Lead Nurturing - Your First Steps

Say you’re young and single and you meet someone attractive. Someone you like a lot. Someone you want to meet again. What’s your next move? Depending on who you are and how you go about things, answers may vary from “text them” to “call them immediately”.

One thing you most likely won’t do, though, is ring them up and ask your new acquaintance to marry you right away. That’d be too much, too soon, and it’d kill your chances immediately. Most people try to build a connection starting with small steps before going for a bigger commitment. Common sense, right?

This works for dating and it also works for sales and marketing. The process is called lead nurturing, and it refers to “getting to know someone better” in a business context. It’s what happens between “meeting” someone as a lead and closing a sale.

Lead nurturing can, among other things...

●    Increase purchase size or amount

●    Improve leads-to-sales opportunity conversions by 225% (Marketo).

●    Boosts e-mail response rates by 400-1,000%+ (Source).

Now one question remains: how do you go about nurturing a lead?

Step 1 - Define your audience and segments

There are two ways to handle lead nurturing. One is the scattershot approach where you hit every lead with the same exact messages and hope they respond. The other is to work with precision, tailoring your messages to specific audience members to maximize conversions. Can you guess which one works better?

Leads nurtured with targeted content lead to 20% more sales opportunities. Moreover, 51% of email marketers say that segmentation is the most effective way to personalize nurturing — which is key in securing more sales.

Some ways to segment your customers are:

●    By cohort (i.e. time of lead acquisition)

●    By age

●    By gender

●    By response time

The important thing is to create effective segments that you can target profitably. The trick is finding the right balance between making groups small and targeted and making them large enough reach as many people as you can with the same action.

Step 2 - Planning touch points

On average, it takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead that’s ready to buy from you. If you get your leads from a company like Fresh Data Now, some of those touches will have already been made for you, which makes things a little easier.

All the same, you still need multiple messages to let your prospect know your business, understand your product, and consider buying from you. You definitely can’t afford to “just wing it”.

Plan multiple touches ahead of time, automating them insofar as possible. This will streamline and optimize your operations, helping you turn more leads and sales. Just don’t think that you have to limit yourself to one channel. McKinsey found that marketing across different channels converts 2.5x more sales. Find ways to combine email, phone, social, etc for the best results.

Step 3 - Teach, don’t sell

Common marketing wisdom says that people and organizations don’t buy products, they buy solutions to their needs and problems. Nurturing a lead isn’t about asking people to buy again and again and again, it’s about giving your customers the knowledge they need to make the choice to buy from you.

In practice, this can mean:

●    Getting on introductory phone calls where you explain the fit between your product and your prospect’s needs.

●    Sending ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and links to blog articles that showcase your expertise.

●    Writing email sequences with tips and information that gives meaningful value to your prospect.

●    Showcasing your product’s features and benefits effectively.

These kinds of efforts win potential customers’ trust, paving the way for an easy sales process. Just remember to combine these informative messages with calls to action and invitations to make a purchase at predefined touch points.

Step 4 - Set schedules, objectives, and goals

To get the best possible results, you need to be precise. Identify the specific goals and ambitions you have for each lead nurturing effort you make and work towards them every step of the way.

One way to do this is by attaching specific CTAs (calls to action) to your emails, push notifications, phone calls, etc — then seeing how often people respond to them. Something else to consider is how your nurturing goals set you up for the ultimate sale you’re going to make. For example, how will you know that a lead is sales-qualified? Which action or analytical data will inform you?

It’s also important to have a clear schedule for nurturing actions. This helps you by keeping results consistent and sets you up for automation, which 74% of top-performing companies do when nurturing leads.

Step 5 - Optimization

Only time will tell which lead nurturing strategies and actions work best for your company. Even the most successful campaigns can stand to improve over time.

To that end, it’s best to track data consistently and then use it to refine and improve your efforts. The better you can do this, the more likely you are to turn leads into sales qualified leads and, ultimately, sales.

Now that you know how to nurture contacts, it's time to start selling. Use Fresh Data Now to get your first targeted leads, then turn them into profitable clients.

Skype Jared : BUYFRESHDATANOW

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