5 Ways to Successfully Nurture Leads – And Why It’s Important.

In an ideal world, 100% of your leads and contacts buy your product or service. Suddenly business is booming! But the reality is far from such a scenario. According to Hubspot, it’s common for 79% of generated leads to never become a prospect. But if you’re among the businesses who respond quickly and engage with your lead, then you have a 35%-50% advantage over your competitors.

But it doesn’t end with lead conversion and lead nurturing. Even after you have managed to win the deal, it is still recommended that you follow up on tasks with your customer. Lead nurturing best practices include engaging with them via email marketing, offering lucrative services and observing closely how your customers and leads behave.

So what can you do better so that you have higher lead conversion rates? Here are some of the recommended best practices for lead nurturing that can help you onboard more customers.

Email Nurturing

According to Growth Hackers, if you invest the right amount of time and effort into email marketing, you can get an ROI from 3800% to 4200%! Email Marketing for lead nurturing is a proven strategy which many different businesses have had success with. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have a 100% open rate.

For an email marketing campaign to be successful, it is not going to be easy (especially if you want the kind of ROIs mentioned above). Your content must be meaningful and should not be generic enough to get caught in spam filters.

Many different SaaS platforms such as Hubspot, Zoho, Infusionsoft, etc. offer specialized email marketing tools. There are also platforms built specifically for email marketing such as MailChimp. According to SalesRipe, there are 6 factors that affect a lead’s viability:

• Level of interest
• Timing and availability
• Existing contracts
• Business location
• Business size
• Available capital

Here are some effective ways to nurture your leads with email content.

a. Personalize responses

Personalizing your emails to the end-user or prospect engages with your user a lot better than generic templated emails. According to a report from SilverPop/DemandGen, lead nurturing emails get open rates 4-10 times higher than email blasts.

You want your user to engage with your content and want to purchase your product or service. They are less likely to do so if they feel like they are just being targeted by an advertising campaign. Ensure that your content is dynamic and you keep track of how every prospective customer is interacting with your emails

b. Automate your email journeys

Personalizing emails is great, but it shouldn’t take up too much of your time either. It’s impossible to find time to deeply personalize content for each and every customer nor does it make sense to hire someone to do just that.

Use the built-in automation functions provided by platforms such as MailChimp, Hubspot, Zoho or others to setup journeys that are automatically sent to your prospects, while still being meaningful and personalized.

c. Send meaningful content

Engage your customers with meaningful and relevant content. Your content should engage with prospects in such a manner that you can tell them what kind of problems your product or service can solve.

You should actively engage them with content such as blog posts, brochures, ebooks or other content which paints a bigger picture of how you can help them. The goal should not be to try to make a sale but also giving them appropriate content that helps them. This will help to keep your lead warm and more comfortable with engaging with your business.

d. Don’t send too much content

While email marketing is probably the best way to nurture your leads, it’s important to realise that a limit should be established. Sending your prospects and customers too many emails becomes annoying and it risks getting your domain in the spam filter.

Don’t forget to provide your users the option to unsubscribe. Not only is this is a legal requirement in most countries, it also gives the user the impression that you are not forcefully opting them in to your content.

Retargeting

Many ad spaces on the internet (social media and other websites) have been designed in such a manner that you can retarget prospects if they have searched for your business even once. On average, only about 2% of prospects will become purchasing customers on the first visit. For the remaining 98%, you’re going to have to retarget them.

Here a couple of best practices for retargeting.

a. Social Media Retargeting

Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube run their core business on advertising. As such, there are provisions for retargeting ads on these platforms. You can also connect your social media accounts to your Hubspot, Zoho, Salesforce, Infusion or other SaaS platforms you work with. That helps you to analyse your companies ad performance, post engagement and how many organic shares of your content are done.

You’ll have to consider age groups if you’re retargeting with social media. Facebook and Twitter are great platforms to target a variety of age groups. However, if you want to target a younger demographic then your best bet is to use Instagram or YouTube. These two are also generally better suited platforms for video engagement.

b. Retargeting to your website

There are many ways you can do visitor tracking on your website. It is as simple as having a small JavaScript code on your website which will show you the geolocation and IP address of the person visiting your website. The cookies of the user will be stored in the browser session too.

There are different services which take this information and retarget the user in different websites. You don’t even need the email, phone number or even the name of the user. It is not a guaranteed way to get a click and a deal to your website but it is useful in case a prospect wants to come back to your site.

Your retargeted ad should offer something like a promotion or a one-time bonus for a purchase. This will increase your chances of converting a lead into a customer.

Content Marketing

Content is king and it will still reign for the foreseeable future. Marketing your content is probably one of the best lead magnets which is engaging for your prospect. Posting videos, blog posts, help guides and ensuring these are shared via email or social media should be done consistently.

Your leads and prospects will believe that you know what you’re talking about and you understand the solution you are providing. Content which is engaging (and even entertaining) also doesn’t give users the impression that you are only trying to sell something.

People love stories. Selling your business and solutions in the form of a story engages them better than any sales pitch you can come up with.

Surveys

Surveys are helpful whether you have converted a lead or if you are trying to engage with a prospect. Surveys can help interact with a prospect by asking questions to narrow down what they’re really looking for. Surveys are perfect for pre-qualifying your leads.

Surveys can be combined with email marketing campaigns or they can also be used for retargeting. Ask them questions which are relevant to your product or service but also relevant questions which your users will be happy to answer. You can ask them if they’re engaging with your competitor and if they are, you can jump in and offer them a discount or a free trial which can prevent leads from going cold.

Remember there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution

If you’ve made the most interesting and engaging email campaign, the most colourful and entertaining content, the most enticing surveys and retargeting campaigns and still don’t have the lead conversions you want, don’t feel disheartened. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for lead nurturing and conversion and this is true even for your competitors.

Some people will have different questions and behave differently in such a manner that you may have to rethink your strategies. It’s important that you listen to your customers or leads so that you can tune your lead nurturing strategy.

Get help from your Sales and Marketing teams. They’ll know how to engage prospects and customers probably better than you. Together with your sales team and user feedback, you can understand the best practices for lead nurturing and how to make a prospect into an account.