What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with prospective customers by providing them with relevant content and information at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
Not every lead that your marketing team generates will be ready to buy your product or service. Some leads may be interested in your product or service but have questions or concerns that need to be addressed before they move from the awareness stage to the decision stage. This is where lead nurturing comes in.
How to Nurture Leads and Turn them into Paying Customers
STEP 1: IMPLEMENT AN INTAKE PROCESS FOR HOT LEADS
The people who are most likely to buy your product or service are the ones who contact you with immediate needs. However, many small businesses fail to properly capitalize on these leads because they don’t have a clear process for taking them in.
Lead Intake Process Best Practices
- Document the lead intake process for your business. This should include how phone and Web leads are routed, who follows up, and in what time frame. Also include how inbound leads are tracked. Create a simple lead intake process and train your staff.
- Never let leads get answered by a machine or voicemail. While I understand that many businesses are stretched thin in terms of staff, it’s critical to have your phone leads answered by a real person. If you can’t dedicate staff, use a service like AnswerConnect. For a monthly charge, you can have professional staff answer your calls and capture and email you leads.
- Respond to Web leads within hours. Web leads begin depreciating in value the minute your prospects hit “send” on your Web form. Make it a priority to respond immediately, preferably via phone, as doing so is much more personal than email.
- Develop a script for inbound leads. You don’t need to turn your staff into telemarketers, but ensure that you train them on the main talking points and questions for converting leads into appointments, in-store visits, or whatever the next step in your sales funnel is. Also, train them to capture the prospect’s contact info right off the bat.
- Always add phone leads to your nurture campaigns. Since many prospects will call rather than fill out a Web form, it’s important that your staff is trained to add these contacts to your lead nurturing database (after receiving their permission). This way, even those prospects who don’t buy right away will hear from you on a regular basis.
- Share the results with your staff. Make a point of discussing inbound lead metrics with your employees on a regular basis. This will not only help foster friendly competition, but it will also help you identify best practices and weak links in your lead intake process.
- Establish your “hot leads” intake process as soon as you can. You can always expand on this as you get more feedback and identify new best practices.
STEP 2: SELECT AN EMAIL MARKETING TOOL
Even if your business is in the early stages of online marketing and doesn’t have much website traffic or content, it’s still a good idea to start building a subscriber/nurture list. All you need to do is choose an email marketing/list building service and add an opt-in form to your site.
Basic Email Marketing Software
For most small businesses, basic email marketing software is all that is needed. Any of the following providers will work just fine although ActiveCampaign is recommended if you expect to grow and use a bit more than just the very basics:
STEP 3: SET UP A BASIC LEAD NURTURING CAMPAIGN
There are two primary ways of sending email communications to your nurture list:
1. Email Broadcasts
Broadcasts are one-time emails sent to an entire email list or segments of a list. Broadcasts are powerful for sales promotions, news, or events because they allow you to reach your entire list at once.
- Content updates: Part of your content syndication strategy involves sending content updates to your subscriber list. Each time you publish a new blog post or video, be sure to send an email with a link to your new content. In Google Analytics, you’ll notice an uptick in “direct traffic” resulting from your subscribers.
- Seasonal updates: Email broadcasts work great for seasonal promotions and updates, holiday promotions, and events. If you get creative, you can come up with an offer to match every holiday or milestone throughout the year. With little effort, you could generate a dozen or more broadcasts to send to your contacts, one for each month.
- Sales and specials: Broadcasts work great for moving extra stock or filling slow periods in your business. Is your business exceptionally slow on Monday afternoons or during the month of August? Send your subscribers special promotions for coming in during these slow periods. For even better response, add urgency by doing a limited time or quantity offer (“Free _________ for the first 25 people who come in Monday”).
2. Sequential Emails
You can keep in touch with your potential customers for a long time by sending them a series of emails over time. Talk to your email marketing provider to learn how to set up this type of campaign.
Here are a few ideas for sequential mailings that have proven to be extremely effective:
- The mini course: With an “email mini-course,” you would offer your visitors a series of articles or videos (top 5 lists) delivered over time. A chef could offer “5 Dinner Party Recipes to Dazzle Your Guests,” sending those who opt in one recipe each week.
- Case studies: Nothing builds social proof with your audience like real-life examples of other customers finding happiness through the use of your products or services. Imagine how powerful it would be to load up five or six case studies and then email them out to your subscribers over time.
- Drip offers: With drip offers, you create a series of emails offering different products or services. If your business has more than one thing to offer, set up a long-term campaign that highlights different products or services over time.
- Affiliate offers: A mainstay for Internet marketers, affiliate offers are a great way to generate extra revenue. Affiliate marketing is the act of selling other companies’ products and services for a commission. This is a great way to expose your audience to offerings that complement yours but that you don’t offer directly. For example, if you run a Tahoe Bed & Breakfast, why not send your subscribers emails offering discounted ski packages, restaurant deals, or other services? Just be sure you only recommend businesses that you know will bring value to your audience.
