Lead nurturing is the relationship-building process between your business and buyers that should occur at every stage of the sales funnel and through every portion of your customers’ shopping progression. Lead nurturing combines marketing and communication efforts in order to fully comprehend the needs of your prospects and provide them with useful information and the answers to any questions they might have.
After all, you don’t want to invest valuable marketing dollars into acquiring or generating new leads, only to have none or very few of those leads convert into any real revenue for your business. Lead nurturing takes lead acquisition by the hand, guiding it through the sales funnel and helping more of your leads to convert and earn you money.
So what are some tips for effective lead nurturing?
Qualify Your Leads
As a first step, you want to make sure to acquire leads that are a good fit for your business and what you have to offer.
To do this, you need to ask your leads the right kinds of questions (without interrogating them) by tapping into their emotions, egos, frustrations, fears, and concerns and assessing how they make decisions and what kinds of criteria they use.
4 Indications That You Have An Efficient Qualifying Process
Steli Efti of Close.io: “There are certain things you can look at in your business that will be an indicator of how well you’re qualifying prospects:
- Productive sales reps
- Successful customers
- Time to close
- Good forecasting (knowing what kind of deals are going to close and what they are going to be worth).”
And here are three red flags to watch out for:
- Reluctant or vague responses
- The content not matching the context (i.e. what a prospect says doesn’t match how she says it)
- BS answers and incongruencies
Maintain A Nurturing Mindset With Ads & Retarget As Necessary
Manish Punjabi: “Companies fail to think of their ad campaigns from a ‘nurturing’ standpoint. I see it all the time: companies are advertising products and services to customers that have already bought because they fail to use retargeting pixels properly.
Try retargeting new offers or customer satisfaction stories to people that have already bought your front-end offer. You will waste less ad spend, increase sales, lower refunds, and increase brand equity with your best customers.”
Adopt A Multi-Channel Strategy
Previously, lead nurturing primarily consisted of a simple email campaign that would drip a series of emails to a list of subscribers. More often than not, however, email open rates do not exceed 20%. And to make matters worse, “79% of marketing leads never convert into sales,” reports Jesse Mawhinney of Kula Partners.
Consequently, as a result of marketing automation platforms, more marketers are now adopting a multi-channel approach to lead nurturing.
Jess Mawhinney: “Effective multi-channel lead nurturing most commonly involve[s] a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach.
Because there are so many tactics involved, to execute this properly, you really need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and working cohesively.”
To help move your leads through the decision-making process using a multi-channel approach, you should use the following tools:
- Retargeting
- Social Media
- Engaging website content
- Marketing automation
- Sales enablement
Conclusion
Justin Christianson: “Lead nurturing is all about building the relationship and trust as quickly as possible. Lead with value and work to position your product or service as an absolute solution to their problem or a key to hitting the pleasure point they are looking to hit.”
What do you think about these lead nurturing tips? What strategies do you use to assist your leads through the sales funnel and get more of them to convert?