Most businesses remain focused on lead generation. They forget to pay attention to lead nurturing. The nurturing process starts even before a lead shows interest in your product. It continues even after the purchase. Some leads require continued nurturing to convert them into buyers. If you have not been seeing better sales results, it may be because you are not allocating enough resources to nurture your leads. Do not neglect this aspect of the business. Remain engaged with your leads by offering them supporting resources and services. You can use an influencer marketing platform to get qualified leads.
The Complete Guide to Lead Nurturing
What Is Lead Nurturing?
It is the process of building a good relationship with your prospective and existing customers. This process continues throughout the buying journey. It does not end even after the purchase because you want your customer to continue buying from you in the future. Businesses use many strategies to nurture leads. The strategies you choose depend on the type of business, the product you are trying to sell, the type of lead, the stage of the sales funnel and others. Each stage of this process requires a different set of strategies. For example, a lead that visits your website for the first time may decide not to purchase for now. You can entice this lead with an interesting offer. It may prompt that person to check your offer and remain engaged with your business. Now you can make another offer during the second interaction to sweeten the deal. Each such step prompts the lead to go down the sales funnel and end up as a customer. You can use strategies like free ebooks, newsletters, discounts, coupons, freebies, and clear any doubt that is making the lead hesitant in buying from you.
Do Not Ignore the Leads That Failed to Convert
Every business would prefer receiving qualified leads and cultivating relationships only with the leads most likely to purchase. You will be focusing only on 20% of leads if you go this route. The remaining 80% that showed initial interest might be neglected. It can be a poor business decision. All of these leads are not going to turn cold. Most of them will purchase what you are offering, but they will buy it from your competitors. If you had nurtured these leads, many of them would have purchased from you and not from other sellers. Your goal is to remain relevant and among the top choices as and when these initial leads take the purchase decision. This goal can be achieved only if you keep nurturing your inbound visitors. Create different segments of leads and use appropriate strategies for each segment. Use behavioral analytics tools like WatchThemLive and a visitor tracking software/tool to learn more about your leads. It is important to know that the lead nurturing process is limited to converting contacts who have already shown interest in your product. It does not involve generating new inquiries.
The Basics
This process is not limited to sending only emails. Many strategies are used during this process. The first step is to identify and categorize your leads by the sales stage, prompts they have already received, and your sales goals. The content and any offer you send should take into account these details. Keep a record of all actions you have taken for a lead and the incoming queries sent to you by that lead.
The Strategies Used in This Process
It starts with a welcome campaign after the prospects show interest in your product. They may have signed up for your email newsletter, filled a contact form, clicked on your ad, or expressed interest in your product in other ways. Your landing page must be optimized to welcome these prospects and guide them toward the next step of the sales funnel. This is also the time when you should start keeping a record of the visitor’s activities. Your next steps will depend on this data. Leads keep going cold at each stage of the sales funnel. Keep re-engaging them. Re-engagement will require strategies like offering product information, whitepaper, webinar or something else. If a prospect has moved to the next steps and started showing deep interest, you can go for a better offer based on the lead’s interaction record with you. You can offer a demo or meeting now. People use several websites and apps in a day. Use marketing and promotional strategies across different web channels to remain in touch with your leads.
Improving Your Lead Nurturing Process
You can achieve this goal in several ways. Streamline your sales funnel. It starts with your marketing campaign and landing page. Keep a record of the lead’s activities, so you can customize your offer and avoid sending the same offer again. Check your sales funnel metrics. Do you see the conversion process failing at a particular stage of this process? Fix the issues causing that problem. Customize your offer and create targeted content for each prospect. You will receive a better response this way. Promote and market your products across the platforms preferred by your prospects. Take into account how your leads prefer to receive messages and information. Use lead automation tools to streamline your lead nurturing process. Many of these tools use AI to minimize manual errors and get better results. For example, this tool will prevent sending the same email newsletter or offer to the same person. Measure your results on different parameters so you can refine your lead nurturing process.
Conclusion
Your marketing projects should not be limited to generating leads. Lead nurturing can increase your sales by 15-20%. Once you have set up this system, it can be put on automated mode. Setting up such a system requires some investment but the significant returns you receive because of it will prove its worth.
Angela Spearman is a journalist at EzineMark who enjoys writing about the latest trending technology and business news.
