Lead Nurturing Best Practices
Lead nurturing through email campaigns is a really great way to engage customers, to keep them engaged, and hopefully to keep them coming back to purchase your products or services again.
However, this is not as easily done as you might think. There are some lead nurturing practices that you absolutely need to follow if you have any hopes of success here, so let’s get right to it and talk about the 5 best lead nurturing practices you need to know.
Start NOW!
One practice that you should definitely keep in mind when it comes to lead nurturing is that you should always start as soon as possible. Some are afraid of spamming potential customers to the point where they want nothing to do with your business. Yes, this is a fine line; however, you really do not have to wait for people to express a specific intent to buy something from your store in order to nurture that lead.
As long as a person expresses an interest of any kind in your business, it is recommended that you start nurturing said lead. For instance, if someone expresses interest in your blog content, or keeps visiting your site and looking at certain products, the time to start lead nurturing is now. There is really no point in waiting with this, because the longer you wait to nurture a lead, the longer other competitors have to steal that potential customer from you.
Don’t Email Potential Customers Too Much
Do you know the best way to get customers to think that you are spamming them, and to get them to delete your emails without even opening them? By sending them emails too often, that’s how. Some email marketing campaigns, the bad ones, will send emails every day, or maybe even several per day; even 2 or 3 per week is usually considered to be spam.
Simply put, if you email people too much, they are going to get tired of you real fast. It becomes obvious that the only thing you are interested in is selling stuff, and people do not appreciate that. Sending emails to leads should not be done more than 2 or 3 times per month at the most. Any more than that, and people will not appreciate your efforts – quite the opposite in fact.
Personalize Your Emails
Another mistake which some people make when creating an email marketing campaign is not to personalize their emails. People are more inclined to open up an email and listen to what you have to say within that email, if you make it personal and specific to them. If you are too general and just label the email to “sir” or “madam,” people will feel as though it is highly impersonal and will probably just view your email as spam.
People like to feel special, like you are paying attention to them and them alone. People really appreciate this kind of thing. You should never send out mass blast emails to anybody and everybody. You want to make segment lists of target groups; you want to address people individually; and if possible, incorporate some general info about the leads themselves. The more personalized you can make these emails, the better off you are going to be when it comes to people reading them and possibly coming closer to the buying stage.
Create Segments – Not Every Lead Should Get Every Email
One of the most important tips to keep in mind is that you cannot send every single email to every lead. Just like sending emails to people who don’t want them, this will annoy people real fast. For instance, if you are sending an email to leads who are interested in your fishing gear, you don’t want to send that same email to people who have only expressed interest in your hunting gear.
You need to create segments of people based on various factors, even if they haven’t previously expressed interest in your business. You want to create clearly defined segments based on their job title, age, location, gender, interests, and so on. In other words, you need to define a clear and specific target audience for each email in the campaign. The bottom line is that you need to ensure that the content in the emails is relevant to the people you are sending those emails to.
Analyze Data and Make Changes Accordingly
The other lead nurturing practice you want to follow has to do with data tracking and analytics. After all, you need to know how well your emails and the campaign as a whole are working to engage potentials buyers.
There are great programs and services which help analyze how many people open the emails, how long people spend reading them, and of course how many people actually click on the links you include in the emails. The bottom line is that you need to analyze the results from an email and then make changes accordingly.
Conclusion
There you have the 5 best lead-nurturing tactics that you should follow. If you follow these tips, your chances of success will greatly improve.