Things to Remember when Doing Drip Marketing

Download This Document from Docstoc

Drip marketing, nurturing marketing, harvest marketing, or relationship marketing—it does not matter how you call it, drip marketing will always be one of the most important methods of lead nurturing. 

As mentioned in the previous posts, drip marketing comes from drip irrigation. It is a process where plants are nurtured through small amounts of water all throughout its life. This way, it does not get too overwhelmed and eventually die because of too much water. 

You can get countless tips on how to do drip marketing, but whatever it is, make sure that you always remember these:

1. You are building a relationship. The main goal of drip marketing is to nurture your leads. When you do so, you are creating a relationship among them, which will be very essential in the lead management process. 

Not all of your leads will qualify. For example, if you are selling diapers for the babies, your qualified leads are mothers who have newborns and children who are three years old and below. Those who do not meet these criteria will not be offered by the product; however, you also cannot throw them away. They can be very useful once you are going to sell educational toys or apparel. With drip marketing, it is a lot easier for you to make an offer or make your current nurtured leads sales-ready. 

2. You must not sell. A lot of business owners fail in drip marketing because they are selling products to their nurtured leads. First, they do not fit the qualifications you have, so there is a huge chance that they are still not going to make a purchase. Second, if they keep on seeing the word “buy” in their inbox or mailbox, they can get so annoyed and leave your business. 

However, you can pre-sell. It means that you can add value to your products and services by informing of the benefits of your products in their lives. On the example above, you may want to talk about the materials used in the diapers and why they are considered to be the best in the market. You can also educate your leads of the industry that you are in. They can make better purchasing decisions when they are properly educated. 

3. Avoid sending marketing materials daily. Here is another misconception. Drip marketing does not really mean that you are going to bombard your leads with e-mails every day. The rule is that you are going to spend few days without sending any news, enough for your leads to be eager to hear something from you. However, you are not going the gap between one e-mail to another too long that your prospects eventually forget about you. 

A lot of marketing experts suggest that you perform drip marketing every 10 to 21 days, but you can create your own time frame. Just keep in mind the general rule. 

4. Come up with the best marketing material. Whether it is a brochure, e-book, report, or catalog, make sure that you take time to make it readable, intriguing, accurate, and relevant. The information that you must have in them must be extremely useful to your leads. It must also be well-researched and accurate. You do not want any of your prospects correcting you. 

5. Suggest that you are an expert. You do not have to be the most knowledgeable in your niche, but you can position yourself as one of the experts. It is easier for your leads to trust the information you are giving them when you are. How do you accomplish this? Provide statistics and other related studies to your information. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

How to Begin Your Lead Nurturing Program

Download This Document from Docstoc

A lot of people will tell you that in any process, the hardest will always be the beginning. It determines your next course of action, even the end. Simply put, if you make the beginning a complete mess or a huge error, all your efforts and even money after that may be useless. 

That is why it is important that you have to come up with a plan. Of course, it will never materialize until you do something about it. You can use the idea of planning when you are nurturing your leads. 

The Essence of Lead Nurturing

We have talked about this time and again, but let us make it clear once more. Not all of your leads will qualify for your marketing campaign. For example, if you are selling clothes but the products you are promoting are plus-sized dresses, you cannot immediately consider the skinny ones. It is important to note that you would not want to lose them either. They will be useful in your other marketing campaigns or product offers. You could be launching a new swimwear collection this season. Instead of finding a whole new batch, which is definitely time- and-money-consuming, you can just get your prospects from your list of leads. However, while they are waiting to become sales-ready, you nurture them. 

How to Develop a Program

As mentioned, it is all about a plan. A very efficient lead nurturing approach is called drip marketing. This means that you send out product information in a regular basis. However, take note that “regular” does not mean “every day.”

Have you ever been bombarded by similar e-mails almost every day? It makes you think that you are spammed. It is the same feeling your prospects will have when you make your drip marketing strategy to annoying. 

The following is a sample lead nurturing program. Let us pretend that this is going to last for two months, and you are going to send information once a week, every Monday:

Week 1. You send out your introductory letter. You can come up with a template with this one. You really do not have to present your offer right away. You are still warming up. You have to send it right after a prospect signs up. This way, you can let him know that you receive his filled-out form. This can also be managed by customize auto-responders.

Week 2. Ask if he or she is open for a presentation. Now, it is important that you stress the fact that they are not obliged to avail of anything from you. Just let them know that they will get to understand the benefits and features of the products and services if they will talk with you personally. 

Week 3. Provide a newsletter. You need to give this to them even if they do not agree with the presentation. By this time, you could have substantial information that you can share to your prospects. 

