What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects by sending targeted messages in a timely manner, with the goal of earning their business when these prospects are ready. Most non-sales-ready leads will eventually be ready if you continue to feed them with relevant information and to be there when they are ready to make a buying decision.
Prospects are spending more time on the web doing research obtaining information from their peers and friends. Credibility is what a potential customer is looking for and the best way to build credibility is by sharing useful and highly relevant information. Once your company is portraying the image of a trusted advisor and thought leader, it is easier for the buyers to believe that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them. This helps reduce the feeling of fear and prompt them to be more receptive in their decision making process.
Why Lead Nurturing?
Studies show that 50% of qualified leads are not ready to buy something from you. With lead nurturing, however, you can bring those leads through the sales funnel and improve the overall response rate. Right messaging is crucial in order to nurture those leads effectively. At different points of the sales cycle, you can deliver the different content that is appropriate. Generally, it boils down to the following stages
1. Touch Base: Leads have approached your service and known about your product
2. Evaluation: Leads understand that your product or service could potentially fulfil their need and solve their problem, they are spending time to evaluate whether you are the best fit.
3. Buy: Leads are ready to make a purchase
Lead Nurturing and Best Practices
What should you be doing to lay the right foundation? There are some best practices which can help augment your lead nurturing outcome – more sales.
Profiling is a proven approach to bucket your leads into different categories. Things to be taken into account includes
- Demographic
- Lead Source
- Completeness of data
- Number of responses
Craft different messages to target different personas. The frequency of email sending and accuracy of the content mapping will determine how the prospects will response and eventually take the action to purchase.
There are multiple pathways to conversion, but as you study how your leads have historically converted into customers, you can narrow down the most common pathways.
A typical pathway might look like:
Visit Website->Visit Blog->Click on Ebook SEO Basic->Download Ebook->Click on Case study->Receive Email Notification about Effective SEO and different techniques->Check Pricing->Contact to find out more information->Receive Quotation->Become a customer.
Focusing on lead nurturing efforts on your existing database including how you’ve acquired through Lead Generation campaign are one of the best way to maximize the ROI. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales with reduced cost per lead. Apart from that, statistic suggests that nurtured prospects buy more, require less discounting, and have shorter sales cycles than leads that were not nurtured.
When you invest in lead nurturing, you make the most out of every dollar your organization spends on demand generation, and you can rekindle once-stagnant opportunities from your existing database. By using lead nurturing campaigns to interact with your prospects and understanding their interest and behavior, you gain deeper insights into their buying intent, increase the relevancy of future lead nurturing campaigns. These ultimately leads to more higher quality sales leads, increased conversion rates and explosive revenue growth.