Lead nurturing is all about sharing relevant, personalized and targeted information to ensure that you stay on top of the buyer's mind.
Inbound marketing has continued to displace outbound marketing as a company's primary means of generating leads, building its brand and growing its audience. However, this is not a market-specific phenomenon. It's market-agnostic and widely-endorsed across multiple industries ; companies now see digital marketing as their primary lead generation strategy and the cog that makes this strategy work is producing great content.
Content provides that continuous flow of leads online that keeps your funnel full of new opportunities. When content is combined with marketing automation, it takes lead nurturing to the next level by continually providing customers with action-based triggers, important reminders and brand messaging.
The focus is to reintroduce the same customers into the same sales funnel by relying upon predetermined triggers.
Customer actions then force you to re-engage your audience and guide them back through your buying process.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need.
On average, 50% of the leads in any system are not yet ready to buy (Adobe Marketo)
Almost 80% of new leads never become sales (Marketing Sherpa).
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost (Adobe Marketo)
Nurtured leads makes 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group).
Effectively developing leads in today’s buyer-driven marketplace means establishing and nurturing buyer relationships with a strategic lead scoring system, and then filling out that framework with a thorough content marketing plan.
Best practices for effective lead nurturing:
1. Personalize: Your lead nurturing email campaigns should be personal. Tailoring each email to the interests and behavior or even name and demographics of your leads and prospects, makes it resonate that much more.
2. Educate according to the buyer's journey: One of the most crucial steps in closing the sales cycle is educating your prospects and giving them the information they need in their current state of the buyer's journey.
3. Don't email leads every day: A sure-fire way to have your leads immediately unsubscribing is by emailing them every day.
4. Don't send every lead every email: You've gotten the jist by now. Every lead is different and likely in a different stage of their buyer's journey. With this in mind, there is no way you can effectively nurture ALL of your leads with the same email.
5. Re-engage when necessary: Are you finding that your leads aren't opening your emails as often or aren't responding to your sales calls? Try re-engaging them with email marketing.
6. Start ASAP: Lead nurturing doesn’t have to wait until a prospect has expressed purchase intent. You can start nurturing individuals as soon as they express interest in any part of your business, even if it’s just your blog content.
7. Create content around consumer pain points: Given how the Web has empowered buyers, marketers have to shift away from self-centered content and provide information that’s useful to their buyers.
8. Don’t rely purely on email lead nurturing: It’s important to personalize your marketing messages outside of email as well. You don’t want show every website visitor the same static and generic message that may or may not apply to them. One way to personalise marketing message on your website is to use dynamic calls-to-action (or Smart CTAs).
The process of lead nurturing sounds complicated, but it's well worth the effort. It will take some time to get everything implemented, but after with some small tweaks to your lead scoring, email copy, and other details until you start getting the conversion rates you want.
We the hope the article adds value to your business communication!
Best,
Bejoy Peter- Digital Creator & Communications Strategist, Email: info@VisionKraft.com | Phone: +91 9850 555 795
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