Week 4. Impress them with testimonials, e-books, or reports. Make sure that you can give these for free. You already have a month to prepare this one, and it is a good way to end the first-month cycle of your drip marketing. You can let them think that your product or service really works. 

Week 5. Add a link to a press release or article about your product or your industry. Your main focus now is to ensure that your prospects definitely understand the full benefits they get once they avail of your product or service. 

Week 6. Invite them to a seminar or trade show. Or you can simply go back to the presentation. If you have done this marketing approach well, there is a bigger chance that the prospect will be open to meeting you. 

Week 7. Offer your product—but make sure that you can present some good catches. For example, you may want to give it in its introductory price or discount. You can also offer a money-back guarantee or more bonuses. 

Week 8. Ask for feedback. Have an idea of how your prospects think of your product. If they have not availed yet, ask why. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Improve Your Lead Nurturing by Enhancing Your E-mail Marketing Campaigns

Download This Document from Docstoc

If you have been following my blog posts, I basically don’t have to tell you the importance of lead nurturing or what it is. I have been talking about it for months now. What you should know now is how you can improve the different techniques, so you can effectively nurture your prospects. 

Let’s begin with your e-mail marketing. Perhaps I’ve already told you that e-mail marketing is one of the most efficient methods in nurturing your leads, especially if they are online prospects. As previously mentioned, 100 percent of those who surf the Internet has at least one e-mail account. But the problem is that it’s not only you who knows about this one. There are others—in fact, thousands of them. 

They would also bombard your prospects with their own marketing materials: e-mails, newsletters, catalogs, brochures, and a whole lot more. Because there’s just too much, there’s a huge chance that 

• your prospect won’t have any more time to read your e-mail,

• your e-mail ends up in the Junk Mail folder or be treated as SPAM, or

• your prospect will unsubscribe, and that could be one prospect less for you.

So there’s the e-mail marketing challenge: how you can ensure that your leads will be able to not only read but also respond to your e-mail. You should also make sure that he doesn’t “bail out” later on by unsubscribing to your mailing list. To help you out, you can take note of these tips:

1. Stop giving them promotional materials. 

Do you understand the pressure that is often associated with offers? Because it’s presented to you, you feel the magnetic force that is compelling you to do something about it. When you’re not interested or you don’t have the funds just yet, the next best thing that you will do is to ignore it and perhaps the succeeding e-mails. It could just contain the same kind of offer or perhaps a new one—but still an offer. 

Use your e-mail marketing to provide clear, useful, and practical information to your prospects. For example, if you’re selling a skin care product, you may want to inform your leads on how they can take care of their skin a lot better or the various skin problems they may develop over the years. Avoid talking about how great your product is. You have to leave that decision to them, but you can influence them through the data you give to your leads. 

2. Give them statistics. 

Make sure that you can also take time to research. If you cannot do it alone, then let someone do it for you. You can easily increase their trust and confidence when you have data and figures to back your claims up. You can then convert these figures into information that is easy to understand and send them through free reports or e-books. (Mind you, Internet users love anything that is given to them without extra cost.)

3. Provide them the option to share your information. 

Think of viral marketing while you’re doing your lead nurturing with e-mails. You can leave a link where your prospects can send your article or report to their friends or family, or you can enclose the form right through your e-mail. There are two reasons for this. First, if they think that the data is valuable enough, they don’t have to wait for another time to share it, until they can forget about it. Second, you can increase your leads through referrals. By the fact that the information is given to them, it only means that they also have implied interest over what you have. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

Drip Marketing: Taking Cues from Agriculture

Download This Document from Docstoc

There are many ways of marketing products to your potential customers. There is what they call viral marketing, considered as the most effective way of advertising since the time it was introduced among marketing circles. Another way of marketing is direct mail marketing, the oldest marketing technique in existence. There is also what they call drip marketing.

As absurd as it may sound, drip marketing developed from a very different concept. The concept originated from the agricultural practice of using only small amounts of water, “drips,” to nourish plants and make them grow effectively. This makes sense; if you irrigate paddies too much, your crops will drown and die. This way, you have directly wasted valuable investment and may incur losses in your business. 

It has long since been the practice of some marketers to refer to “leads” as “plants.” Let us look at it this way: if you plant a flower, you expect it to grow. That’s true with marketing as well; once you generate a lead, you want it to “grow” or become interested enough in the product that they will bite at the chance when you offer them a deal. However, this does not go by chance. You have to nurture them, in both cases. For a flower to grow the way you want it to be, you have to tend to it everyday. You have to water the plants regularly, and trim the stems when needed. You’d also need to get rid of the weeds, so they will grow healthy and beautiful. 

Drip marketing is a very effective tool to use for marketing. 

