In recent time, many businesses, small and big, have adopted inbound marketing as a means of generating more leads for their businesses. When you use inbound marketing to generate leads, the need to have a fully functional and efficient lead nurturing system or strategy becomes very important. Most times, the majority of your leads are inactive because only a handful of them are willing to purchase right away. Hence, the need for an effective lead nurturing strategy is quite essential and inevitable.
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.
Is your lead response time fast? How fast is your lead response time? These questions are significant in the lead nurturing. If it takes you too long to respond to lead, you are at risk of losing that lead. Your lead response time should be super fast so that you never keep your leads waiting. Your lead response time should be under five minutes. The primary reasons for this are:
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Ways of making your response faster include:
The lead nurturing emails you send out must be designed to suit your leads personally. They should be structured based on the interests, behavior, and other demographics of your leads. Try as much as possible to make the emails appear real and not like a general broadcast or automated message.
Classifying your leads into different categories based on status, behavior or interest is surely an effective way to make lead nurturing easier for you. With this, the emails you send out can be easily drafted to suit each category and make it look more personal.
An effective way of personalizing your emails for lead nurturing is to include details about the interests or location of your leads. Also, addressing the emails to your leads directly by putting their names on the email is an efficient way of personalizing your emails.
According to the Experian Email Marketing Study, "Several research studies indicate that email marketing continues to be the most effective tactic for lead nurturing. The research also consistently shows that personalized emails tend to produce significantly better results than generic email blasts. In fact, a recent study by Experian indicated that personalized emails could generate up to six times higher revenue per email than non-personalized campaigns do."
Sending out emails to your leads is certainly a way to nurture them and register your brand in their minds. However, send out emails to lead several times a day or too often will surely backfire. When your leads receive too many emails from you especially on a daily basis, they might get bored and frustrated; and this can lead them to unsubscribing.
Scheduling and planning the time you send out lead nurturing emails to your leads is surely a good idea. It helps to remind them of your business and also gives them time to assess and process the contents of the emails you send to them. However, do not make the mistake of leaving your leads without any follow up for too much time as they might eventually forget about you or lose interest in your brand.
Lead nurturing emails that you send to your leads should not only remind them of your brand; it should also serve as a step-by-step manual about your business. This will ensure that the needed information will get to them and also guide them through the various stages of your marketing conduit.
Ensuring a concise and precise lead nurturing emails will certainly help a lot. The goals of your business will be shown clearly in a precise and concise way. Your leads may get bored while reading your voluminous emails and they might not even get the message you are trying to pass, making your emails a bit irrelevant. If your leads are keeping getting bulky and less informative emails from you, they might lose interest in your brand.
A sequence of concise, precise and informative emails should be connected to guide your leads through the stages of your marketing funnel.
Trigger based marketing or event-triggered marketing is surely one of the most effective ways of nurturing your leads. It involves reaching out to your leads and interacting with them based on changes in events around them. This marketing strategy can be adopted easily, and it offers you the chance to automate it using marketing automation platforms. These platforms enable you to communicate with your leads automatically as changes or event occurs all around.
According to Gartner Research, event-triggered 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 significant.
Having a lead nurturing strategy in place is essential for your business as generating and nurturing more leads may be the life force of your business. Carefully select a lead nurturing strategy that will suit your leads and keep them enticed and interested in your products. The tips listed above will surely help you to choose and run a lead nurturing strategy for your business.