Lead Nurturing – Why it is the key to success
Lead nurturing is one of the most important tools in your arsenal. What exactly is lead nurturing? It is the process of building a relationship and trust with your customers and prospects alike. The majority of people are not willing to buy after just one communication. They need to feel more confident with your company before they commit.
Through marketing, you build this trust with multiple communications that give them more information that they want about your business as a whole. This helps them feel more comfortable when they are ready to buy, making a sale for you more likely as they will perceive you to be a thought leader in your sector/industry.
Key tips that lead to successful lead nurturing
There are many different practices you can adopt to nurture your sales prospects. Below we have highlighted a few that have worked successfully for us over the years. Our experience with both business and consumer campaigns has given us expert knowledge that we use to improve your marketing.
Add Value and Educate
If you are going to be sending multiple emails to a buyer, they need to be worth that person’s time. Consider what they have already seen and adapt your messages so that whenever they receive an email, it teaches them something new about your business/products. For example, share pages on your website, show testimonials, product reviews etc. This will help maintain and increase their interest. Sending the same message over and over will only lead to less responses each time.
Ensure that whilst adding information about your business, you also include offers for the products you are selling. These two combined have shown to have higher click rates and sales.
Number of Email Communications
A bad and quite frankly, annoying habit that certain companies have is to email you every day. The only thing this manages to achieve is to get you to unsubscribe or put in a complaint. One email a week keeps your business fresh in the minds of your buyers, without overpowering them. However, this does depend on the industry you are in and the audience you are trying to connect with. Therefore, we will advise on what works best in your industry to maximise results.
Email marketing is a key tool in lead nurturing. It is important that the process is managed carefully from start to finish to avoid any potential spamming and unsubscribing. In order to keep things fresh and interesting, speak with your leads over the phone as well to help further build the relationship. This will also allow you to gather more information, leading to a more targeted approach in terms of information sharing in your email communication. This targeted approach will in turn ensure better results and engagement.
Lead Scoring
If you email multiple people, tracking and reporting is a key part of its success. Lead scoring builds on this by assigning a score to each recipient of an email. The way that they interact with the email determines their score. This includes if they open the email, how many times they open it, which links they click and how many times they click and so on…
It is also worth considering the various stages these prospects are going through, namely – Awareness, Considersation and Action. Each of these will require various levels of information sharing as they move along the buying process. Once again we would be more than happy to consult on these cycles for and the typical information to be shared accordingly.
Once a certain score is hit, it is a good opportunity to call these people as they are clearly more engaged than other recipients. it is therefore more likely that they are further along their buying process and are in a closer position to buy.
Lead scoring is a service we can provide through our specialist email marketing service. Tracking is an important aspect of lead nurturing so if you do not have the facilities to track, consider Impact Marketing to run the process for you from start to finish.
Personalisation
In a previous post, we write how personalisation is a key tool for successful email campaigns. This overlaps in lead nurturing. When a potential customer is showing more interest in your emails and marketing, personalising all future broadcasts to this person will only help more. The contact feels that they are receiving a message specifically for them and not just a general message that is going to everyone.
When you create value and send information that they have not seen before, personalise this message as well and the response will be highly positive.
Summary
Lead nurturing is becoming one of the most important factors in the buying process. Consumers are more inclined to purchase from a company that they feel they know and trust. Without lead nurturing, your potential customers will end up buying from one of your competitors.
Build a relationship with your customers and you will find that you have more repeat business and more referrals. Creating value and regular communication is shown to lead to higher sales.
At Impact Marketing, through providing email marketing and lead generation services for our clients for many years, we understand the process and importance of lead nurturing. We include full tracking and lead scoring in our marketing campaigns to ensure your marketing performs at the highest level it can for your budget.
Get in touch today and a member of the team will be happy to advise on what we can do to improve your marketing campaigns and return on investment.