Lead nurturing is an incredibly important process that helps you with building relationships with your customers, engaging with them.
Without lead nurturing your customers won’t know you, probably won’t like you and certainly won’t trust you. This will make it very difficult to make any sales, or if you do, you may be leaving a lot of sales that you could otherwise have easily made.
Keep reading to find out how to change that through understanding what goes into a good lead nurturing strategy, what to do when generating leads, the benefits of lead nurturing, and how to convert leads to sales.
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building a relationship with your potential customers.
It is about letting them know who you are, what you do, and a bit about your brand, and keeping them interested up until the point where they are ready to buy from you.
This is about having a conversation with your new potential customer, and helping them to achieve whatever it is that they want.
Problems That Indicate That You Need Lead Nurturing
I have unengaged leads in my list
This is usually an indication that they got excited enough with your initial message that they opted in to your list, but then found that it wasn’t offering value, or wasn’t interesting enough, or just wasn’t what they expected.
People these days are as likely to hit spam when they get bored of you, as they are to unsubscribe. Even if you’re not spamming them, they possibly feel like you are.
How To Lead Nurture Unengaged Leads
To deal with this, lead nurturing will stop this happening to a certain extent. But for those that are no longer interested for whatever reason, then you will need to start a re-engagement sequence.
If that sequence fails to engage them, then get rid of them, they’re of no value to you.
What this does it is makes sure that those leads that have forgotten who you are don't mark you as spam.
Removal Of Unengaged Leads
I know it seems scary to remove leads that you worked hard to get, but this is all about maintaining relationships with your email marketing campaigns, and if the lead isn't engaging with you, then they're wasting your time and money.
Most marketing professionals when they first come across this technique think no way I'm doing that after all my email marketing efforts, but the less engaged you are, the worse your open rates. So to increase lead quality, no matter how many leads you have, you need to get rid of those that are not a good fit.
I have lead nurturing, but my leads still are not engaged
You need to help and engage people who will ultimately buy from you. Nurturing your leads means doing exactly this.
This means that you need to demonstrate your skills at being able to help them solve their problems. Your lead nurturing tactics needs to better record and track as you nurture leads, so that from your lead scoring tactics, you can easily see where leads are failing to engage with your marketing messages.
As you do this, and the readers of your content like it as well, and become more engaged, they will start to know, like and trust you. Content marketing and social media posts, all help to do this, as part of your nurturing campaigns.
How To Engage Leads During Lead Nurturing Strategy
Make sure that as part of your nurturing strategy, you are asking your leads questions, and have your marketing team answer them, and build this information into the buyer's journey for your potential customers, and adjust your lead nurturing tactics to align to the questions being asked of you.
If you are not engaging leads, then you may need to look at what competitors are doing, take a look at the quality of your own content, and also the message that you are sending, and what you are hoping to achieve.
This shouldn’t be a straight out pitch fest, although your lead nurturing tactics should align sales to the messages that you are sending out there. Nothing will kill a lead nurturing campaign as easily as marketing saying something works in a particular way for the sales page to then contradict it.
I want Lead Nurturing But I Don’t Have Marketing Automation Technology
You could do this manually…
No, you can’t.
Or not at least unless you want this to be your full time job.
How this works is that when leads complete certain actions, such as filling in a survey or completing a quiz, you tag them with certain values.
Then use those tag values to get the automation to do certain things if the tag is found.
Segmenting Leads
This process is known as segmenting, and you can then do things based on certain tags being present.
So a segment could be people who have not opened any emails for the past 30 days. And you might want to get automation to send them to a re-engagement sequence.
At the end of the sequence, you apply a tag. If they still haven’t opened anything for 30 days, and have completed the sequence, then you delete them.
Buh-bye!
In reality you could use your auto-responder software to search for these, then manually apply a tag, then send those with the non-opener tag to the re-engagement list.
You could then do the search every so often to see if there are non-openers in that list that have completed the re-engagement sequence, and delete them.
