You’re a lead generating machine. Your company is attracting and converting numbers of leads from your great content on social media, your website, and ultimately from your content offers.
However, some of your leads just aren’t sales ready. In fact, according to Gleanster Research, only 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy.
With this in mind, let’s say you’ve generated 5,000 new leads this month. Then only 2,500 of those leads are qualified but still need a little push to purchase your products or services.
Lead nurturing is a simple practice that ensures that you’re attracting the right people and nurturing them along the sales funnel that is relevant to their needs and desires. To put it simply, you can’t just base your sales off interest alone.
Like Ken Krogue, Founder and President of InsideSales simply says, interest is the counterfeit of need — it will waste more time than anything else because it masquerades as need, but isn’t.
Ultimately, lead generation and lead nurturing go hand in hand — ensuring that you’re nurturing your whole funnel regardless of your audience’s placement in the buyer’s journey. That way, your audience will not only trust your product but also your brand — creating a great experience for them that they will keep coming back for more.
Prevent your company from having 79% of your marketing leads never convert into sales and learn why lead nurturing is important towards growing your sales conversions and impacting your business.
It’s personal.
The success of lead nurturing is largely predicated on the notion of one-to-one engagement. For example, Susie Q is a lead that has downloaded your free eBook on Inbound Marketing 101. However, she’s not ready to start introducing inbound marketing into her business’ marketing strategy just yet. You have a great service that will help take that in-house obligation off her hands by allowing your team to do all her inbound marketing strategy and analytics for her.
So how do you get Susie engaged enough to buy your service?
Easy, you find where she is in the buyer’s journey and guide her through the funnel. Using email campaigns is the most well known practice to nurture leads. Sending the following examples into Susie Q’s inbox over time are just a few ways to provide her with that one-to-one personal engagement and ultimately nurture and make her ready for the sale:
- a how to guide on why inbound is great for her small business
- an eBook on why hiring an inbound marketing agency is a great time saver for B2B companies
- a FAQ blog post or webinar about what to look for when hiring an inbound marketing service.
Therefore, it’s imperative that you make sure you spend time getting to know your leads and where they are in the buyer’s journey. That way, you can spend that personal time guiding them along the funnel and making them ready to buy from your business.
It keeps the right ones coming back.
Making your leads sales ready also means that you’re going to lose some of your leads along the way. For example, lead nurturing emails have a slightly higher unsubscribe rate (1%) than individual email sends (0.5%), indicating their effectiveness in removing unqualified leads from the sales funnel.
By targeting your emails to suit your leads needs, you weed out the ones who were just interested in your free products. Don’t be afraid of the unsubscribes. Instead focus on generating and nurturing the right leads for your business in order to keep the right ones coming back for more.
It’s a time saver.
As stated before, just because you’ve generated a lot of leads, most of them may not be ready to purchase by the time the marketing team hands them off to sales. MarketingSherpa provided this statistic that, 61%of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified.
Why waste your sales team’s time with a HUGE amount of unqualified leads.
Nurture your leads from the very beginning. Therefore, when they give indicators that they are ready for purchase, i.e., a lead is asking questions in your product forums or has visited your products and services recently after your email nurturing campaigns, that’s the time to hand those leads off to sales. And believe me, your sales team will thank you for it.
Don’t be the 65% of B2B marketers that have not established lead nurturing in their marketing and sales strategy. Don’t abandon your leads. Nurture them into the direction you want them to go — building trust in your business, purchasing your product, and delighting them into coming back again.
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