For one, it does not bombard your leads with shocking and irritating marketing materials. The death of marketing is generally realized when a marketer sends too much advertising materials and initiates too much marketing action to the prospect. The interest of a lead is usually distinguished if they receive marketing materials one too many; they start getting irritated and will slam the doors on you without even listening to what you have to say. 

However, drip marketing does not do that. Carrying on the analogy of the drips of water used to irrigate plants, drip marketing involves the regular and intervallic sending of offers or information to the client. Just like the concept behind the agricultural practice, marketers just feed on the interest of the prospective client and nurture it until it becomes fully ripe for the taking. 

The interval between each transmission of marketing materials to the client depends entirely on the marketer. However, the concept is simple: you should send prospects an advertising material at a set interval that does not irritate the client. However, it should not take too long between each transmission and receipt that the lead forgets who you are and what you want from him. You can construe drip marketing as a way for you, as a marketer, to constantly remind the client that you’re there waiting with an offer for him and that he should take actions to respond to the offer. 

Another advantage of drip marketing is that, instead of giving details about the offer, the marketer takes the chance to become more intimate with the client. Drip marketing materials are personal in nature; the marketer directly talks to the lead. It is also quite aggressive; there is always a call to action in every marketing material issued within the drip marketing campaign. Every advertising material that is sent to the lead is considered as a prodding, to remind that person that he has a need and that you have the means to answer it. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

What Most People Don’t Know About Lead Nurturing

Download This Document from Docstoc

Lead nurturing, next to lead generating, is the most important part of the lead handling process. Lead nurturing is where you slowly bait in the prospective client before you close in for the kill, where you make the offer to them in the hopes that they will buy. However, there are still some things that most people do wrong and some things that most marketers do not understand about lead nurturing. 

First, most marketing companies give undue importance to generate as many new leads as possible. They extend so much effort, trying to rein in new people who may be interested in buying the products that they are offering. As a result, so much time is wasted in generating new leads of which only 25 percent or lesser are even interested to give the product a try. That is what makes people apprehensive of using Internet marketing despite its many benefits. Most of the leads generated are uncertain, and some people even consider it a waste of time. 

While they burn their eyebrows off coming up with efforts just to get new leads who are otherwise not interested to buy, there sits in its database a whole wealth of people among which are individuals who may be sales ready. What’s ironic about this is that agents concentrate so much on getting new leads that they’re forgetting that they have a powerhouse of prospects constantly being built up. These people are just waiting to be tapped, but these are mostly ignored. These people just need a bit more nurturing, since they have already expressed previous interest in the products.

That is what true lead nurturing is about. Nurturing is defined as the act of growing something to its full potential. In lead handling, this means you are taking advantage of the interest your potential customer has for your products. You take efforts to entice them more, to grow their interest, until they are “ripe for the taking” or are already interested enough to say “yes” to your offer. Generating new leads without taking into account the existing database of contacts is, in fact, a contradiction of the true definition of lead nurturing. 

Some people also have the mistaken concept that if they have new contacts, they should do all their best to close a sale with these people. This also results to thinking that if the contacts do not buy, they will ultimately not be interested. The automation of lead handling that is so popular nowadays also causes people to rely on templates to reach out to new and even existing prospects to close a deal. This, again, is a misconception of lead nurturing. 

True lead nurturing is about conversation. Although pre-set messages and e-mails can be quite attractive and interesting, the truth is that people have different mind-sets and give different openings for the marketer to take advantage. Pre-set messages cannot address that, as they all have one structure for all people who receive them. 

The key about lead nurturing is to understand the need of each client. Although marketing real estate or any other product is based on need, there are many different ways for the person to realize this need. This requires face-to-face conversations. Through talking one-on-one, you can understand a bit of the mind-set of your potential client and exploit it accordingly to close a deal. 

Automated lead generating and nurturing is not a bad idea. However, machines are less reliable than humans. Sometimes one needs to take an active hand because marketing is a two-way process; only a human can understand the need of a prospective client after all. 

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

The Benefits of E-mail Marketing in Lead Nurturing

Download This Document from Docstoc

One of the most widely used marketing techniques these days is e-mail marketing. A lot of businesses have been successful in getting themselves known because of e-mail marketing. One good example is Hotmail, which became successful in a successful marketing campaign that started with signatures in their e-mail. Other companies have then followed suit, leading to the recognition of e-mail marketing as a powerful tool in getting messages across.

Reasons Why E-mail Marketing Is So Popular

The popularity of e-mail marketing owes itself to the many advantages that it can offer. These advantages include the following:

Global Reach. With a valid e-mail address and recipient, your message can reach out to all the people in the world.

