What is lead nurturing?

Most visitors of your website will not buy immediately. It’s a fact. They will first browse, gather information, compare products, services, companies etc. Providing the correct information is important.
But closely monitoring your customer’s behavior, you are able to derive what the customer is looking for.

You can find out about the customers interests and preferences. This knowledge can make a big difference when it comes to getting the right message to your audience.

This stage in the sales process is called a lead. We have information that a potential customer has shown interest in a certain product/service or certain kind of product/service.

How does this process begin?

Lead management

What is lead management exactly? Lead management is the process of capturing leads, tracking their activities and behavior, qualifying them, giving them constant attention to make them sales-ready, and then passing them on to the sales team.

This sounds simple enough. But, in truth, lead management is complex, especially when the numbers are high. Let’s take a very simple example of a new business to understand the complexity:

Now, let’s understand the different stages in a lead management process in a bit more detail:

1. Lead capture automation

Lead capture automation means the leads should get captured automatically in your system. In today’s world, there are infinite sources of lead generation. Below is an example. 

Another aspect of lead capture automation is the capability to automatically assess sources generating most number of leads and revenue for you. You can easily identify both – the high profit, and the money draining lead generation sources. This data is very important for marketing and business intelligence teams as they can re-imagine their budget with this information.

2. Lead tracking

When a lead is captured, the lead management would start tracking the activities and behavior of that lead – the pages they are visiting on your website, the forms they are filling, the time they are spending on your blog, the links they are clicking in your email blast etc. Basically, it gives you valuable insights about your leads which you would otherwise not have. Modern day lead management software also tracks conversations over the phone. In today’s world, analytics are provided in everything we do and range from website analytics, email analytics, PPC analytics, press release analytics etc.

3. Lead distribution

After capturing the leads, you need to pass them on to the relevant sales people. Again, it will take a long long time if you do it manually. A lead distribution system auto-assign the leads based on any logic that you define. For instance:

Pass the lead to USA Team if the location is USA

or

Pass on the lead to Jack if they are interested in Product A

 

In most businesses, if a company is able to contact the lead before their competitors, they’d get a definite advantage. (Because if a lead fills up your inquiry form, in all probabilities, they have done the same for 5 more services similar to yours). With lead distribution, you can significantly reduce the response time and make sure that the lead is chased by the most relevant sales person, so that the lead can enjoy a consistent experience, as soon as they make a query (enter your lead management system). I can’t emphasize this enough. If the marketing efforts are bringing in the leads and your sales team is dropping the ball, well…then your competitors should send you a thank you card each Christmas.

4. Lead qualification

At this stage, the leads are checked to identify if they are worth pursuing or not. These qualified leads are also called sales-ready leads. Internally, your company should define this process with a lead score. Quality score can be customized by the business on the basis of their ideal buyer persona.

5. Lead nurturing

There is nothing called a dead lead. Some leads may not buy at the moment, but that can very easily change in the future. Some of them might never buy, but if you give them a good experience in whatever they wanted from you – maybe a white paper, a blog-post, or some educational information – you have a brand advocate for life.

The moment you know why a lead is not interested, you get an idea of how you can get him interested. This category probably makes the largest portion of leads in your database. The ones who are not immediately interested. The Maybe’s.

These somewhat interested leads go into lead nurturing cycle and would come out from there and passed along to sales whenever they become ready to be sold to. This is why we create “drip campaigns” as we nurture the leads. Often called drip campaigns but known by many other names—drip marketing, automated email campaign, lifecycle emails, autoresponders and marketing automation.

Lead nurturing consists of consistently engaging the leads across multiple channels, by sharing content they’ll find interesting. Now, this multi-channel engagement might be through email campaigns, triggered emails (or drip emails), or even through social media by means of re-marketing.

None of this isn’t an overnight process. It takes time, consistency, strategy, investment and a digital marketing agency to pull this off. It’s a consistent and time dedicated process. Believe this, if you aren’t doing this, your competitors are.

Something EXTREMELY important to point out, before prospects are contacting you, they do what everyone else does — they visit your website to check you out.

Then, crickets. They don’t call, they don’t email you, they don’t fill out a form. Nothing. Apparently your warm lead just turned cold. What happened?

Your website scared them away.

Instead of giving them confidence that you know what you’re doing and you can actually help them, your site did just the opposite. It created doubt, uncertainty and a general feeling of uneasiness about you and your company.

So they quietly click the back button on their browser and decide to look elsewhere. Probably to one of your competitors that offers inferior services to yours … but has a better website than you.

Getting new clients is hard enough. Don’t make it even harder with an amateurish website that repels otherwise qualified prospects.

Now that you know what lead management is, and why you need it, you should be thinking of how and why a digital marketing agency can help you. Click below to view our flyer and schedule a discovery call.