10 quick tips about lead nurturing system
In recent years, inbound marketing has been adopted by many businesses as a means of generating more leads. When inbound marketing is being used, the need to have a useful and effective lead nurturing system or strategy becomes paramount. Mostly, a larger percentage of your inbound leads are dormant because only a few of your leads are ready to make purchases immediately. This brings about the need for an effective lead nurturing strategy. In this article, we will provide you with tips on lead nurturing. But before we give you the tips, you need to first know what lead nurturing is.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is a marketing strategy for building a relationship with potential buyers or inbound leads by providing them with relevant information that educates them about a product or brand. It is intended to improve the preferences of a product or service in the eyes of potential customers.
Top ten tips about lead nurturing
1) Personalize your emails
Your lead nurturing emails should be structured to suit your leads personally. The emails should be custom-made to the interests, behavior, and demographics of your inbound leads. You should not make the emails seem to be automated messages or general broadcasts.
Grouping your leads into different classes based on behavior, positions or interest can prove to be an effective means of lead nurturing. Emails can be easily constructed with specific details about each group.
Including details about the locations or interests of your lead is also a way of personalizing emails for lead nurturing. Also, addressing the emails to your leads directly by putting their name on top of the email is an efficient way of personalizing your emails.
According to the Experian Email Marketing Study, a lot of research studies has shown that email marketing is one of the best ways of lead nurturing. The Research has also demonstrated that personalized emails can be more efficient than generic email blasts. As a matter of fact, a recent study that was carried out by Experian indicated that personalized emails could generate up to six times higher revenue per email than non-personalized campaigns do."
2) Don’t over-do your lead nurturing
Sending emails to your leads on a daily basis is a strategy that is certain to backfire. Emailing your leads every day might frustrate them to the point of unsubscribing. Therefore, scheduling your lead nurturing emails in a timely way can be a helpful way of reminding your leads of your company. And it also gives them time to process the contents of your emails.
3) Use different emails for various leads
Certainly, your leads are different from one another, and they are likely of different status. Due to this, using the same email to nurture all your leads is not an effective option.
Grouping your leads into different classes or groups is surely an efficient way of nurturing your leads. Some of the factors to consider while grouping your leads are the job title, location, interests, and age.
Grouping your leads with these factors in mind will surely ensure that the content of your email is more relevant and it might prove to be a more effective way of getting their attention.
4) Remind your leads when due
Are your leads not replying your sales call or not opening your emails frequently as before? Reminding or re-engaging them with email marketing might be the best action to take.
How to re-engage your leads:
- Your emails should be about them: personalizing your emails is an efficient way to regaining the attention of your leads.
- Offer them something valuable: providing an incentive to your leads can help to rekindle their interests in your business.
- Make them feel a sense of urgency: making your leads feel that they need to make a purchase as soon as possible might help to re-engage them. Although, putting too much pressure on them might backfire.
5) Carry your leads along
Your lead nurturing emails should serve as a step-by-step guide to your leads. This ensures that they are constantly informed, and it also moves them through the different stages of your marketing funnel.
A concise and specific nurturing process is certainly the lead nurturing strategy. The goals of your lead nurturing package should be shown in your in a concise and specific manner. Long emails do not often reveal your goals and also, most of your leads may find it boring to read through the long emails; thus making the emails almost irrelevant. Sending irrelevant emails to your leads may backfire as leads may start to lose interest and eventually unsubscribe.
A string of brief, precise and informative emails should be linked together to guide leads through the stages of your marketing funnel.
6) Don’t always use HTML-based emails
Although HTML-based emails look cool and attractive, it also takes a lot of time and effort to design. Refraining from the use of HTML-based emails and adopting plain text emails might be the best decision for your business. Also, the time used in designing HTML-based emails can be put into creating excellent and informative plain text emails.
Not only should you adopt the use of plain text emails, but your grammar should also be plain and straightforward. Your emails should be readable, concise, simple, and easily understood.
If you are not quite sure about the simplicity of your texts, using the Hemingway App surely helps. The app offers a text readability score and also suggests various ways of improving your texts. The lower the text readability score, the easier it is to read and understand your texts. The app is a powerful tool, and it is also free to use.
7) Give your leads a reason to read your emails
Ensuring that your leads think about your business frequently should be your priority. Your leads should be provided with qualitative and thoughtful contents that show your reliability and superiority among other businesses.
While doing this, you must always bear in mind the original purpose of your lead nurturing program; which is about the products and services you are offering your contacts. Your texts must not stray too far from the product or service you intend to offer.
8) Use smart CTAs
To obtain the desired result from a lead nurturing program, you should not solely rely on emails alone. Dynamic calls-to-action (Smart CTAs) are also ways of personalizing your lead nurturing messages.
9) Put contents in place before you start
Sourcing or generating materials should be your first step. Having an efficient system of generating contents in place before creating a lead nurturing program is certainly the wisest move for your business. This ensures that you have lots of items which you can include in your lead nurturing strategies when you start the program.
A wide variety of items can serve as the content for your lead nurturing program. These items include images, blog posts, infographics or anything else that serves as a new source of information for your leads.
10) Use trigger based marketing
Trigger-based marketing or event-triggered marketing involves approaching and interacting with a prospective buyer based on the change in events. This marketing strategy can be automated using marketing automation platforms. These platforms enable you to communicate with your leads automatically as an event occurs.
According to Gartner Research, events that are triggered by marketing can potentially save up to 80% of your direct mail budget. To obtain the best result possible, setting up an event-triggered marketing strategy alongside a lead nurturing program is crucial.
In a word, it is imperative that you have a strategy to build a better relationship with your potential buyers. And lead nurturing is one of the best strategies. You can make use of the tips for your lead nurturing. Good luck!
Thirumalesh Prasad C G (Thiru) is an entrepreneur, Founder, and CEO of Inboundsys. He has over 22 years of experience working for various multinational IT products and services companies in India and abroad. He was a significant member and worked as a user interface architect, designing the user interface for many web applications and products. In addition to running Inboundsys, he is an advisory board member in various other design studios and digital marketing agencies. He is a passionate blogger who loves writing on digital marketing, inbound marketing, lifestyle, philosophy, positive thinking, and motivation.