Imagine, during a flight, you meet an awesome web designer. Both of you have a great conversation and exchange cards. But you have no communication after that meeting.
Let’s say, after 4 months you are in need of a web designer to revamp your company’s website. You would search for designers on Google or might ask your friends for references. What are the chances that you will remember the designer you had met? Most likely, very low. Had he dropped you an email with his agency’s website address, or would have stayed in contact, he would have been on the top of your mind. Probably, you would have considered him before anyone else. For the lack of nurturing the relation, he lost a potential customer.
Same holds true for the relation between you and your prospects. We as brands, do a fantastic job in generating leads. But, that is just the first stage, the seed has been planted. It needs proper care to bloom into a healthy plant and give fruits.
While lead generation is certainly important, investing in generating more leads without building an effective lead nurturing system is sheer waste of resources.
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your leads until they are ready to buy. By keeping them engaged and making them familiar with your business, they are pushed down the sales funnel until they become customers.
Our research of the industry trends say that:
- On an average, 50% of the leads are not ready to buy.
- Almost 80% of new leads never become customers.
- Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
- Emails that use lead nurturing get up to 10X more responses compared to standalone email blasts.
Some more good news for you!
Despite lead nurturing being so critical to business, just 35% of B2C marketers have established a lead nurturing strategy. This implies, by implementing effective lead nurturing campaigns, you can be way ahead of your competitors!
Okay, now that you understand the importance of lead nurturing, what next?
We will tell you, what is next.
Lead nurturing, although a traditional marketing practice, has now taken a completely new meaning. It is not just sending personalised emails. For the tech-savvy, smart, always-online customer, your lead nurturing strategy needs to be equally smart!
Brian Carroll, author of the bestseller Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, says, “Lead generation isn’t about instant gratification, but rather requires sustained effort to succeed, often over a relatively long period of time. Key words are consistency and time.”
Here, we give you 5 most powerful mantras for designing great lead nurturing campaigns:
- Segment your leads – “One size fits all” does not work in lead nurturing. Understand the characteristics of the group you are trying to communicate with. Segment the leads on the basis of their location, gender, age, purchasing habits, etc. and send them targeted content.Recently, we did a segment based lead nurturing campaign for a leading bank. All the leads were categorised into segments based on their income, and the bank’s offerings and schemes were sent accordingly. And the response the campaign received was fantastic!
- Send personalised and relevant content: Who doesn’t like to feel special! Several researches show that personalised communication content produces up to 6 times better results than generic content. Personalisation is not just personalised emails and SMS. Send content according to the web behaviour of the prospects, recommendations of the products and pages they often browse.
- Use multiple channels – As stated earlier, gone are the days when lead nurturing meant only email drip campaigns. Every 5th marketer says that the highest email open rate they could achieve is only 20%. Hence, an effective lead nurturing program is a combination of multiple communication channels like emails, SMS, push notifications, social media, dynamic web activity tracking, and marketing automation.
- Score your leads– Lead scoring is ranking your prospects based on the interest and level engagement they show towards your brand. Lead scoring has proved to be the most effective tactic in improving the revenue contribution from lead nurturing.
- Track, measure & analyse – Be sure to measure how many prospects come in, how many enter into the lead nurturing program, and how many get converted to customers. Evaluate which type of content generates the most leads. Monitor how the prospects receive the information and which channel of communication works best. All this information will help you to improve the whole content generation and lead nurturing process. In our recent lead nurturing program run for an insurance company, communication was sent through email, SMS and voice calls. Analysis showed that voice calls performance was quite higher than emails and SMS.
We hope these mantras help you design and execute great lead nurturing campaigns.
Stay tuned for more!
If you’re immediately looking for effective lead nurturing campaigns, do get in touch with us!
