You’ve mapped your customer journey, instilled an omni-channel customer experience and invested time into optimising your CRM. What more can you do to improve the conversion rate of your business?
If you haven’t already, it’s time to introduce yourself to lead nurturing, which is a process that allows you to educate and pre-qualify your early stage leads by sending an automated series of relevant communications through email or SMS messages. Think of it as a virtual guide to leading your customers down the sales path to become paying customers – if you’re able to correctly predict their needs and get the timing right, it’s an easy way to set yourself up for success.
In this blog, we’ve put together just some of the benefits of automated lead nurturing, and why it should form an important part of your marketing strategy.
1. Leads who are effectively nurtured can increase sales.
There is no doubt that email is king when it comes to marketing communications – Statistica figures show that more than half of the nearly 8 billion people on the planet use email.
While mass marketing email blasts still produce results and should form an element of an effective omni-channel marketing strategy, our digital inboxes are becoming increasingly crowded– meaning anything that’s not relevant is likely to be sent straight to the virtual trash can. Nurture emails differ from one-off promotional emails since they are designed to be relevant to the receiver and are form a coherent story and purpose that offers more benefits and details to the end user and ultimately your business.
And the more relevant the email, the better your results. According to Juniper Research, relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails, while DemandGen statistics have shown effectively nurtured leads can increase sales by up to 25%.
2. Outcomes outweigh the costs.
The investment required to generate a nurture strategy should always be key in deciding whether it’s worth pursuing. According to DemandGen, companies that excel at automated lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Effective lead nurture can also lead to shorter sales cycles – which is a proven way to increase revenue within the same amount of time with less human intervension to get the prospect ready to buy.
3. It can help you retain and/or increase customer engagement.
By maintaining consistent, relevant communication with your audience from the outset, automated lead nurturing allows you to connect more closely with your audience, which may help uncover pain points and segmentation opportunities.
A successful lead nurture campaign should create a customer base that’s more invested in and engaged with your product because the process should educate the prospect of the benefits to them, and in turn, making them more likely to talk about to their friends and family, encouraging new organic referrals and generating new referal leads.
It also helps to ensure that leads won’t slip through the cracks along the customer journey – if a lead has stopped visiting your site or reviewing your offerings, lead nurturing will remind them about the benefit to them of your business or products.
4. It enables you to build thought leadership.
Through sending out an interconnected series of communications, lead nurturing can present a great opportunity to show that you are an expert in your field.
“As long as the content is relevant and the timing of the communication is right, you’re also building the consumer’s trust and confidence by showing them you understand what their needs are, and how your products and services can fulfill those needs,” Idea Science’s Lisa Mena says.
“In particular, consumers today are looking for brand authenticity. They want their brands to be authentic, real and factual, that you need to speak to those elements to create that level of trust between your brand and the consumer.”
5. Nurtured leads make larger purchases.
According to The Annuitas Group, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. It’s a statistic that has gained a lot of attention in recent years, but why would that be the case?
Aside from the fact that lead nurturing can help you identify cross and upsell opportunities, if you’ve done a good job at nurturing your customers, they should have all their questions answered before making a purchase. Understanding options, features and add-ons through communication of benefits to them is a great way to make a larger sale.
The key is to guide them with relevant information, so they’ll feel more comfortable and confident in making larger purchases with your company.
Are you ready to start nurturing your customers? Idea Science can help with that.
