How To Nurture Your Leads

Lead nurturing is a long game for sales teams. Prospects will not convert into sales on the first impression they get of your product. People always like to weigh up their options before converting, so they’ll need convincing to get them over the line.

 

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is the way businesses develop relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel through the buyer’s journey. The focus of marketing and communication efforts is to provide prospects with the information and answers they need to convert into a sale.

According to Gleanster, using lead nurturing showed that 15-20% of customers who were not ready to purchase, converted into sales. Forrester Research also found that 50% of companies that excel at lead nurturing generated 50% more sales and 33% lower cost per lead.

So how do you successfully nurture your leads? Here are our tips on getting those sales.

 

Personalise your campaign 

Customers love being contacted personally by businesses. Tailoring emails to the name, interests and demographics of your leads will resonate more with that person.

Your emails should never appear automated or as though you are blasting information at your leads time and time again. Be creative. Address your emails from the various departments of your business. Personalised emails are helpful, especially towards the end of the sales cycle. These can easily be created using the right software, including Salesforce CRM which can personalise your campaign at every step of the sales journey.

 

Give the buyer new information

Buyers sometimes need new information before they are ready to complete their journey. If you only send one email for lead nurturing, there are three things you can do to educate prospects:

• During the awareness phase: give leads blog articles they want to read or are interested in and provide them with the latest trends and statistics in the industry.
• Consideration phase: Invite your lead to a webinar about the product. Perhaps you could offer a demo?
• Decision phase: Share customer testimonials or success stories or product reviews.

You need to ensure the content you send is relevant to the lead. What have they already downloaded? What are they talking about on social media? Have you identified any pain points they might have? You should compare this information to past prospects, so you know what the prospects need to do to move towards a purchase.

 

Time your marketing messages accordingly

A lead doesn’t want to be contacted every day. All that is going to do is put them further away from the sale. You should set up an optimal lead nurturing schedule that not only keeps the company in mind, but also gives leads the time to digest information. Always build trust with your lead and never scare them away.

 

Send what emails you need to

Every lead doesn’t need every email you send out to your mailing list. Every lead is an individual and are likely to be at different stages of the buying process. For this reason, you cannot effectively nurture every lead with that same email.

You must group your contacts by defining their individual traits. These include:

• Job title
• Age
• Location
• Interests

By grouping contacts, you can ensure that your email leads are delivered to the right people. According to a DemandGen Report, emails sent as part of a lead nurturing strategy get 4-10 times a better response rate than standalone email blasts. More responses will ultimately mean more sales.

 

Re-engage with the buyer when necessary

There could come a time when a lead isn’t opening your emails or responding to any of your sales calls. This is when you need to attempt to re-engage them with strategic email marketing techniques.

How can you re-engage with a lead?

• Make it about the lead: ask your subscribers for feedback on your emails.
• Add incentives that are highly valuable to the client.
• Create a sense of urgency when it comes to the sale

 

Start your nurturing immediately

Once a lead takes an interest in any element of your product, such as the blog, then don’t wait to nurture that lead. After subscription, your company should send a steady stream of content and useful information. This gives your lead an opportunity to learn more about the product.

After your lead requests more information on a product, then they need to be moved to a more targeted campaign that focuses on the product. By engaging with the customer early on, your business will be able to nurture your leads along the sales cycle.

 

Create content for the buyer

The content of your marketing campaign can no longer be self-centred. It must provide information that’s useful to your buyers. Forrester Research found that 33% of B2B marketers note that  targeted delivery of content (delivering the right content to the right audience at the correct time) as their biggest challenge.

To do this right, you understand your unique buyer personas – a fictional character created to represent your target audiences. After this, you must create a range of targeted content which are designed based on the interests, goals and objectives of your leads. This information can be fed into a CRM platform such as Salesforce that can identify, segment and target all of your unique buyer personas. A CRM acts as a marketing automation platform – this ultimately will help you scale your entire lead nurturing strategy.

 

Don’t rely on email lead nurturing

Personalising your marketing messages does not end with your emails. This can also be done in other areas. Most visitors to your website will be shown the same static messages that don’t change to appeal to individual leads. You can use a dynamic call to action (or smart CTA) to change this.

 

What is a Dynamic Call to Action?

A dynamic call to action can be used on a website to specifically target a person, after you have successfully segmented the lead via the completion of a form or from any existing sales records on them.

A CRM can support with a dynamic CTA, as the software has all the data available to target specific users you can lead to a personalised page. It can be a great way of encouraging users to find out more about what you are offering and how it can benefit the prospect.

By following these steps, you can help nurture your leads into sales. The sales cycle is all about finding if the lead is a good fit for your business or not, because sometimes it is not meant to be. However, with smart targeting within your marketing strategy you will be able to find the leads that are the perfect fit.

Find out how you can nurture your leads for B2B or B2C with Salesforce CRM by contacting Purus today.