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Published May 20th, 2016 by

Why You Should Start Lead Nurturing Campaign Right Now

You’ve been someone’s lead. And maybe you’ve been nurtured. If so, you’ve probably spent more at that store, bought more, and had a great experience, which you shared with your friends.

It’s the power of Lead Nurturing! In the post, I’ll elaborate on why it’s worth marketers’ attention, what pain points it addresses and how to introduce it.

Massive website traffic is not enough

Online marketers focus a lot of attracting new customers and increasing website traffic. Actually, the number of visitors is one of their key metrics. But in their attempt to gather as many people as possible on their website, marketers might overlook one crucial thing: the traffic itself is useless. How so?

Imagine you write a great, SEO-optimized post enriched with stunning visuals. It addresses the problems your target group experiences, so thousands of them find your website when googling and researching. On social media, the post went viral. Wow! But after you finish high-fiving yourself, can you tell what exactly have you accomplished in terms of the buyers’ journey and future sales? You exposed audience to your logo, you attracted them to your website and showed them that you’re an expert. They’ve read your fantastic post and then left.

Sorry to break it out but people stumble upon dozens of great and potentially helpful stuff per day. It’s called the internet – there are so many wonderful pieces there that we rather suffer from lack of time to consume them. If you write a breathtaking post, it’s not like everybody will freeze in astonishment, bookmark your website and set a reminder to go back there once a week. Great content is not enough: it might allure people but then they’ll leave. What then?

What can you do with a person who just entered your website and knows little about your product or service? You won’t sell to her, because in most cases she doesn’t have enough information to make a decision. What makes your products unique? What do you offer anyway? Are you trustworthy?

Only 2% of your website visitors are ready to buy at the first contact (Marketing Donut).

So a new visitor is someone you probably shouldn’t sell to (unless she comes from a sales campaign, obviously). At the same time, you need to make her stay with you.

Can you see the gap here? What to do if not selling? Educate your new visitors! After they entered the website, capture their emails with a contact form (personalized ones perform better). And then deliver your newly acquired leads everything they need to know to understand the business, find the best solutions for them and fall in love with your brand.

Lead Nurturing: educational email campaign

In other words, you should prepare a dedicated drip campaign for your fresh subscribers to introduce them into the field.

Imagine you sell a designer ecological furniture. Your prices might seem astronomic to some. Others might not be aware of what ecological approach means in interior design and why it matters. They were simply attracted to your website by beautiful photos of your chairs or sofas but to make them stay with you and buy, you must make them understand your values and choices.

So capture their email addresses and send a couple of messages, explaining:

What ecological design means

What difference it makes

Who buys it and how they use it (social proof)

How it benefits the customer

Why creating an ecological furniture is expensive and what adds up to the final price (so the audience knows what they pay for).

If you send all that information, divided into small bite-sized chunks in a couple of emails before you will start to actually sell, your audience will be more prepared to make a decision.

I deliberately used ecommerce example, although Lead Nurturing basically was invented as a B2B marketing tool: the buying process there is long, complex and requires a lot of consumer knowledge.

Hence today the boundaries between B2B and B2C blur and marketing technology adoption reflects that trend: more and more e-stores take over B2B techniques and use them for their own purposes. It also applies to Lead Nurturing: in many niches, customer education is a huge advantage.

So it doesn’t matter if you gave a small e-store or a giant B2B company: you can still benefit from Lead Nurturing.

How?

Benefits of Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing helps you build lasting relationship with the audience, increases revenue and streamlines the work of sales reps.

Customers gain a solid knowledge. And knowledge gives the sense of security, of understanding the process.

Educated customers buy more. According to Annuitas research, nurtured leads spend 47% more than not-nurtured ones. The reason? They know what are they paying for.

You build a relationship without being pushy. Lead Nurturing solves the marketers’ dilemma: how to keep in touch with consumers who aren’t ready to buy without pushing them to buy? With Lead Nurturing, you simply deliver them valuable knowledge, share your experience.

