Lead Nurturing - Top 10 Tips
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, May 10, 2011
It's common knowledge that lead nurturing is an important part of the lead qualification process that ultimately helps close deals faster. It can be difficult to keep on top of all your leads and understand at what stage of the buying cycle each individual lead is at.
The first step is undertaking a lead nurturing process and realising that it can deliver a measurable ROI.
Here are the top 10 things to think about with lead nurturing.
1. No “One-Off” Messaging: often marketers send individual emails for the latest sales messaging they are focusing on that week or that month, with no link to the prospect’s recent behavior or areas of interest.
2. Simple: Be realistic and start by sending a targeted email to a small controlled audience of say 1,000 contacts, followed by related offers.
3. Decide on Definitions: Establish some common criteria to determine the difference between an inquiry, a lead and a qualified lead.
4. Remember, Content, Content, Content: It’s not enough to have one white paper on the benefits of a solution. Buyers will look forproduct comparison breakdowns, ROI stats and case studies as they progress through the buying cycle, so include those content pieces into your nurturing campaigns.
5. Remember Timings: The main benefits of nurturing are educating your prospects and in turn accelerating their buying cycle. To dothat effectively you have to develop the right frequency.
6. Progression: Ensure you have access to landing pages and their contact information. Consider adopting practices that allow you to collect a little more information about the prospect each time they engage.
7. Keep Score to Rank Leads: Use basic criteria, prioritise the value of new leads to help you determine which contacts needmore hand-holding or education before they considered sales-ready.
8. Create Rules of Engagement: There needs to be a seamless process for getting the priority leads passed over to sales. Develop a process to pass back those “delayed” leads into the nurturing process.
9. “Dead Pool” keep it alive: Re-engage these contacts with new content. A pile of dead leads can be missed opportunities for new deals!
10. Track Your Progress: By tracking the conversion rate at each phase of the funnel you will further support the role of marketing in contributing to increased lead conversion to sales. Understand what works!
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