5 Best Practices For Small Business Lead Nurturing
Posted by Robert Hennessey on Fri, Jan 13, 2012
Only have a few employees and sell B2B, then lead nurturing could be vital to your success. Maximizing the returns on your lead nurturing marketing boosts profits and helps you grow. Small business lead nurturing is one way to generate B2B sales leads that do not cost a lot or require a marketing department to deploy. Simply follow these best practices for lead nurturing and see your profits grow.
1. Add Value
Gleanster Research found that 25-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first
The goal of successful lead nurturing is to help potential sales prospects gain increased interest in your product/service as they consider making a purchase. How do you keep them interested and peak their interest in your product/services?
Provide high quality and valuable information to prevent a prospect from forgetting about your company. Producing content with specific information about solving business problems of interest to your prospects demonstrates your company's ability to be a valuable solution provider.
If you do not have the inclination to create your own content, you can outsource this part of your small business lead nurturing campaign. A professional writer can create new content vignettes that you share with your sales leads. This will give you a leg up over your competition.
2. Nurture Your Leads
Gleanster Research estimates that 50% of leads who are qualified to buy are not ready to purchase immediately
Lead nurturing is most effective on clients that are not ready to buy but are still viable sales prospects. To avoid wasting time and money, develop an automated process and protocols that do not take a lot of effort to implement.
MarketingSherpa found that segmented emails get 50% more clicks
Nurture all your website sales leads by keeping them interested through quality information specifically of interest to them by segmenting your leads by topic of original interest that caused them to become a lead in the first place.
Lead nurturing emails give you insight into the challenges your prospects are facing. What features or product/services they are seeking in their solutions. By presenting different questions or types of content and identifying who responds to what, you can further segment your leads and increase rapport building and tailor more effective communications that will meet your lead nurturing goals.
3. Tight Focus
Market2Lead found that nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle
Executing a lead nurturing campaign is far from a science. However, following certain practices will ensure the efficiency of your lead nurturing emails. For example,
- refrain from inundating prospects with sales pitches
- begin by sending useful, low-commitment information with segmented content-based calls-to-action
- slowly, introduce a middle of the sales funnel call-to-action that answers the question, “Why should I buy from you?”
- middle of the sales funnel content could be fact sheets, free consultations, or an invitation to a webinar
- always, end with a call to action or prospects may forget that you are trying to secure their business
No matter what kind of informational messages you decide to use, lead nurturing emails need tight focus. Do not extrapolate on the value of your services or experience in the industry for a majority of the material. Keep this information to a sentence or two at the end of your email. Focus on the information that your clients find helpful for at least 90% of your lead nurturing messages.
4. Use Free Services
Lead nurturing emails get 4-10 times the response rate of standalone email blasts -SilverPop/DemandGen Report
The less you spend on distributing or sharing your nurturing efforts, the more you can spend on creating top quality content. Use social networking methods like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to create points of contact with other businesses that need your services. Adding short updates or linking to your longer pieces reduces the amount of effort you need for lead nurturing marketing. Email marketing software is inexpensive and automates most of the process, saving your time and attention for more important things. These methods will help you keep more leads interested at the same time with less work.
5. Share Other People's Content
When an important or interesting report becomes available from a company within your industry, share it with your sales leads. Send a quick email to anyone that the information is applicable to and include a quick note explaining how it might be useful. This demonstrates to your sales prospects that helping them improve their business is more important than just securing a sale. You will also show your ability to anticipate their needs. Finding a balance between providing fresh content and sharing the best of publically available information makes your company valuable to all the leads that you contact.
Takeaway
Is sales lead nurturing appropriate for your B2B small business. Yes!
