For a business, any business, irrespective of size and revenue, lead generation is imperative for business continuity. Companies adopt multiple strategies to generate high-quality leads and maintain a robust pipeline full of hot leads. However, generating leads isn’t enough to guarantee sales. Customers have myriad options! Just like you, your competitors would also be adopting different ways to attract your customers to their offerings and prompt them to close a sale. To convert leads into paying customers, you need to offer something extra. This is where lead nurturing comes in. Implementing targeted lead nurturing tactics can help you to gently push your customers until the end of the sales funnel and complete the sale.
What is lead nurturing?
Before we delve deeper into lead nurturing strategies, we first need to understand what is lead nurturing. Lead nurturing is nothing but a series of steps and processes that enables businesses to develop deep and meaningful relationships with customers, throughout the end-to-end buying process. In simple terms, lead nurturing is when you nurture your customers with valuable content and interesting offers, winning their trust and loyalty and in the process motivating them to become a buying customer.
Why is lead nurturing important?
The importance of a lead nurturing strategy is manifold. Here are some of the major benefits of lead nurturing:
Communication – Today’s customers expect constant communication and transparency from brands. Lead nurturing involves sending consistent marketing, sales and value-added content to customers. This constant communication improves customer satisfaction and loyalty, increasing the chances of a sale.
Engagement – While a customer may be interested in your offerings, if you do not engage with them, they will soon go cold and opt for your competitor. By using a lead management system to nurture leads, you can continuously engage with your customers and ensure that you are on their mind when they decide to purchase.
Feedback – Lead nurturing is generally done with the help of emails. By using emails to ask your customers pertinent questions about their feedback on your offerings, their needs, requirements, etc, you can redesign your content, products and services to be more targeted and effective.
Referrals – Another major advantage of lead nurturing is that it opens up referral opportunities. If your lead nurturing strategy is relevant, including highly helpful content, chances are that your existing leads will share your content with others. This will help in generating new leads.
Lead Nurturing Tactics
Here are 5 lead nurturing tactics that will bring you positive results:
Personalisation
If you really want your leads to turn into customers, then you need to make them feel valued as individuals and not just as prospective buyers. When we say personalisation, we don’t just mean including the name of the customer in your emails. In today’s competitive business environment, personalisation should go much deeper. As a marketer, you need to understand each and every customer on a personal level. You need to identify their needs, requirements, pain points, likes, dislikes, etc. Based on this, you can personalise all content and communication to be of value to every prospective customer.
Omnichannel Communication
Traditionally speaking, lead nurturing is generally associated with email marketing. Marketers would use drip email campaigns to nurture their leads. However, only using one channel to engage with your leads cannot bring you the desired results. You need to follow an omnichannel approach while creating your lead nurturing strategy. Use different channels like Facebook, website, etc to nurture your prospective customers. For instance, you can target your website repeat visitors with exciting offers on your website. You can also use Facebook to run targeted ads for your list of prospective leads. Running engaging and value-added ads can drive engagements and conversions.
Follow-Ups
Often, marketers fail to understand the importance of regular follow-ups. Your customers have multiple options. If you don’t follow up with them consistently, they will go cold, forget about your brand and move on to a different competitor. Following up with your leads using lead nurturing tactics can exponentially improve the chances of a sale. The best option for you would be to use a lead management system to promptly follow up with leads. Manual follow-ups may cause unnecessary delays. A lead management system comes with automated lead nurturing capabilities that can follow up with your leads and drive conversions.
Content Marketing
Your lead nurturing strategy is incomplete without effective content marketing. Content marketing involves providing your prospective customers with quality content that can help them in some way, free of cost. Content can be in the form of checklists, blogs, whitepapers, ebooks, videos and more. When you are sending content, you are providing your customers with something of value without expecting anything in return. This helps them in building a feeling of trust, thereby nurturing them. Constantly sending relevant and value-added content will establish your brand as a knowledge leader in the minds of your customers. This, in turn, will prompt them to turn to you when they are about to make a purchase.
Lead Scoring
Lead nurturing and lead scoring go hand-in-hand. Lead scoring is a methodical process via which leads are ranked as per their chances of quick conversion. All the leads in your sales pipeline do not have equal chances of conversion. While some leads are hot and can convert within a short time, others are cold and have fewer chances of converting anytime soon. By scoring them, you can direct the sales team to focus greater efforts on the hot leads. A robust lead management system usually comes with lead scoring capabilities. By leveraging these abilities, you can easily identify the high-quality leads and then focus on nurturing them with relevant, value-added and personalised content.
Having an effective lead nurturing strategy is the first step to boosting your sales and revenue figures. The above lead nurturing tactics can help you engage with your customers, build loyalty and trust, provide them with value-added services and finally motivate them to convert into your paying long-term customers.
Talisma’s lead management system comes with transformative automated lead nurturing capabilities that can help you convert more customers, with minimal human efforts. Get in touch with us to know more.
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