Business is all about relationships. Building relationships in business is vital and need proper attention for it to grow and stay strong. Growing relationships with potential customers are a process called lead nurturing.
At its core, nurturing leads involves the process of cultivating leads that are not yet ready to commit and make a purchase or engage a service.
The goal in lead nurturing is cultivating and engaging prospective customers by providing them with appropriate content at every stage of a customer’s sales journey. The main goal is to earn their business at the end.
What is Lead Nurturing Optimisation?
There’s no way around it. For any business to thrive and grow, it needs a constant stream of leads. However, generating leads is only half the battle. The work is just only beginning once you secured a lead.
For any marketer, the real difficulty lies in finding and nurturing leads that turn into customers – they are a sure-fire way to generate revenue for your business. A way to improve your lead-to-customer conversion rate is through lead optimisation.
Lead optimisation simply refers to techniques you use to move leads from a prospect to a marketing qualified lead (MQL) to a sales qualified lead (SQL) to a customer. This process is called “sales optimisation” for a good reason.
However, do note that having a lead nurture strategy in place is not always enough. The consumer landscape and ever-changing demands are always evolving, so there is a constant need to keep optimising your strategy to keep up.
It is vital that your consumer journey is as optimised as possible to increase conversion rates while increasing consumer loyalty at the same time. Lead optimisation is a technique used to help in moving leads or potential consumers through the sales journey to the decision and purchase phase as quickly and as streamlined as possible.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Listening and understanding the needs of your prospects is what lead nurturing is all about. You can execute this effectively by providing them adequate and relative information that addresses their concerns regarding products and/or services offered by a particular business.
A successful lead nurturing process anticipates the consumer needs depending on where they are in the consumer journey. For marketers to nurture sales leads successfully, they must provide content that depicts their brand as the best choice among others within the same niche to foster prospects who aren’t quite ready to make a purchase.
By elevating your business profile in the eyes of your prospects or potential customers, you can significantly boost your chances in having consumers purchase your product/s or engage your service/s when the time comes for them to commit to a sale.
How to Optimise Your Lead Nurturing?
We need to better understand how to nurture potential consumers entering the consumer journey in the most optimised way to save time while providing the best consumer experience possible.
What’s included in lead nurturing optimisation; here are a few examples:
- Automated Email Follow Up Sequences
- Scheduled Follow Up Sales Scripts
- Automated Sales Campaigns
- Streamlined Offering Descriptions
Any marketer worth his/her salt and is serious about lead conversion, chances are they already have lead nurturing campaigns in place to manage soon-to-be customers through the decision-making process
Your success rate will be improved by creating an automated lead nurturing process. Regardless of if you are seeing success or are still struggling to see results from your lead nurturing campaign, there’s always room to make them even better.
1. Strive to be one step ahead of your competitors.
Though we may understand our customer persona and what moves them to take action, it is not always guaranteed we hit the jackpot with our campaigns. Gaps in engagement could mean missed opportunities and give our competitors a chance to swoop in and make our leads switch to them.
That is why you should remain vigilant of what your competitors are doing. Observe what works for them and what isn’t. Make a note of all of this and find a time to modify your campaigns, incorporate it into your lead nurturing campaigns and do it even better,
2. Segment Your Customers.
Segmenting your customers improves your lead nurturing campaigns. You shouldn’t only run one lead nurturing campaign at a time. Note that different leads start at various places. Each have different motivations, interests, and problems to solve.
Additionally, segmentation enables you to send the right message and tools to your prospects, further, it also allows you to personalise your emails. This exercise leads to better relationship building and results.
3. Ensure that your content fits the customer journey.
With personalised campaigns, your content is just as important as your subject line. When choosing the content you feature in each email, if your prospect is just getting acquainted with your business, highlight your competitive advantages in your first email.
If they are at the bottom of the funnel, send them tools and information that can help you seal the deal. Atop from sending the right type of information, also be aware of sending it in a format that appeals to your leads.
4. Ensure you have a strong CTA for every step of the Customer Journey.
You can’t expect magic in convincing your leads to convert with just one email. Also, many buyers are not willing to talk until they are more than halfway through the decision-making process. Providing them with frequent communication and calls to action can motivate them to schedule a call or even a meeting.
5. Optimise your campaigns for deliverability.
Do note that your campaigns are only effective if they are seen by your prospective customers. That is why it is important to optimise your emails for improved deliverability and engagement. Email is one of the most effective methods for nurturing leads.
Take the time to look at your open and delivery rates. Also perform A/B testing and check if there are subject lines and CTAs that are getting more engagement from your leads. Adjust or perhaps replace those that are performing poorly.
Revising content should be a routine step if you want to continue improving your lead nurturing efforts.
6. Adopt a multichannel lead nurture strategy.
If you are optimising your lead nurture efforts, you can’t focus on just one or two channels. It is vital to diversify your outreach efforts by adopting multiple platforms and channels that will enable you to engage and reach more prospects.
It is highly advantageous to consider every channel that your target audience uses to engage with your business.
Why is Lead Nurturing Important?
The goal of lead nurturing campaigns is to make an impact on your audience, build trust, and establish a symbiotic relationship that will drive sales.
There is no denying the importance of leads, but quality trumps quantity. You can greatly improve the quality of your leads and dramatically improve your conversion rates by using the lead optimisation techniques outlined above.
Optimise your leads to increase your chances of converting them into customers by nurturing your sales pipeline. A little time spent upfront translates into greater conversions, greater sales, and greater revenue for your business.
Do you need help nurturing your leads? Take advantage of The Growth Manager’s Consumer Sales Journey Guide to convert leads on autopilot.
