Lead nurturing is about building relationships with leads over time and continuing to engage them until they are ready to buy. It keeps you top of mind with your potential clients and focuses marketing and communication efforts on tracking the behaviors of prospects to zero in on their needs and offer the right solutions. It’s all about listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need.
- On average, organizations that nurture their leads experience a 45% lift in lead generation ROI over those organizations that do not. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
- 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
- Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report)
To nurture leads, you need to have a strategy in place that includes quality content delivered over time and a system to score leads so that the lead nurturing efforts can be measured. Your marketing automation platform can make this process much easier.
Establish trust
Regular communication with leads helps ensure that you are top of mind. While you may think that talking to someone who is not ready to buy today as a waste of time, it sets a foundation and ensures a good connection for future purchases. It also provides a venue for referrals – just because your contact is not ready to buy does not mean he or she doesn’t have a peer who is.
Maintain communication
After you establish trust, you want to maintain communication with your leads. You can setup automated emails to be sent out to your leads in bulk as a follow up or a friendly reminder of your business and what you have to offer. These emails can be personalized with each lead’s specific interests to further persuade the potential buyer into using your product or service.
Identify customer interests and desires
Lead nurturing communications are an excellent way to learn about your leads and what they want. For example, have customers asked questions about features you don’t yet offer? You can use this information for some research and development if you get enough inquiries about certain features or products commonly requested.
Further segment your lists
Your lead clicks on one email and not another. What can you learn? During a lead nurturing process, you can monitor lead behavior and automatically move leads on to lists that match their interests. As you further segment your lists, you’ll know more about your leads and can use this information to move in for the sale when the time is right.
Decrease the sales cycle, increase the order
It’s really simple: nurtured leads buy more sooner. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. (Source: Forrester Research) Your marketing team moves the lead through the funnel faster and your sales team closes a larger order. Everyone wins.
Start nurturing today
Lead nurturing is a key component of marketing automation and it’s why you need to implement a platform today. SharpSpring has built its entire platform around agenciesand businesses that focus on B2B conversions. Want to find out why more than one thousand businesses started using the marketing platform in less than a year? Schedule your demo today.
