What is lead nurturing best practice? 5 tips for inbound marketers
Posted by Stephen Morris on Thu, Feb 02, 2012
Getting found and converting site visitors into leads is a real buzz for inbound marketers. However, it can often take more than one interaction to convert a lead into a customer. That's where lead nurturing comes in.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of moving a prospect forward, engaging and informing them so that, when the time is right, they convert into a new customer for you. A good way to think of it is to imagine you're having a conversation with them. What questions might they have, what information do they need, how do you stay in their thinking?
What is lead nurturing best practice?
Lead nurturing involves using the permission the prospect has granted you by downloading some content to push relevant, engaging content to them. Depending on the platform you're using, this could involve email marketing, tweeting or customising the content of your website.
The chances are that you're reading this because your previous nurturing activity has been unsucessful or you're failing to convert prospects into customers. Implement these 5 principles to your lead nurturing campaigns to keep your leads converting into customers.
1. Keep it relevant
The most crucial element of lead nurturing best practice is to remain relevant. You've got the prospects attention, don't lose it by losing focus. In face-to-face business, you always make an effort to not only remember who your talking to, but where you met them. The same applies to your campaigns online. You need to know why you have their email address in the first place. For example, HubSpot software keeps track of all the pages your lead viewed, as well as forms they filled in. Only when you have an idea about what their specific interest in your business is can you send them relevant information.
On the same note, keep your emails fresh - as something in your industry is bound to have changed. Do not send them an email trying to sell a service they didn't express an interest in - you'll only confuse them and end up being marked as spam!
2. Timing is crucial
Be prompt in your email response to a lead who has supplied their contact details. While launching your campaign a mere 30 seconds after they've clicked Submit can seem a little too automated, you can't let the lead wither away either. Set your response to them within a day, so as to be in their inbox before competitors - the first company to respond wins 78% of sales that start with a web inquiry (according to Hubspot).
Also bear in mind the frequency of your emails. There's a fine line between staying fresh in their minds or creating a sense of urgency with special offers and being plain annoying. A general rule of thumb for an email is once a month at least, and once a week at most.
3. Nurture through social media
You don't always need to contact your leads through their email. Most people have multiple email addresses or create new ones for a variety of reasons, such as name changes or from being simply too tired deleting spam from an old one. Social media accounts on the other hand can endure the test of time and can be checked more.
Share your interesting content with them through their preferred social media channel and remember to reply to their tweets and posts too.
4. Still provide call-to-actions
Just because you already have their email address, doesn't mean there isn't more to learn about the lead. By inserting a call-to-action button you can gather more information about your lead's preferences - helping shape your future lead nurturing campaigns. Additionally, you may want to include your clear concise call-to-action within the first paragraph of the email, as your busy clients may have time to read the whole thing!
5. Be human
Computers can be very smart, but they can also be socially awkward. The email address your reply to/from should be from a real contact in your company, for example: mari@inboundmarketing.co.uk as opposed to auto-response@inboundmarketing.co.uk. Another way of making your emails appear less generic is by personalising them.
Demonstrate you are perfectly aware of who your lead is by using their name, company or even mentioning what whitepaper they downloaded from your website. The tone of your emails should be approachable and friendly - after all, you want to create feeling that they are being cared for by a human.
Hopefully this article has whetted your appetite for one of the key areas of inbound marketing. What is lead nurturing? It's the process that turns good inbound marketing into great inbound marketing.
Image courtesy of: http://www.thetlcfirm.com