Business is all about relationships; that’s why lead nurturing is so important. Lead nurturing is an ongoing process that helps your business create relationships with buyers at each stage of the sales cycle.
Every business owner is painfully aware that building relationships with buyers can be quite difficult to accomplish. Unfortunately, we’ve seen many well-intentioned businesses hurting their chances of a relationship with poor lead nurturing.
To help make sure you’re not one of those businesses, here are several lead nurturing problems to avoid.
The Problem: Let’s say someone contacts your business, either online or by phone, to inquire about your product or service, and you provide them the information that they’re looking for. The worst thing you can do after that interaction is forget to follow up with the person.
Eighty percent of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth interaction. Following up with someone once or not at all means you’re missing out on a lot of business. We understand that following up with prospects can be time consuming, and fortunately, there’s an easy solution.
The Solution: Use as much automation as you can. With tools like HubSpot, it’s easy to set up an automated lead nurturing campaign for your prospects. You can use a combination of emails, offers, phone calls, and more as part of your lead nurturing. Automation allows you to set up schedules and events that trigger certain actions in your lead nurturing campaign. You will be consistently following up with your prospects without having to do anything!
The Problem: Someone visits your website and downloads a free ebook. Right away, they receive an email from you about setting up an appointment. Chances are, if someone is downloading an ebook on your website, they’re not ready to schedule an appointment and talk to a salesperson yet. Rushing to setup an appointment could be a turn off.
The Solution: Pay close attention to your analytics. If you see a drop in activity after a certain action in your lead nurturing campaign, you could be asking too much from your prospects too soon in the sales cycle. Try moving the action to later in the sales cycle and continue to watch your analytics.
The Problem: After contacting your business, your prospect gets entered into a lead nurturing campaign with information that’s not relevant to them. Unfortunately, it’s so easy to generalize the needs of customers as a whole. A lack of personalization can make your prospect uninterested in your product or service very quickly.
The Solution: Segment your prospects by persona as soon as they enter the sales funnel. Each persona will have unique needs and pain points. Build a lead nurturing campaign that is suitable for every persona, and personalize your actions to their specific needs.
The Problem: Once someone becomes a customer, they are removed from all lead nurturing campaigns. There’s no ongoing follow up with them to stay in touch about new offers or to ask for feedback or referrals.
The Solution: Create one or more personas for your past customers. Just like your other personas, add them to a lead nurturing campaign that includes information relevant and personalized for their needs. Your lead nurturing communication with customers will be less frequent than with prospects, but just as valuable, if not more.
Setting up lead nurturing campaigns can be time-consuming, but definitely worth the effort. By using automation, analytics, and personas, your campaigns will require very little management going forward.
If you’re struggling with lead nurturing, get help! We can set up a free, 20-minute marketing audit to see what areas of your lead nurturing could be improved. Simply contact us or click below to get started.