STEP 4: CREATE A CUSTOMER NURTURE CAMPAIGN
If your clients visit your place of business, you can offer them incentives to join your email list. For example, you could provide a discount on their next purchase, or a free item. If you provide services elsewhere, you can add email fields to your invoices and offer staff incentives for email acquisition. For example, you could offer a commission for every email obtained. Here are several ways to leverage your customer relationships:
REFERRALS
I believe that customer referrals are the strongest source of leads. When customers recommend your business to others, it allows you to skip the first few steps in the online marketing process. Each referral comes with its own trust and authority.
- Ask right away. The best time to ask for a client referral is right away, while your new customers are still excited, with your business fresh on their mind.
- Make it easy. Give your customers an easy way to create referrals, whether that means a link to a short referral form or a business reply card in the mail. Don’t just ask for referrals and expect your customers to do all the work.
- Provide incentives. We’re all driven by incentives, including gift cards and discounts. Use incentives to get referrals from your customers. Even if you send a gift card in advance, many of your customers will follow through out of a sense of reciprocity.
- Combine online and offline. As cost-effective as email can be, you might get better results when it comes to obtaining referrals using offline means such as postcards. Many marketers have foolishly abandoned direct mail in favor of all-digital means, but postcards can really cut through the ice and help your message STAND OUT.
- Follow up immediately. When you get a referral, treat it as your hottest lead, applying the same follow-up rules we discussed earlier.
- Track your referral sources. Make sure you measure your referral sources using your intake process and CRM or client database. You may find that one or two of your clients or other sources are lighting up the scoreboard with referrals, triggering you to reinforce their behavior with incentives.
- Launch a referral program. If you really want to crank up your referrals, go beyond your existing clients and launch your own referral or affiliate program. Any other business serving the same market you do could be a great source for referrals. For example, a carpet cleaner could partner with a landscaping company, painter, or furniture retailer, sending campaigns to each other’s client lists for mutual gain.
STEP 5: RETARGET ACROSS MULTIPLE PLATFORMS
Here’s how to retarget your leads using social media and display ads:
Social Media Retargeting
According to Jeff Rizzo of the Slumber Yard, social media retargeting is the most effective way to stay in contact with leads. The effectiveness of ads, however, varies depending on the customer segment and social media site.
When targeting individuals under the age of 34, use Instagram and YouTube instead of Facebook and Twitter. These platforms are more engaging for this segment. Additionally, using video allows you to create a more personal connection with them.
Instagram retargeting ads generate 19% more clicks on average compared to those same ads on Facebook or Twitter.
If you want to reach a more mature audience with say health-related guides, you might only use Facebook and no other social site. You will likely get around 25% more clicks when you include closed captioning on your videos.
According to Rizzo, the older demographic is more difficult to market to than the younger one, but they are also more likely to respond to targeted ads.
Display Retargeting
Andy Hoek from Invalshoek says that display retargeting is one of the best ways to take care of leads. He has set up HubSpot to work with AdRoll and has made active lists for each stage of the buying process.
When potential customers are further along in the buying journey, they will start to see display ads that are relevant to the stage they are in. Even if we don’t have an email address for that lead, we can still nurture them through display ads. Having an email address for a lead is an effective way to reach them through another channel.
Hoek points out that display ads not only lead to more email opens, but also more brand exposure. By using display ads to nurture leads, businesses can gain a competitive advantage by filling up more of the available ad space.
STEP 6: PERSONALIZE YOUR INTERACTIONS WITH LEADS
To nurture leads effectively, focus on accommodating the customer’s needs and wants instead of sending out duplicated, standardized responses, as BitMoto’s Matthew Finke suggests.
This means that your interactions with potential customers should be tailored to their individual needs.
When you interact with a lead in a personalized way, you nurture that lead.
If you’re wondering how to improve your lead nurturing efforts with personalization, here are 3 ways to do so:
Email Personalization
Kraig Martin from Storage Vault says that the best way to maintain a positive relationship with a client is to make sure that all communications are personalized.
Personalizing all your emails to customers with specific details about them.
When planning a campaign, create a series of email templates. Then personalize these templates as much as possible by adding in any unique details you know about the customer, such as their name or interests, to help build a strong relationship.
Martin reports that, since implementing a new approach, their open rates for emails have increased by 46%, and their confirmed leads have increased by 30%.
If you want to improve your email personalization strategy, there are a few things you can do.
First, segment your list so you can send more targeted emails.
Second, use tools to help you personalize your emails.
Wrap Up
According to Roberto Garvin of Mofluid, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to working with leads, as each one has different needs, budget constraints, and evaluation criteria.
What is vitally important is that you do have something in place to nurture your leads – and then just keep improving it.
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