Putting in place an effective strategy
Since most of your leads aren’t ready to use your services right away, how do you maximize the likelihood that when these leads are ready, you’ll be the one they choose? You need to be nurturing these people by having an effective lead nurture strategy in place.
Lead nurturing refers to keeping in touch with your leads or prospects until they’re ready to do business with you. Nurturing them will help you to stay “top of mind” and eventually convert them into customers. Below are the three steps to nurturing your leads:
1. Assign each lead to a drip marketing campaign
A good customer relationship management (CRM) system will have a variety of pre-designed drip email marketing campaigns to choose from. A drip marketing campaign is a series of emails that go out automatically at various time intervals. These campaigns will differ in length and each one will be created for different types of leads that you add to your database.
Drip marketing is great for nurturing your prospects and you’ll save loads of time by automating this key area of your marketing. It’s essential that each email in the campaign contain informative or educational content (we want to avoid sending “sales pitches”). Note that to prevent these emails from coming across as cold or impersonal, each email should be addressed to the individual recipient’s name. A good CRM system will automatically do this for you.
2. Send out a monthly e-Newsletter
A monthly e-Newsletter is a great way to nurture your leads. Not only are email newsletters cost effective, they’re also a fantastic opportunity for you to provide interesting and valuable information to your prospects that they can look forward to receiving. A good CRM will give you options to either write your own e-Newsletter using different design templates or use a professionally written and designed monthly newsletter already produced for you.
3. Track your results
Once a lead nurture email or e-Newsletter has been sent, log into your CRM and check your open rate, click-through rate, and forward rate. Also, check to see which leads read your email and how many times they read it.
Why should you do this? For one, if you find that your open rate and click-through rate is very low, you may want to change around the content of your email so it resonates more with your recipients. The second reason is that if you see a handful of people have read your email more than once and/ or forwarded the email to others, this is an indication that these individuals are particularly interested in what you have to say and are potentially hot leads. You can then personally give these people a call and know to pay special attention to them.
The takeaway
You may get multiple leads per day but if you’re not effectively nurturing these leads, you’re losing out big time on potential business. Lead nurturing will help you build stronger relationships with your leads, as well as trust and credibility. When they’re ready to use your services, you’re the one they’ll call, not one of your competitors.
