Lead nurturing is the process of building a meaningful relationship with prospects that are not ready to buy and moving them through your sales funnel by engaging, communicating, and “keeping in touch” with them regardless of time.  While nurturing leads, you always want to maintain that permission to continue to educate them until they are ready to buy.  Lead nurturing is a complex topic and there are many practices that help with your lead nurturing campaigns, making them successful and driving prospects through the sales cycle, to the point of sale.  50% of leads are qualified and not ready to buy after the first conversation, while only 25% are ready to go to directly to sales (according to Gleanster Research).  50% is a large portion of prospects, and with a successful lead nurturing campaign you will optimize potential and drive revenue.  Here are some lead nurturing practices that can be implemented into your lead nurturing campaigns.

  1. Teach – Remember that you are the expert in your industry, so you should be able to easily educate prospects on a product or service.  However, you must first make sure you have something of value to teach, as well as creating new content and information in each email, continually educating prospects with new material.  This will keep them happy and result will continual engagement.
  2. Focus – Each email you send to a lead should be concentrated on one topic area, this topic area should specifically be directed to the type of response the lead provided.  You want your leads to continue to open your emails, and not delete them.  In your lead nurturing campaigns, keep your emails focused and relevant.
  3. Short and Sweet – Do not overload your emails with large fonts, graphics, or colors.  That will cause a red flag for the ones reading it, if it makes it past the spam block.  Prospects do not want to see how creative you can get with all that unnecessary “junk.”  This isn’t art class.
  4. 4-1-1 Rule – If you are looking for a way to create a flow for your progression of emails to prospects then you can try the 4-1-1 rule.  This rule suggests to send out 4 educational and entertaining emails in a progression, and then mix in one “soft-promotion”, which can include asking them to attend an event or offer a free trial.  After the “soft promotion” use a “hard promotion” such as asking them to subscribe to a newsletter or apply for an account.  The 4-1-1 rule is a suggestion if you are lost on how to progress your emails.

Author: Michael Whartnaby, Prospectr Marketing