No one likes being pushed into commitment before they're ready. We’ve learned that from pretty much every romantic comedy we’ve ever seen. And your leads are no different.
According to Hubspot's Introduction to Lead Nurturing, on average, only 25% of a company's leads are ready to go to sales. The problem with this is that many marketing departments generate leads and immediately send these cold leads over to sales, which can have a nasty effect on your conversion rate. If you push your leads over to sales too soon, you have a pretty good chance of making them feel pressure to buy before they're ready and losing them for good, and at the same time losing trust from the Sales Team.
Lead Nurturing 101
Lead nurturing is the practice of sending targeted content to your cold leads to "nurture" them into becoming warmer leads, and eventually customers. The content can be anything from blog post recommendations, ebooks, graphics, videos, or emails linking to informative landing pages.
The main purpose is to build trust and legitimacy. By sending meaningful content to cold leads, you're showing them that a) you know your stuff, and b) you're relevant to them and their concerns. The goal is to convince them of this without pushing a sale at them before they're comfortable. Consider it the courting stage of your customer relationship. You’ve gone to a movie and gotten iced cream, but you’ve only held hands once. Not counting the time your hands met at the popcorn.
A major part of inbound marketing is focused on creating great content that attracts leads to you instead of seeking them out (and bothering them with a cold call during family dinner.) With lead nurturing, you're guiding the lead from the content based, educational space of inbound marketing to the product based, transaction space of sales. Your goal is to turn a curious mind, who hopefully used your content to inform their opinion, into an active decision maker who is ready to decide on you.
4 Lil Lead Nurturing Tips
Effective lead nurturing is about staying top-of-mind, relevant, and trustworthy, and there are 3 key components you should be sure to incorporate into your lead nurturing strategy to make this happen.
1 // Act fast. And we mean it. 35-50% of sales go to a company that responds first to a lead, and the odds of a lead becoming qualified is 21 times greater when he or she is contacted within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes.
This means that when your lead submits their information on a form, in an email, or on your website, he or she should have an email from you by the time they click back to their inbox. The email should thank them for providing their contact information, provide a link to the content offer they just requested, and provide some form of useful, cool content that will draw them in (don’t hard sell them yet!). You definitely want to differentiate yourself from the sea of online coupon offers.
2 // Stay top of mind through follow up emails and content. Once you've made your initial contact, your automated campaign should periodically send the lead more content that a) further informs them and b) helps you target the lead and figure out what they are looking for.
3 // Track your lead's engagement in the follow-up material you send. Do they open your emails? Do they click on the offers? Which offers do they click? Data analysis will help inform your team about what’s working and what isn’t.
4 // It's decision time. Once you collect and analyze their response to your content, it's time to decide if pursuing a sale is a good idea or not. If the lead never opened a subsequent email, don't bother them with a sales call (but you should consider sending them alternative emails to gauge their interest). However, if you decide that you have successfully engaged the lead through a series of offers, landing pages, emails, and web content, and they seem eager to know more, you can send them over to your sales team. This is also a place where lead scoring can help. Though a sale isn't guaranteed, you can be confident that they will at least hear out what the sales team has to say.
As mentioned above, an important aspect of sales is legitimacy. Your lead nurturing is key in establishing your brand to your customer, so when they do get that phone call or email, they don't immediately shut down. This means that informative, well presented, relevant content is a must for any campaign. No tacky images, no special offers written in ****ALL CAPS WITH LOTS OF PUNCTUATION!!!!***, and no pushing a sale. You want them to be a customer, but it's important to remember that for the moment, you are still in the “holding hands” phase of your relationship.
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