What is lead nurturing? If you’re aware of your sales funnel model, you can quickly identify the most effective ways to navigate yourself around achieving the goals set to their utmost potential. Lead nurturing is a crucial component that helps you move through your sales funnel stages smoothly. When reinforcing relationships with the buyers are formed by meeting the goals at each sale funnel stage, lead generation plays out its wonders.
In a conventionally lead nurturing program, we can witness a primary focus on clear communication and strenuous marketing on behalf of the business. They usually tend to do this by hearing out the major concerns of their prospects and being a valuable source of all the information and answers required by them. It is all about sheer transparency as the rapport built is an essential component of a client relationship. A sense of mutual trust, thriving brand awareness, and persisting connections (despite engagement in business or not) are established through this.
A website known as Marketing-Sherpa reports that around 80 percent of the total leads never buy the product or access the services, so it is always most advisable for the relationships with buyers to be nurtured using strategic and systematic methodologies. Aside from that, elongating the length of the sales funnels is a compelling and productive thing for a business, for it fosters independence within the functional teams and their prospects, further fostering a relatively more critical requirement for effective, lead nurturing programs.
As we become consistently more connected through technology, it becomes more critical by the day that we, as salespersons, create an experience that is the cross channel for the buyers as the contemporary consumer inherently has the expectation of marketing that is personalized according to their likings. Always keep in mind that your buyer is not just some other guy to sell to; they want to be heard and listened to, they want their demands and needs validated, and you can earn genuine endorsements from clients if you just listen. Knowing your prospects allows you to quantify what they might need, categorically giving them a subjective experience according to that goes a long way in strengthening your bond with them.
Lead nurturing can only be claimed as effective when it encapsulates one’s complete marketing calendar because it allows it to compute the particular amount of communications being exchanged with your leads such as the emails and newsletter, business and exclusive updates, emails regarding the database, and much more through other varying communication channels. These interactions should have a harmonious way of working so that when relevant, your customers receive an experience that is the best, awarding you with your lead’s loyalty.
Why Lead Nurturing?
In most B2B businesses, if a person visits your website for the first time, they most definitely are not looking to purchase from you. They are making sure they have the correct amount of information about what exactly you have to offer and how well it would satisfy the need they are looking for the solution to. Much research has shown that most leads require “long-cycle” nurturing with several influencing factors. This means that even though they may not be ready to make the purchase now, they will be at some point in the future.
This is precisely why lead nurturing is considered highly crucial. For a business to be able to secure revenue that will perhaps be lost otherwise for no other reason. For there to be a more transparent, more vivid perspective of the picture, here are some must-know statistics about the importance of lead nurturing-
- When compared with elemental standalone email blasts, lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times more responses.
- Around 68% of the total B2B companies have a habit of using landing pages to nurture new sales leads for conversion in the future. (Marketing-Sherpa)
- The lack of lead nurturing leads to 79% of the overall marketing leads obtained never be turned into sales, reports Marketing-Sherpa.
- As B2B marketers claim, the number 1 benefit of automating the process of marketing is the newfound ability to generate more and thus better leads. (Pepper Global)
A lead nurturing framework that is relatively simple may just include many nurture messages (emails) to be sent in the time of the coming days and weeks. At the same time, a more advanced lead nurturing framework has more elaborate points and features like a variety of touchpoints, content offers, and communication with different channels.
It is always the most beneficial to start from scratch and the easiest ones out there and let the campaign fire evolve with time!
Complete Lead Nurturing Strategy
Targeted content should be leveraged
When we talk about lead nurturing, one particular size does NOT suffice. Research shows that when leads are strategically nurtured with targeted content, results tend to improve significantly. One can begin by understanding the different personas of your buyers. Proceed with creating a wide variety of content that is designed to nurture all those personas concerning their interest, business and commercial aspirations, and potential marketing triggers
Multi-channel nurturing should be prioritized
Using Multi-channel lead nurturing means being omnipresent on the internet. This allows you to meet the need of your leads accurately. For the longest time, email has been the most widely used mode of lead nurturing campaigns, but the consistent issue of spam filters, etc, makes it difficult for businesses to contact their leads through email. This means the need for cross-channel lead nurturing arises. Some other channels that can be helpful for lead nurturing apart from email are as follows-
- Dynamic website content
- Retargeting ads
- Monitoring social media
- Automation of mobile marketing
Follow up with leads in a timely fashion
Most organizations know the benefits of follow-up calls that are immediate and done promptly, but they still choose not to act upon it enough.
When one makes a well-planned follow-up call within a follow-up window, it outshines any form of cold calling by a considerable measure. You know what the prospect is researching about as all the information exchanged is still fresh. Plus, you already have ample information about the kind of profile your prospect works in, which is also, in a way, enough to know what they will like and what they are looking for.