Why Your Sales Force Should be Taught the Importance of Lead Nurturing

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The truth behind most sales teams is that a lot of the people you have onboard as sales staff do not really care that much about taking good care of leads that are not ready to buy. They are also less likely to care about a lead that does not show any promise or a lead that won't convert into a sale for them anytime soon. This kind of an attitude is not rare since a lot of companies do give out commissions and incentives based on sales and lead conversions. This can often lead to a loss of prospective sales and good leads usually because of the way the lead was handled or because the lead was seen as not lucrative enough for the here and now.

The importance of taking good care of leads that end up in the trash bin, so to speak, is not up to your sales team but is actually a responsibility that your marketing team should handle. Here is where lead nurturing comes in. There are times that a lead is lost not because it is not a qualified lead, it is simply because the lead was handled the wrong way and could have become a qualified lead had it been given the proper attention it needed. The use of lead nurturing can get the company a chance to regain the trust and patronage of this lost customer with a carefully planned out move that gives these leads the chance to know more about your company and your services in a more favorable light. How this can be achieved is through marketing strategies that help build your image slowly but surely in the eyes of the lead.

Drip Marketing Used for Lead Nurturing

The use of drip marketing as a strategy to regain a lead's trust or to build up your company's image to a certain lead who might purchase but is not ready to do so, is one of the ways you can nurture a lead. Drip marketing can get a lead to familiarize himself with the services and products you have in small doses that saturates in time and may lead to a sale or conversion when the need arises. How this happens is simple. Imagine slowly giving a person information on something that he may not need right now but might need sometime in the future. With the use of numerous avenues of marketing, you will soon find that when the need for what you offer arises, the name that they will probably remember is your company's name. This is why drip marketing is one of the most used lead nurturing tools in the business.

Using Marketing Automation Software to Help with Lead Nurturing and Drip Marketing

Sure, drip marketing and lead nurturing need to be done to help with keeping certain leads alive for future conversions but doing this kind of a task manually can be pretty taxing and logistically costly. This is because you will need to employ a huge number of people to saturate these leads with material like emails, calls, flyers and other advertising mediums. You can actually reduce the number of people who do this kind of a task to a select few with the use of marketing automation software. This kind of a software will not only help you nurture your leads over time with its effective bombardment of info on your company, it also helps keep the number of people who need to do this at a low number, making the lead nurturing task cost effective for you. With an effective automatic marketing software in place, lost leads need not be lost for long, drip marketing need not be an insurmountable task and you get to do all these without having to worry about getting your message across to those you want to reach fast and effectively without having to use a huge number of people to do so.

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

Effective Use of E-mail for Drip Marketing

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Drip marketing is considered to be one of the most effective methods of keeping the interest of your sales leads and customers on your products and services. It works by sending bits and pieces of information or promotional materials to them, thereby making your name more common or recognizable to them. E-mail drip marketing is one of them.

The Power of E-mail

Every person who uses the Internet has at least one e-mail account that he regularly uses. He utilizes it to communicate with friends, families, and business partners. He uses it to keep himself updated on his interests. Because of this, e-mail marketing is an excellent element in drip marketing.

However, there are several ways on how you can make it really work for you. Just to give you some ideas, you can do the following:

1. Focus more on texts than images. Though picture paints a thousand words, it may not really work on your advantage if you are going to use on e-mail. According to studies, most of e-mail users make use of text-only settings in their e-mails. This is especially true when they are fervent users of mobile devices, such as phones. In case you can’t avoid to use photos, however, you should make sure that your texts will be enough to make the message clear to your readers, even if they cannot really see the image at their end.

2. Ask permission. E-mails are still considered personal, even if they are also used to communicate with clients and business partners. Thus, you may like to ask permission from your sales leads before you send them marketing materials, such as newsletters and one-page announcements. A very good method is through a mailing list. You can offer them something that they can’t resist, such as a freebie, discount on your product, or free reports or e-books in exchange for their contact information like their name and e-mail address. Asking permission will also prevent them from putting your e-mail address in their Block list or considering your e-mail as spam.

3. Leave some room for mystery. Keep in mind that you’re doing drip marketing, which means that you don’t need to tell everything in one fell swoop. Make it a point to have your readers or your sales leads up on their toes, anticipating on your next e-mail. There are a lot of ways to do this. You can tell a story, or you can give out different tips on your every e-mail.

4. Ensure that you can come up with the right subject. Your e-mail subject can make or break you. More than 50 percent of e-mail users make use of preview, which means they are going to read the subject first. If they think that it sounds unimportant or, worse, spammy, you’ll end up in the Trash folder, or your e-mail won’t be opened at all. You may ask, though, how am I going to do this? It’s quite simple really. First of all, settle for a believable domain name. Avoid using a domain with a lot of characters, since it’s normally associated with spam e-mails. Moreover, the e-mail subject should talk about the e-mail content without sounding like you’re actually selling or making a sales pitch.

5. Get personal. Your sales leads really don’t want to feel as if they’re just part of your database, names that have been generated using your marketing automation program. If you want to practice effective lead nurturing through drip marketing, you may want to get personal with your approach. You can start by using their first name when addressing them in your e-mail.

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