5 Ways Marketers Can Improve Lead Nurturing

It’s extremely rare for someone to jump up and buy your product the first time they’ve even heard of your brand. It takes careful nurturing to take your prospects from here to the sale. By incorporating these five practices, you will find that more people become your customers and that your marketing efforts are more likely to pay off.

1. Create drip marketing campaigns.
Marketing automation allows you to easily keep up communication with your prospects long after the first contact. Research indicates that only about 2 percent of people are ready to buy when first making contact with a brand. It can take a half-dozen or more “touches” for a prospect to become comfortable enough to trust you with their business. By setting up a regular email delivery, you can slowly and gently win their business.

2. Develop a deeper understanding of your prospects.
You know why your product is great, but what do you know about your potential customers’ wants and needs? Engage in social listening to see what people within your prospect group want. What are their pain points? What dilemmas are they trying to solve? By focusing on the specific benefits you can provide instead of the neat features your product has, you can make a stronger case as to why you deserve your prospects’ business.

3. Segment your lists.
Your customers are not all alike and will not all respond to the same information, language and offers. Once you have learned more about your customers, their preferences and their needs, you can create messaging that speaks directly to them.

4. Develop content for every phase of the buyer’s journey.
Just repeating the same message is not going to help a customer decide that you are the vendor they want. Someone who is just starting their research is going to want very general, top-level information. Once they have decided that they want to buy but are just deciding whom they want to work with, more in-depth material is needed.

5. Don’t neglect the people who have purchased from you before.
The list of your current customers is the most highly qualified list of prospects you have. Your chances of winning a sale from someone who has already done business with your company are significantly higher than they are with someone who has never bought from you before. Reach out to this group regularly. If your product is one that is regularly depleted, such as paper supplies for the office, use marketing automation tools to automatically send a reminder to rebuy around the time that they’ll run out. By reminding your customers you are there and have the goods that they want, you can keep their interest and win further sales.

Lead nurturing campaigns require more effort, but they also provide stronger results. Over time, you will find that your return on lead acquisition costs plummets as you turn a larger share of your prospects into happy customers.

About Experiture: Experiture is an all-in one customer engagement marketing platform that helps B2C and B2B marketers interact more effectively with target audiences. Users can easily create, deploy, optimize and measure outgoing, automated marketing programs across the entire life cycle.
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