Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Lead Nurturing and Drip Marketing: Maintaining Your Hard-earned Leads

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It all begins with getting a lead and making that lead work for your company. Once you have that lead working for you, the next step is in making that lead keep on working for you. This can be done with something called lead nurturing. When you nurture a lead, you are essentially trying to maintain a customer, or basically, you are trying to get a present revenue-creating lead to keep on creating revenues for you. Also called relationship selling, lead nurturing can help create a lasting and lucrative relationship between your company and the customer.

Nurturing leads often begins with an automated marketing strategy that slowly inundates your prospective, and even present, clients with information on your current and up-and-coming services and products. The second step, the actual sales call and closing of sales, is actually handled by sales agents and representatives. The marketing phase of the whole process is often done automatically, and when a lead is turned into a prospect, that is when real people or sales personnel step in and help keep the customers satisfied and buying from the company.

When you create a lasting relationship with your leads, you will find that your business will have a constant stream of revenue coming in the door. This relationship can be started with what is called drip marketing. Somewhat similar to lead nurturing, drip marketing is a strategy where you get your prospective clients to become familiar with your products and services over a certain period of time. This strategy can actually be pretty effective and has proven to be a good marketing ploy that keeps customers coming back to your company. This kind of a marketing strategy basically works on a customer’s saturation point. When a prospective customer, or a prospect, keeps on getting subtle yet useful information on what your company provides, they will eventually find themselves wanting to know more about what you can do for them.

You can liken this marketing strategy with its agricultural namesake, drip irrigation, where plants are watered little by little over a period of time. After a while, these plants do blossom or produce and will constantly do so with the same kind of minimal yet regular “feeding.”

The same can be said of people and drip marketing. You can slowly get people to become familiar with your products and services through regular “feeding” of information, and this can be done via the many mediums available to you. You can send them these dripped marketing items via e-mail, newsletters, postcards, and other advertising materials. This constant flow of marketing mediums to your target clients can produce results over time and can even prove to be the source of regular revenue for your company.

When you decide to go into lead nurturing and drip marketing, you might want to consider marketing automation to optimize such a marketing strategy. With the use of marketing automation, you actually get your e-mails, brochures, and other such paraphernalia out to your nurtured prospects and clients in a regular and organized fashion. This can be done with software or a specialty company that helps keep track of the many marketing tools you have for your campaigns. Since these tools can be quite difficult to keep track of manually, using an automated process to distribute as well as track them can help you and your company analyze which marketing tools work best for your drip marketing and lead nurturing programs. Automation can also help you save money on having to get your people to do the marketing of your products over time and have them concentrate on closing the sales that these marketing ploys generate.

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