Let’s start with a definition:
Lead Nurturing is when you follow up with contacts or leads with the purpose of closing a sale.
Lead nurturing is an extremely important part of the sales process. If you have a database full of leads but you’re not talking to them, chances are you’re not building a relationship and they may forget who you are.
Nurturing leads has a few key components that you need to be aware of. Number one is speed to lead.
What is Speed To Lead?
When the person is in the modality of making a decision towards buying what you were offering, you want to be the first person to reach out to them. Studies show that people choose the first agent that they meet with. In fact,
30-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.
[Via InsideSales]
Pretty powerful, right? Now we know that speed to lead is crucial. There are tons of tools out there including Email Drip Campaigns that automatically engages with somebody via email that follows up repeatedly, collecting information that then goes directly into your LionDesk database.
Number two for lead nurturing is segmenting your audience.
What is Audience Segmentation?
When engaging with your audience, you need to be segmenting (or filtering) your database.
“Segmentation is the process of dividing your list of email subscribers into smaller groups based on specific criteria. Typically, this process is completed through the addition of a tag within your CRM.”
Learn more about email list segmentation here.
Each contact in your database should be segmented into a different group or groups. For example, if you have two leads, a homebuyer and a home seller, the information that you provide is obviously going to be different for each of these leads. You can differentiate these two types of leads based on tags.
Segmenting needs to include the tags that you have applied to the person and can include adding the tags or excluding the tags based on how granular you want to get with the information. This is super easy inside the CRM like LionDesk which allows you filter based on inclusions of tags, exclusions of tags, or a combination of tag inclusions and exclusions. Additionally, it gives you the ability to save the lists you’ve created for easy access later.
The third tip for lead nurturing is consistency and frequency.
Lead Nurture Consistency and Frequency
You’ll want to communicate with your audience differently depending on the buying stage your customer is in.
For example if they are buying a home and your goal is to represent them, it may be a longer journey than if they’re selling a home and your goal is to get the listing. So you’re going to want to be more aggressive upfront for certain audiences and play the long game for others. Both are extremely important, but the most important aspect is being consistent with your follow up.
Tip number four is nurturing across multiple channels.
Nurture Across Multiple Channels
It’s important to reach your customer on the channels that they’re engaging with, but keep in mind that nurturing through only one channel might not be enough.
You’ll want to make sure you are communicating consistently with your target audience via email, text, phone, and social media. This can be very time consuming if you do this manually, so you’ll likely want to use a CRM like LionDesk, which allows you to engage across multiple channels at one time with automatic drip campaigns. That way you can set it and forget it rather than setting calendar reminders to reach out to each contact (See these organizational tips for more examples).
These are campaigns that you have set up in advance that have the right message that’s going to the right person at the right time. Drip campaigns allow you to automatically send an email to a contact simply by attaching them to the campaign and it happens automatically.
Why Lead Nurture is So Important
Lead nurturing is the most important step in sales and marketing. It is the step that most people give up on quickly, or don’t doa good job with. In fact,
80% of all US sales happen on the 5th – 12th contact. Most give up after 2.
[Via Scripted]
Following up 12 times manually can seem like an impossible task, but with a good CRM set up properly you will win every time by playing the nurturing game of knowing who your audience is, speed to lead, segmentation, consistent follow up, and multi channel approach.
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