What To Do With A Segmented List
You can segment your leads by location, skill level, interests. The point being that with them correctly segmented it is easier to engage them with what they are interested in. After all they will have told you this, if you asked.
That took you probably a few hours every few days or week. If you are nurturing your leads in this way, your leads won't be as fresh, and you will miss opportunities that could be solved by marketing automation through the lead management process.
Auto-Responder Software That Can Segment Lists
Find an auto-responder software that can do this for you, and use it.
A few autoresponders that can do this for you (try them all out and pick the one you like the most, keep reading to find out more):
I don’t know what to measure for my lead nurture program
You need to measure something to ensure that your lead nurture program works.
So lets say that you’re starting out with a lead nurture program.
And you want to reduce the number of unengaged leads by 50%.
That means that you need to be able to measure the number of unengaged leads at any point in time, as a percentage of the list size.
Then you measure at the start, what the percentage is.
Let’s say its 60%.
So your goal is to reduce that unengaged leads to 30% or less.
If you can’t measure it, it will be hard to know if you have achieved anything.
It takes people too long to buy
With the internet available, you have reviews, you have multiple competitors, and you have options. People know this, and a lot will spend a long time researching, and figuring things out for themselves.
This means that your potential customers have a lot of concerns, and are looking for answers that you are not giving. So you need to research your product, ideally use it, and then address those concerns and objections with helpful information, and provide more relevant content and monitor lead scoring as your key performance indicators improve through a successful nurturing strategy.
You can Shorten The Sales Cycle With Your Most Qualified Leads
If you give them everything they need, you can shorten the sales cycle - so your lead nurture sequence can be shorter, and hit them with all the facts that allow them to make a purchasing decision.
Sales Ready Leads and Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy
If a particular lead isn't buying, then you’re probably not helping them properly. You need to describe their benefits in a way that they understand, and appreciate, and show them how a problem is solved in a way that is beneficial to them, and become sales ready leads.
If people are taking too long, and you’re getting a good conversion rate then maybe the traffic source isn’t as targeted as it needs to be?
7 Effective Lead Nurturing Hacks
1. Talk to your leads like they are real people and learn about them
You need to communicate with your leads, solve their problems, ask them questions, answer the questions, and provide value to them.
You need to start to segment your list of leads based on the actions they take. The answers they give to any surveys or quizzes, so that you start to get to know them
2. Target your leads with relevant, personalized information
Having asked questions, you need to talk to your leads about the problems they specifically have, rather than generally. Talk to them as if you know them, and send them content that directly addresses their problems, and talks to their pain points
3. Connect with lead using multi-channelled approach
Ensure that your leads can interact with you from multiple channels, so you communicate with them, wherever they feel most comfortable. This could include social media, email marketing, paid ads (particularly retargeting) This will give the leads the most convenient experience possible.
4. Follow up sooner. Keep the relationship going
Make sure as soon as you get the lead, that you follow up with them right away. This is usually the point where you have your leads’ most attention. Don’t let them forget who you are. Start to build a relationship based on the value that you provide, as soon as you can do. Ideally this will be an automated process, via email marketing software.
5. Increase touchpoints, and start a conversation
Leads often need 7 to 10 contacts with you before they would consider buying. This means that you need to provide value, answer questions and objections, highlight benefits, and help them through those contact touchpoints, before they will feel comfortable enough to purchase anything from you.
6. Marketing and Sales need to be aligned and congruent
The marketing communications, and the sales communications and processes must be aligned, so that the customer experience is as seamless as it can be. The marketing message must be congruent with the sales message. So that the sales process agrees with, and builds upon the work that the marketing communications has laid the groundwork for.
7. Follow up AFTER each sale
The job isn’t done when the sale is made. You need to make sure that the customer is happy, that they are using the product or service in the way that they need to, to get the desired outcomes. If the customer is happy after the sale, they are a lot more likely to come to you to purchase other related products or services into the future.
BONUS: Use a lead scoring system
Score your leads based on the information they provide, how they interact with your lead nurturing process and marketing strategies. Every business will do the scoring in different ways to decide upon how good a fit a lead is during the lead generation process, and based on the information that the lead provides to you.