It speeds up the sales cycle. With all the important information served to them, leads need less time to decide if they want to buy.

Thanks to Lead Nurturing 15% to 20% of the “not yet ready to purchase” leads finally buy (Gleanster). Sometimes your leads like what you offer or see how they could use it but don’t have resources at the moment. Lead Nurturing addresses them and helps you maintain relationships with people who haven’t decided yet or have to wait.

You increase the productivity of sales reps. The nightmare of every salesperson? So many leads! Who to call now? Thanks to Lead Nurturing you approach leads when they are ready to talk: they understand what you offer and how can it potentially help them. Sales people don’t have to waste their time on persons who aren’t convinced or gave their contact data by mistake.

Nurturing reduces lead leakage. The term “lead leakage” describes the moment in buyer’s journey when your leads drop out. They lack knowledge or motivation to move to the next level of the relationship with brand and they either just get stuck at that stage (people who have been reading your newsletters for 3 years but haven’t bought anything or haven’t registered for the free trial) or simply unsubscribe/ resign from further contacts with the brand. Lead leakage is often depicted on the sales funnel. To some degree, lead leakage is inevitable: not all your blog readers or social media followers or webinar attendees will become customers because of objective reasons you can do nothing about (like they don’t have resources now). But a lion’s share of droppers are people who could’ve stayed with you and buy – if they had more information. Lead Nurturing aims at arming your leads with all the data they need, so when you want them to move to the next level (register for a free trial, buy the first item), they are prepared to make that decision (they know what do you offer and how it can help them).

How to conduct Lead Nurturing campaign?

Educating customers sounds great but where to begin?

Start from understanding your leads. You can call It “creating a Buyer Persona” or use any other term, but the important thing is that you see precisely who your leads are, what pain points or challenges they face and what kind of information will be useful for them.

Focus on the audience, not on the brand. Write about their problems and potential solutions, answer questions they have.

Create or repurpose the content. Don’t overcomplicate your materials! Decide what do you want to communicate, strip it down to essentials and divide into small chunks. Remember that you can use videos or podcasts.

Be specific. Avoid vague terms and jargon. Instead of talking about “innovative solutions” and “advanced features”, share a case study. Explain what you do on an example, using something user can relate to.

Be sure to measure the performance of the Lead Nurturing campaign. Track OR, CTR and unsubscription rate. See also if the shopping cycle shortens in the result of the campaign and whether it influences Customer Lifetime Value.

Another form of Lead Nurturing: social media

It can happen that your Lead Gen efforts won’t deliver the expected results. Someone reads the post, watches the video, maybe even browses the blog or a website, but then doesn’t fill in the contact form. You don’t have her email address. Does it mean you lost a potential customer?

No! You can educate them in other channels, use retargeting campaigns or try to educate her by displaying targeted ads on social media. Think of possibilities of Facebook Custom Audiences integrated with your Marketing Automation platform: you can targets recipients of your FB Lead Nurturing campaign.

You’re an expert. Share your knowledge!

When you educate your customers, you share something with them. You want to give them something valuable and show respect for their own buying pace and research they have to make. You don’t rush. You don’t push. But at the same time, potential customers stay at your sight and your bond evolves and strengthens.

That’s the beauty of Lead Nurturing: it allows you to be close to your audience and find the most suitable moment for making an offer.

Learn more about Lead Nurturing: download free ebook

Author’s Name: Ewa Wojciechowska

Company name: SALESmanago

Address: 21 Grzegorzecka Str., Cracow, Poland

Email: [email protected]

Brief Bio of Author:

Ewa Wojciechowska, Product Manager, SALESmanago Marketing Automation.

At SALESmanago she is responsible for content, PR and research. Her interests focus on new trends in consumerism and changes technology brings to marketing, culture and everyday life

 

Ewa Wojciechowska

At SALESmanago she is responsible for content, PR and research. Her interests focus on new trends in consumerism and changes technology brings to marketing, culture and everyday life.

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