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Lead generation and nurturing are an important component of organic marketing.
What is lead generation?
Before you read this post, I suggest you read my introductory post about lead generation. In that post, I have covered the following:
What are leads?
Why every business needs a lead generation strategy
Basic principles to create a lead generation strategy
You can find the introductory post here.
What is lead nurturing?
Not nurturing your leads is a little bit like having a social media page but not posting on it. When people provide you with their contact information, they want to hear more from you.
Lead nurturing is the process of keeping in touch with your leads and nudging them towards making a purchase from you. Companies that have a lead nurturing strategy generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost (source: MarketingSherpa).
Lead nurturing can be broken down into the following categories:
First communication
On-going communication
Sales nudge
First communication with your leads
After someone signs up to your lead magnet, your first communication with that person is about your lead magnet. This is the communication they expect to get. But you want to be able to communicate with them further. A good way to do that is to send them an introductory email about the future communication that they will receive.
Say you have a blog that you would like to send to your leads. Before sending them the blog, let them know what you will send, why they should read it and how often you will send it. Be sure to include instructions to unsubscribe to future communication, should they want to. If you don’t have an unsubscribe process, people may get tired of deleting your emails and mark you as spam.
On-going communication
After establishing the first connect, communicate further with your leads. You may devise different type of communication for leads at different stages of the marketing funnel. As an example, someone who became a lead through a relevant Google Search may be sent more specific communication about your product, than someone who became a lead from a contest entry. In the case of the contest, the person is expecting to know about the contest (results etc.) but may not necessarily be interested in your product. You would want to send them more generic communication. This strategy of targeting users based on their buyer journey will help you get 72% higher conversion rates (source: Aberdeen).
Sales nudge
Let’s not forget the ultimate goal of lead generation – generate sales. While nurturing your leads, it is crucial that you remind them ever so often what they can purchase from you. You could do this in two ways:
Add a constant reminder of your product or service in every email: This could be a footnote in your email, pointing them to how they can avail your product or service.
Sales campaigns: Ever so often, you can send them an email detailing out your services. Or if you have a product, then you can send them a product catalogue or a discount code. If you are doing this, be sure to segment your audience first to send it to the people who are most likely to take action. You can read about segmenting your list in this blog post.
Now you know the benefits of lead nurturing and how to nurture leads. Marketing automation services like Mailchimp or Hubspot make it very easy to set your strategy up. So, go ahead and try lead nurturing!
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