You have leads. Now what? You follow up and nurture the relationship!
Having successfully attracted and signed up leads, the next crucial step in the inbound marketing journey is nurturing those leads. This step revolves around the practice of building trust, delivering value, and guiding leads down the sales funnel towards their buying decision.
How many times should you follow up with your leads?• 2% of sales close on the 1st call,
• 3% of sales close on the 2nd call,
• 4% of sales close on the 3rd call,
• 10% of sales close on the 4th call,
• 81% of sales close after the 5th call.
Despite these figures, many companies cease their follow-up efforts prematurely:
• 48% quit after the 1st call,
• 24% quit after the 2nd call,
• 12% quit after the 3rd call,
• 6% quit after the 4th call,
• 10% quit after the 5th call.
This gap in follow-up efforts results in significant opportunities being missed.
Why is so much following up?
Marketo and The Annuitas Group provide further data that underscores the importance of nurturing:
• 50% of leads in any system are not yet ready to buy.
• Almost 80% of new leads never become sales, primarily because they aren’t nurtured effectively.
• Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
• Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
• 67% of prospective buyers that tell you “no” today will be ready to buy within the next year.
• 80% of leads considered “dead” will buy within two years.
The nurturing stage is fundamentally about building trust. Implementing an effective lead nurturing programme requires providing interesting, compelling, and valuable content that keeps prospects and customers educated, engaged and interacting with your brand. The content should be designed to solve the problems your leads are facing or help them achieve their goals. Mainly, your content should be:
Trustworthy: Your content should be reliable, accurate, and honest. This helps build trust with your leads.
Convincing: Use persuasive language to convince leads of the value of your products or services.
Educational: Provide useful information that helps leads solve problems or make better decisions.
Sharable: Make your content easy to share on social media or other platforms. This increases your reach and attracts more leads.
Marketing automation plays a pivotal role in nurturing leads. By automating the process, businesses can engage more people, more often, and at a significantly lower cost.
Automation ensures that follow-up emails, educational content, and other communications are sent to the right people at the right time without you constantly having to think about it. It minimizes the chance of leads falling through the cracks and helps maximize sales from each lead.
Later in the book, we’ll delve even deeper into how to create your very own automated email nurturing sequence. In chapter 19 we discuss how to “Increase Lead Conversion and Customer Retention with Marketing Automation”. For now, consider this automated email nurturing sequence as an example.
Email Nurturing Campaign Example – A three-email nurturing campaign you can implement to improve lead nurturing after a lead signs up for your lead magnet and provides you with their email address:
Email 1: This email, sometimes considered email zero, provides access to the lead magnet.
Email 2: Usually after 24-hours, email 2 is sent out. It typically continues the conversation started by the lead magnet. It delivers more value related to the topic and helps to establish your business as a reliable source of information.
Email 3: This email presents a case study and\or success story related to your product or service using testimonials. It shows leads the real-world impact of what you offer, solidifying the value proposition and building trust.
Email 4: This email offers a no-obligation consultation or product demo. This provides leads with a low-risk opportunity to explore how your offerings can benefit them.
Underlying these emails, can be a minimum or limited-time offer you propose for increased urgency. However, don’t be pushy. To maximize the effectiveness of your nurturing process, consider the readiness of the lead to buy. Lead scoring can help you prioritize leads and decide when to dedicate more resources to specific leads in your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.
Lead scoring is a method used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead has as well as their perceived readiness to buy from you. This ranking is based on a scale that you create yourself. You essentially assign points to leads based on certain criteria, such as their engagement with your content, interactions with your website, demographics, and behaviour patterns.
For example, if a lead frequently visits your site, downloads content, or opens emails, they might receive a higher score, indicating that they are more likely to be ready for sales outreach.
You can then use this ranking to determine if you should allocate additional resources to pursue the related opportunities. This would typically include, reaching out to the prospect by phone, extending exclusive offers, inviting them to customer-only events, etc.
Lead scoring helps businesses prioritize high-quality leads, improve efficiency, and focus their efforts on prospects most likely to convert.
Remember, the nurturing step involves building relationships, trust, and delivering consistent value to guide your leads toward becoming loyal customers. By leveraging marketing automation, you can streamline this process and ensure no lead falls through the cracks.
Because today’s customers are bombarded with countless marketing messages every day, personalization becomes that much more crucial for capturing attention and driving conversions. Marketing automation empowers businesses to deliver highly targeted personalized messages tailored to each individual’s preferences and needs, automatically.
By leveraging data collected from various touchpoints across the customer journey, marketers can create personalized campaigns that resonate with their target audience.
Whether you are a small startup or an established enterprise, incorporating marketing automation into your strategy is crucial for sustainable growth and long-term success.
Marketing automation streamlines, automates, and measures marketing tasks and workflows, leading to increased operational efficiency and faster revenue growth. Here are some of the key benefits:
1. Efficiency: Automation frees marketers from the day-to-day grind of executing campaigns, allowing them to focus on strategy and content creation.
2. Personalization at Scale: With automation, businesses can provide tailored experiences to large audience segments based on their behaviours and preferences.
3. Lead Management: From generation to scoring to nurturing, automation simplifies the lead management process, ensuring no lead falls through the cracks.
4. Analytics and Reporting: Automation tools provide detailed reports on campaign performance, customer engagement, and ROI, helping businesses refine their strategies and make data-driven decisions.
The key take away is that regardless of a company’s size, marketing automation can enable significant advancements in customer engagement, process efficiency, and revenue growth.
In the words of Bill Gates, “Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency…”. As such, the journey to mastering marketing automation is truly a journey towards magnified efficiency and magnified success.
As we move forward into a new era of digital and inbound marketing, the role of marketing automation will only become more central to achieving business success. We will delve deeper into how to create an effective marketing automation strategy in the chapters that follow.
