When B2B organizations put their resources into marketing automation technology, “lead nurturing” is usually one of the key things that spurs those businesses to take the plunge. However, a new marketing automation platform may take more than a few months to deploy effective lead nurturing and to provide the impact that marketers and their management want for their business.
Many organizations have no standards in position for managing leads properly, so separating real buyers from those merely poking around is worrisome and time-intensive. The sales department usually gets weak leads which kills more time and eventually detracts from generating more revenue. According to a Research (specific company?), just 25% of leads in a given sales pipeline are real prospects.
Best Practices to Evaluate Lead Nurturing
1. Know Your Buyer:
Having a good understanding about your buyer is among the most effective tips for effective lead nurturing. If you don’t know who you are speaking to and how they are important for your business, it would be hard to drive the behaviors of your choice.
2. Work Closely With the Sales Team:
Lead nurturing will probably not work without an agreed upon understanding of objectives, schedules, and processes among those involved in marketing. Examine the meaning of a “sales ready” lead. The best practice is to communicate effectively with sales so that there is an agreed upon understanding (SLAs) about what characterizes a sales ready lead, lead routing, time allocation for follow up, and effects when the procedure is broken.
3. Be Consistent:
While creating your landing pages, make sure that they deliver in a reliable way on the promise of the nurturing emails you are sending to prospects. Getting a prospect to navigate is very crucial and you need the landing pages to be consistent all around (message, sales, tone) with how they arrived at that point
4. Don’t Underestimate Subject Lines
A great subject line can make a great difference! The more people you have opening your emails, the more opportunities you have to impress your prospects. Consider how A/B testing can help focus the best subject lines. Think about streamlining titles to expand email deliverability. All of them are very critical factors in lead nurturing.
5. Create Compelling Content:
Be sure to keep all prospect communications brief, relevant and unique. Include industry news, educational resources, and helpful tips to show your thought leadership. If your content isn’t compelling, targeted, and delivered at the right time, you’re likely to be overlooked when buying decisions are made.
6. Freshen Up Old Content:
You have much more content than you may think. The most effective approach to begin lead nurturing is to consider how you can improve old content (articles, emails, websites, and sales presentations) and transform it into instructive resources for using in demand generation campaigns.
7. Rinse and Repeat:
In order to get maximum benefit out of your lead nurturing, you have to distinguish what’s working and what’s not. You can do this by observing traffic, number of touches, lead conversion, sales conversion, unsubscribes, active visitor clicking percentage, and so on. By taking these into consideration, you can figure out where to roll out improvements and what to repeat.
8. Use Content Mapping Techniques:
Not all content has equal importance. Similarly, not all leads have the same needs. In this manner, you have to map your content to the prospect’s buying cycle. As potential clients interact with your campaigns, the content needs to drive them towards an action.
9. Score Your Leads:
Lead scoring is fundamental to sending better-qualified leads to sales. Start to build up a typical scoring system by working with sales teams. Choose which interactions and demographic data must be scored, and how much each is worth. Be adaptable, as your scoring criteria may change after some time.
10. Re-nurture Them:
Not every lead is prepared to buy after the introductory telephone call. If you want to avoid lead leakage, make sure to nurture once again leads that don’t change over immediately. Make an agreement with sales and make it simple to retry leads again and develop a support program. However, in re-nurturing program, make sure that you are doing everything in accordance with professional ethics of email marketing. Don’t let people go away just because of your poor messaging and communication.
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