series for everyone in a segment, on a fixed schedule.
  • Triggered. A touch goes out because the person did something: a second visit to your pricing page, a new job, a reply that says "not now".
  • Personal. A rep keeps a short list of good-fit accounts and writes by hand whenever there is a real reason to.

For outbound teams the last two do most of the work. A lead who said "maybe next quarter" needs one good message at the right moment, and a monthly newsletter does not do that job.

In GetSales a reply that says not now gets a follow-up when they said: the AI SDR plans it, and its scenario sets whether it sends on its own or waits for your OK. For the triggered kind, Signals has plays for a website visit, a job change and a post. You switch a play on for a table once.

How to measure lead nurturing

  • Replies and meetings per touch. Cut the touches nobody answers.
  • Time to a sales conversation. How long a nurtured lead takes to become a qualified one.
  • Unsubscribes and spam complaints. When they rise, the touches are too frequent or too thin.

A nurture email whose main purpose is to promote what you sell is commercial email. In the US, CAN-SPAM requires an opt-out that works and is honored within 10 business days, and a valid postal address in each message. The law makes no exception for email between businesses.2

Sources

  1. Adobe Experience League, Understanding Engagement Programs (Adobe Marketo Engage), last update 7 October 2026. Read 28 October 2026.
  2. Federal Trade Commission, CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business, August 2023, edited January 2024. Read 28 October 2026.

Last updated: November 2026

Lead enrichment

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