Several months ago, I placed a single online order with a certain national brand. I don’t have further need for their product, although I was fairly pleased with my purchase. But ever since I placed that order, the brand has been sending me monthly emails that frankly, are getting on my nerves. It was OK at the beginning, but now it’s just become ridiculous and in fact it has reached the point where I marked those emails as spam and am now sending them directly to my spam box.
Having your emails marked as “spam” is probably the worst thing that can happen to you when it comes to lead nurturing. It’s a delicate balance, for sure, because while you don’t want to bombard your leads with annoying, generic emails, you also don’t want them to completely forget about you.
Thankfully, marketing automation can greatly help you with the difficult task of achieving that elusive lead nurturing balance. The secret is to regularly nurture, but to do so at a pace that reflects the individual lead’s actions on your website and their responses to your emails, and to use content that might actually be useful to them.
The secret to successful lead nurturing? Think about your leads not in terms of “closing a sale” but in terms of “being helpful.” What does the lead need? What are their pain points and what type of content might they find interesting, and at what pace?
You could do this manually, of course, assuming your database is small – no more than 100 leads. But if you have a few hundred leads, not to mention a few thousand leads, the only reliable way to send them individualized content at an individualized pace is to use marketing automation.
Using a marketing automation system is very helpful in navigating complex B2B relationships. When you care about where a prospect is in the buying cycle, what their specific needs are and whether they are ready to talk with a sales rep, you can no longer just blast that lead with emails. You want to tailor the frequency and content of your emails to their exact needs.
Doing it manually is ridiculously time consuming, not to mention error prone. Marketing automation helps you grow your relationship with potential customers by automating the nurturing process to assure you maintain effective and timely contact with them based on who they are and their activity, taking every opportunity to positively impact their decision-making process, without annoying them.
Google+Tags: smart lead nurturing
June 12th, 2012 at 7:55 pm
Interesting post. Lead generation is the first stage of sales process and many sales organizations place a lot of emphasis on this. However, without nurturing those leads that are not yet ready for your product, you lose out a lot of potential customers without closing the loop. The main thing is to talk to your potential buyer and make them feel like the only person in the world.
James
June 25th, 2012 at 5:42 pm
Monthly? Try daily. It seems as if many businesses don’t get this. Being helpful does not mean sending me the same email over and over until I respond. It doesn’t work and makes me unsubscribe.