Around the Clock. Even when you’re not in the office but you have managed to send your e-mails to your mailing list, they can reach the recipients anytime. It also makes it possible for you to check e-mails anywhere with a wireless connection.

Measurability. It is easy to measure interest and reception to your marketing campaign through the responses that your leads give to your e-mails. You can then filter out your mailing list further to include those who are better qualified to receive your offerings.

Intimate Connection. E-mails make it possible for you to gauge a person’s response and come up with a more personal message the next time you send an e-mail to a lead. It is easy to build trust and confidence between you and the prospective client if the messages are personal and not robotic.

Simplicity. Most of all, e-mail marketing is very easy and simple to do. All you need is a mailing list, Internet connection, and e-mail addresses. You can even conduct an e-mail marketing campaign on just about everywhere with a computer and an Internet connection.

How to Successfully Convert Leads via E-mail

With all of its advantages, however, e-mail marketing is a sitting duck if you don’t do it right. As a marketer, you need to pull some strings and use a select number of words in order to tickle that recipient’s fancy and convince him to buy your product. Here are some ways on how e-mail marketing can be used to successfully convert leads:

Develop a good content. In the age of Internet marketing, content is undeniably the king. If your content is not relevant or not well-structured, then your e-mail marketing campaign will fail utterly. One way to develop good content is to use bullets and even pictures. Studies have shown that people understand web content better through the use of these tools.

Constantly remind your prospective leads about your product. As long as he hasn’t opted out of your offerings, it is always a good idea to keep sending e-mails to your prospective clients. He may not be interested the first time he receives your e-mail, but he may be interested in the next. A lot of marketing campaigns have failed in the past because the marketers failed to follow up on their qualified and interested leads.

Avoid bombarding your leads with e-mails. Although it may sound like it, this is not a contradiction to the previous statement. This simply means that you shouldn’t send large volumes of e-mail messages to your leads every day. This will only incur their wrath and cause them to lose interest in your products. You will be sure to receive spam reports and have your e-mails diverted to your clients’ spam inboxes if you do that.

Leave an interval between each e-mail and the next. It depends on every circumstance; some marketers choose to send one mail every other day or one email every week. It’s up to you to choose.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com

You Are after a Closed Sale, not a Sales Cycle

Download This Document from Docstoc

A lot of business owners believe that the lead generation process should be a continuous one. This means that you are working with the same set of leads every time you have a new product or service to offer. This is probably one of the worst notions you will ever have when it comes to lead process. This is because you will just end up dealing with the same leads who are not really interested with your proposal as of the moment. On the other hand, leads would probably be annoyed too for being offered with almost the same thing over and over.

What is very important is that you should learn how to qualify them. Those leads who don’t meet the criteria that you’ve set up can then be placed under the lead nurturing program. This way, you don’t end up completely losing them. You can also make sure that their interest over your business in general will still remain high.

Using the Sales Funnel Concept

Perhaps one of the best methods that can help you in closing a sale rather than going for a sales cycle is the sales funnel. This is sometimes called sales pipeline or sales tunnel. Regardless of the term, the main point of this one is to ensure that you can really narrow down your leads to include only those that fit the qualifications that you have. Yes, it is very similar to a liquid funnel. The opening is usually the biggest, and a large amount of fluid can go through. However, along the way, the tube gets thinner or narrower, and only a specific small portion can get into the container.

There are different layers that are part of the sales pipeline. First you have the huge amounts of leads. You can have as many as hundreds to even thousands, depending on the marketing campaign you’re doing. For example, in trade shows, you can have hundreds of new leads. You can have more with your opt-in list.

The next layer can be called initial contact. This is the part where you are going to make a proposal to your leads. It could be through their phone number or through their e-mail address. Usually, you don’t easily offer them your products and services, but you want to know if they are interested to know more about them or not. This is also the time when you can start to narrow down your choices since there will be some of the leads who will not be interested with what you have.

Then, you come up with qualifiers, depending on the products that you’re currently selling. These will further decrease the number of your leads to deal with. After all, there are some of them that will not meet the criteria. For one, they are not the target market. Second, they may not have the money to buy what your offers. Third, they have other preferences.

These leads that don’t qualify to your lead campaign will then be nurtured. How? One of the best techniques is through drip marketing. You send out little marketing materials to their e-mail to ensure that your company is not clearly forgotten. You can also use this method to make your leads more qualified. For example, if you’re selling gadgets and a lead is only interested with a laptop, you may be able to convert him to buy a digital camera instead through your drip marketing. This way, you don’t have to wait for a long time to make him sales ready. Lead nurturing will also make your prospects feel that they are important assets to your business since you take time to send out information and offers.

Visit our lead management software sponsor: www.leads360.com