When it comes to converting online leads for your business into actual paying customers a good lead nurturing strategy is crucial. Lead nurturing is the process of warming up your leads and identifying when they are ready to buy. In today’s world, your prospects will walk away if you try to sell them too soon. Using lead nurturing best practices is a game changer.
The saying “Always Be Closing” was made famous by the play Glengarry Glen Ross. If you’ve never seen the play or the movie, it’s about old-school salesmen who are focused on one thing, closing sales at all costs. It’s a strategy best left in the past because it doesn’t work today, especially online.
Today, you still want to close a lot of sales and a great lead nurturing campaign will help you do that the modern way.
What makes a great lead nurturing strategy?
First, the fact that you have a strategy is a huge plus. Strategic marketing always trumps random marketing. When it comes to lead nurturing strategy, we prefer to use the buyer’s journey. This strategy allows us to understand when the prospect is ready to buy. The prospect will actually tell us when we should begin that sales discussion. When the prospect tells us they’re ready to buy, closing the sale is much easier.
The three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision are the perfect roadmap for an effective lead nurturing strategy. By using content that is relevant to your prospect in each stage of the buyer’s journey, you allow the prospect to tell you where they are in their buyer’s journey.
You can use a series of lead nurturing emails that will offer your prospect the opportunity to interact with your content. When they do interact, you can assume that your prospect is at that stage of their buyer’s journey and you can begin offering them content that matches with the next stage.
The final stage of the buyer’s journey is a great place to offer your prospect some kind of content on price. It doesn’t have to be a price quote, but you can describe why your services may be more or less expensive and what the factors are that drive the total price.
Price is a key part of a great lead nurturing strategy because it indicates that the prospect wants or needs your services. Price is always the last thing that someone considers before committing to any purchase.
Here’s an example of how price is the last factor of any purchase decision. Let’s say you’re hungry and you decide you want a slice of pizza. You head to your local pizza shop and walk in and notice that they have raised their price to $10 per slice. Your problem is that you’re hungry (awareness stage), you chose your favorite pizza shop (consideration stage), but you don’t make the purchase because the price is more than you are willing to pay (decision stage).
When a prospect shows interest in pricing information, they have made a decision to use your services and they are trying to see if they can afford it.
This lead nurturing strategy is a great way for companies to generate a steady flow of qualified leads. When your leads are telling you that they are ready to buy, you will close more sales, guaranteed.
Effective tools for lead nurturing campaigns
As more and more businesses are starting to understand that lead nurturing campaigns are a great way to create a steady flow of qualified leads there are more and more tools out there that make it easy to set up lead nurturing emails in automated workflows.
The older tools like Constant Contact and MailChimp are fine email platforms but they lack the branching logic that more modern tools utilize. The reason this matters is that without branching logic, your prospect is going to get all of the emails in a series even if they have interacted and moved to the next buyer’s journey stage.
So if you have 5 emails in your awareness stage series and someone interacts with the first awareness stage email, you want them to start getting the consideration stage emails, not 4 more awareness stage emails. Constant Contact and MailChimp do not have this feature.
There are two tools that do have branching logic in their lead nurturing functionality. They are Hubspot and Marketo. These platforms also have a multitude of other features and as a result are very expensive and often out of reach for small or medium-sized businesses.
Our favorite tool for lead nurturing campaigns is ActiveCampaign. It is easy to use, affordable and full-featured. If you want to check it out you can click here to see more.
A good lead nurturing strategy is definitely crucial for any successful online lead generation strategy for businesses today. If you have questions about how to get started with a strategy that’s custom built for your business, call us today at (973) 770-4668. We can help.
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