Developing Your Lead Nurturing Strategy

For a long time, marketing would bring in new leads, pass them off to sales and that was that. If sales reached out and a prospect wasn’t ready to move to the next stage, that lead would often get abandoned and eventually forgotten. The problem with this is that even if someone isn’t ready to buy today, that doesn’t mean that they may not be interested six months down the road. By disregarding these less sales ready leads, you are throwing away valuable marketing dollars.

Instead, you should lay out a lead nurturing track (or a few!) to keep in touch with your prospects by sending interesting information their way every so often. Using a marketing automation system, you can easily customize and automate your nurturing drips, triggering them based on both time passed and a prospect’s activities.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when planning your lead nurturing campaigns:

• Set Expectations – Like in any series of emails, best practices say that you should welcome your recipients with a note informing them of what to expect from future messages. Usually, a friendly note as a follow-up to your conversation and acknowledging that you’ll be sending them some relevant information over the next few months does the trick.

• Segment Your Lists – If you interact with different types of prospects, think about their specific needs and interests and make your messaging relevant. This means you’ll probably have more than one nurturing track in your bag of tricks. You could chose to segment by any number of distinguishing factors like the product they are interested in, their job function or their industry. Then make sure to follow up with targeted content that will be beneficial to each type of lead. Creating segmented nurturing lists should be simple using rules in your marketing automation system.

• Its All About Timing – Don’t bombard your prospects with too much content – even the best content can feel like spam when your inbox is flooded with it. Think about how annoying it can be if you’re watching a movie on TV and the same commercial comes on every 15 minutes. Not good, right? Instead, plan to send content every couple of weeks to keep your brand top-of-mind without overwhelming your recipients.