Thursday, December 18, 2008

Best Questions to Ask When Developing a Lead Nurturing Program

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Lead nurturing ensures one thing: ROI. With it you don’t only provide them with sales ads and newsletters, but you are also teaching them. As more information about the business or even the industry you are in get shared to your customers, the confidence level of your sales leads will increase. This will enable you to make your products and services even more credible. Turning them into loyal customers will no longer be a huge problem.

However, knowing is completely different from doing. Coming up with a solid lead nurturing program is not going to be as easy as you think. That’s why you need these 4 essential questions to guide you as you develop a good plan for your business:

How would the customers think?

This is the foremost question that you need to ask yourself when you’re creating a lead nurturing plan. When you know how your customers think about your business, it will be very easy for you to determine the most ideal marketing campaign for them. You will also learn their common issues about your products and services, so you can also determine the right solutions to their problems. You can also have an idea on how you can increase the credibility of your business.

Just to give an idea, most of the leads will think about the benefits they can obtain from your product and service, the price they have to pay for it, as well as the credibility of the company.

How can we deliver the right message to them, which will hopefully influence their purchasing power?

Not all marketing campaigns will work—that is something that you should keep in mind at all times. Thus, you have to pattern your ads according to your targeted leads. For if you are planning to get Internet leads, the best strategy will be to come up with an opt-in list, while offline leads may be derived from surveys.

What type of offers can you give to your leads when they are willing to buy something from you?

You should include in your lead nurturing program the kinds of freebies or perks that you can give to your prospects. This is aside from your products and services. In fact, when you’re making those calls to your leads, you must pitch in what they can receive for free and other perks you’re offering. After all, who doesn’t want freebies, right? You should then make sure that you can stay true to your promise. For instance, if you say that the free item will be given to them once you send the product then they should receive it along with the purchased goods. Otherwise, you will be lowering down the credibility of your company.

How do we address issues, making sure that they don’t happen again?

One of the foremost reasons why you lose an existing or potential lead is the presence of pending issues about your products or even about your business. You may have received negative reviews from disgruntled former buyers. Sometimes these issues are just created by your competitors wanting to put you down.

It’s fundamental that you can address these concerns right away to remove the stigma associated with your company. You can perhaps start by giving away free product samples to your customers or money-back guarantees.

Lead nurturing allows you to maintain your long-term leads. These are the people who are often ignored simply because sales agents are eager to make the short-term ones. But then, you know that you will have 85 percent success of selling a new product with your old customers and existing leads. So make sure that you can take care of them too to deserve their loyalty.

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

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Free Items Can Make Lead Nurturing Successful

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No marketer or businessman can deny the importance and the difficulty of making customers happy or keeping them interested in your current and future product offerings. Prospects are very fickle; one wrong move and they’ll forget you ever existed in their mailboxes or phone databanks.

It doesn’t help that marketing should be done aggressively and persistently. You have to keep calling or reminding your prospects to buy or at least check out your products. Most marketing campaigns fail because of the apparent misinterpretation of this basic rule of marketing. Some also fail utterly simply because they don’t the necessary “umph” to catch the prospective client’s fancy and interest for the items.

Unfortunately, that’s what lead nurturing is all about: touching so lightly on prospective clients’ interest and tickle their curious minds enough to make them check out and even buy your offerings. You don’t have to worry too much about that though. There is still one trick that you can bring up your sleeve that can help make your marketing campaigns succeed. It is a bit unorthodox and some companies actually refute the effectiveness of this technique, but the results have spoken for themselves in most cases.

Regular Follow-Up Is Simply Not Enough

It is one of the basic tenets of marketing that marketers should regularly make follow ups to their customers and prospective clients. The aim is to drum knowledge of the company and product to the person’s memory through continued reminders. It actually works. For example, an online piano teacher can make a potential student remember his offered lessons by constantly emailing him about the product. However, it is simply not enough for the student to remember. He should be driven to actually partake of the lessons. That’s where the real money for the teacher comes: in the lessons.

If you are the teacher, what could you do make your lead nurturing result to an actual sale? You have done your part. You have introduced your product to your potential customers in the best words as possible. Why is it that these leads do not respond and order a lesson package from you? You probably have the answer, and that is you lack something in your marketing. Let us call this lacking element, in this discussion, as a sneak preview.

Give Your Customers a Quick Peek at Your Products

The idea is that it is simply not enough to push information about your product in your customers’ faces in your lead nurturing efforts. They’d surely understand and comprehend what you are all about that way, but to close a sale, you must give them something that will capitalize on the interest they have for your product and push them to buy.

When you decide to watch a movie, what is the other catalyst for your decision aside from the interest? It is the trailer. An interesting trailer can turn even the most boring movie into a box office success. That is because the trailer shows viewers what they can expect about the upcoming movie. The trailer builds up the hype.

The same concept can apply to your marketing. As a piano teacher, you can give your potential students free lessons. You can start with the basic lessons. If your potential student likes the lessons – assuming you made it as attractive as possible – then he will buy the full package from you. