We are into IT Services andB2B Lead Generation
Lead Nurturing is the process of developing relationships with the targeted prospects based on their buying behaviour. In short, it is a process of engaging your targeted prospects by providing them with relevant and useful information and thereby creating a sales opportunity.
According to Ascend2 and Marketo, 57% of the marketer believe that lead nurturing is the most valuable feature of automation software
The end goal of any company would be closing the sales but without lead nurturing closing the deals would be difficult. One should keep in mind that a lead is just a possibility but if they are applied with nurturing, it helps you to close the deals quickly which in turn shorten the sales cycle. Lead nurturing helps to educate the leads with the product features/services offered and helps to develop and maintain a long term relationship with the leads. It is effective, provided the content should be designed in an engaging way to educate your leads
The following are the lead nurturing techniques:
Leads that are nurtured with highly targeted content, boosts the sales opportunities. Sending the right content to the right audience at the right time helps you to nurture the leads and increase the sales
Let’s say if you are providing budgeting software and you send an email at some time in June and another at some time in December/February, which one would your receiver prefer? I would say the receiver might rather act on the latter one as the Financial year starts in Jan/March and it would be a perfect time for targeting your right audience.
Research shows that a lead gets converted into a sales opportunity when a lead is contacted immediately following a warm response/website interaction. Immediate follow up would result in highly qualified leads into the pipeline. According to Harvard Business Review, responding to a lead within the first hour increases the odds of qualifying the lead by 600% or more and also according to their research, only 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours(in a sample of 2,241 US companies), which means only a 50% of the companies are responding to the leads with in the 24 hour time frame.
Retargeting is the use of content specifically designed for delivery to people who have already visited your website or engaged with your content. Retargeting is one of the best lead nurturing techniques to engage your target audience. Retarget the prospects who previously engaged with your company(across multiple platforms) by sending them with the latest updates of your company(Email Newsletters, Marketing materials, New product updates) can help your audience to stay in touch with your company and helps the prospects to keep your brand in their mind.
Email marketing is the most effective channel for the lead nurturing process — and sending personalized emails are also found to be consistently producing significant results than generic email templates. We should avoid sending a generic template to all your prospects, instead we should send a personalized email to our target audience based on their demographics(designation, location, seniority, etc), firmographics(industry, company size, etc), and revenue, etc. Try to apply personalization for different parameters and you can even close a deal with high personalization in no time.
Track the behaviour of a lead and nurture them based on the behaviour. If a lead frequently opens your website or emails, check which web page or which email he is spending more time with and try sending them emails with utmost personalization in continuation with the content they looked for. As mentioned above, if they are followed up immediately with the relevant content, there is a high chance of creating a sales opportunity.
Track the behaviour of a lead and nurture them based on the behaviour. If a lead frequently opens your website or emails, check which web page or which email he is spending more time with and try sending them emails with utmost personalization in continuation with the content they looked for. As mentioned above, if they are followed up immediately with the relevant content, there is a high chance of creating a sales opportunity.
Leads that are nurtured with online means are effective but none can replace the one-one conversations. Companies should try and include a direct interaction with the leads as a part of lead nurturing. Yes, it is not always possible to have a direct interaction with lead due to location restriction instead you could connect with the lead on the other social media platforms to keep in touch with the lead and to engage them with your product/service.
Lead scoring is a technique used by the Sales and Marketing teams to analyze the worthiness of a lead and thereby making a priority list of the leads based on the score. Lead scoring helps the Sales team to focus more on the leads that are highly scored which helps them to create more sales opportunities.
It is the least used lead nurturing technique but found to be highly effective. Lead scoring takes into account a number of parameters like prospect looking for pricing, multiple email reads or website visits, reading blog posts, etc. Setting up a system for evaluating the score is time consuming but once set in place it can be used as an effective lead nurturing technique.
