How to nurture leads is probably the question you ask yourself after you’ve managed to get some new leads in your portfolio.
It is always better to maintain relationships with your leads than simply wait for them to come back. However, people tend to forget about this fact and don’t know how to best keep the relationship alive. The 3 following methods are designed thinking of these facts, so read carefully!
1) Send personalized messages every now and then, but only when it makes sense!
In an age flooded by emails, if you want to learn how to nurture leads you have two choices: either you invest some time in studying the market and writing a different email for each lead or you use pre-written templates. They can be sent on autopilot. We would not recommend doing the second choice. While it might seem more efficient at first glance, it will most likely harm your relationship with the lead.
It is better to write individual emails, but since you probably don’t have all the time in the world to do that, what you can do is make use of some tools that can help you automate the task.
One good example is MailChimp, a free service that allows you to create different email lists depending on which criteria you choose (e.g.: age group, gender, etc).
They also have pre-made advanced segments where you can make really precise groups based on different behaviors (open rate, link clicks …) and show people either the same template or completely different ones based on what they are doing at any given time!
Another option is using services like Ontraport, which allows you to send different emails to people depending on how responsive they were in the past. There is a 7-day free trial available if you want to give it a try.
Like Ontraport there are other different services such as Active Campaign or DotDigital.
Depending on your needs, you can check either of them and see which one fits best for you.
Of course, these tools can only take you this far and won’t write your message for you! You will still need to put some effort into finding out what exactly makes your leads tick in order to learn what interests them and why. This way, when creating an email sequence, you’ll know precisely who should receive which message at which moment based on their profile’s data.
2) Offer many entry points.
Make it easy for your lead to come back by offering multiple ways of doing so (e.g.: website, blog posts, social network accounts, contact form).
Make sure they are easy to find though! On the same note, make your website easily navigable and promote it everywhere (e.g.: social network profiles, offline and online advertisement, etc.). Don’t forget that every lead you get is a new door through which others could potentially enter as well!
This means that once the lead has come back from the first visit, they might be willing to follow up with you again in order to get more information or engage with your brand.
3) Set up a CRM software .
There are many CRM softwares on the market, but most of them have a monthly fee. If you want something free but comprehensive enough to work for at least a few months, we would recommend checking out the Hubspot CRM .
The good thing about this software is that it allows you to create various types of contacts (e.g.: leads, potential customers, partners…) depending on what they are to your business. It also has a very comprehensive social network tracker which can be used during lead generation campaigns in order to find new people who share the same interests as your leads.
Some CRMs allow you to set automated tasks depending on certain actions people perform or time periods. You can even use it for sales purposes by creating an email template with different elements personalized automatically based on contact’s data and making sure it gets sent at the appropriate time!
It might seem like a lot of steps but trust me when I tell you that this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you are looking for ways to maximize your lead generation efforts, we would encourage you to continue reading articles about marketing automation, which is what’s trending at the moment.
We hope we’ve provided you with some helpful tips and tricks to help maintain your lead relationships. This is an important topic that should always be on the minds of any marketer or salesperson, so don’t forget these ideas! Good luck!