You obviously want to eliminate anyone who have provided spammy inputs to your sales and marketing process.
And on the other hand you want to ensure that you interact with leads who are indicating through their actions throughout your sales funnels and sales and lead nurturing strategies to be interested.
If you have sales teams, they should follow up with the higher scoring leads. And the sales and marketing teams need to collaborate to ensure that the lead nurturing efforts are fruitful.
Nurtured leads produce qualified leads through the buying process, and identify prospective customers quickly throughout the buyer's journey, converting leads into future customers.
Automated lead nurturing can create meaningful relationships through cross channel communication to your ideal target audience and a higher lead quality quicker so that you spend more time on your customers and less time on leads that are of little to no value.
What Should I Track In My Lead Nurturing Strategy?
Ads, and other Traffic Sources
You need to be able to track how effective an ad campaign was at getting the right, ideal potential customers for you.
You also need to be able to retarget these customers, so that you can pull them back into your lead nurturing program, through your sales funnel, and to result in sales, and repeat custom.
Temperatures of Traffic, and Niche Relevant Leads
If you pick a traffic source that is "cold", meaning that they are not aware of the problem they have, much less about what you can do for them, then the lead nurturing process would be much longer than getting lead from a traffic source that is warm, meaning they are close to making a buying decision.
This is similar to putting a hotdog stand outside a sporting stadium after a game. Everyone is hungry, and most will buy. This is compared to standing on a random corner trying to convince people.
Web Properties
Any web properties you use for social media, content marketing as part of your lead nurturing strategy you need to be able to track, or remarket to, to continue your lead nurturing conversation with them.
You need to track a blog post, a lead magnet, visiting a landing page. These all are important in being able to tell you which ones are the most successful lead nurturing strategy, how and why.
If the tracking is done right, you should be able to filter the leads by those that lead to the best sales, and see where the majority of leads came from, or, to see the lead nurturing campaigns that made use of blog posts, lead magnets or landing pages, which were the most successful.
Sales Funnel
If you are not aware of how a sales funnel works, then see 18 Powerful Sales Funnels To Pick From To Give You An Unfair Advantage.
Sales funnels take your prospective customers through the journey, from capturing their details, through to nurturing them toward a sale.
It is important to use marketing automation here, if for example you can detect that a lead was interesting in some part of the sales funnel, and by nurturing leads you can remove their objections whilst the experience is fresh in their minds, you are much more likely to get conversions.
What To Do With Tracking In Your Sales Funnels
For example, did the lead visit the opt-in page, but not opt-in, you could retarget them.
Did the lead visit a bridge page but didn't go any further? Perhaps they need more nurturing, and their objections being discussed?
Did the lead get to the sales page, but didn't buy? You could perhaps offer them a coupon, bonuses, or a discount?
Maybe it wasn't about the cost, but something in the sales page scared them away? You'd need to try to get into their heads, and address that.
Email Marketing
You will need to track who opens, and who clicks your links, and you can see who is engaged. Most email autoresponders will do that, and allow you to segment your leads for those who are most engaged.
There is only a small number of software that will then allow you to score your leads, which is particularly useful if you are going to get your sales team to follow up with them.
Email Auto-Responders That Have Good Automation
If not, then a standard email autoresponder will probably be fine.
Email Auto-Responders that are good for lead nurturing:
Customer Relationship Management Software Solutions That Do Lead Nurturing Well
Customer relationship management or CRM software solutions are the name given to tracking a customer through the sales process, which would include lead nurturing, lead scoring, and so on.
If you have sales and marketing teams, you will probably need a CRM, however if you are just a digital marketer, then a good auto-responder will be all that you need.
Two examples that do this well are:
Lead Nurturing Stats: https://www.smallbizgenius.net/by-the-numbers/lead-nurturing-statistics/
If you like this article, please share it with your friends and colleagues. If you have questions, or would like more information, please drop a comment.
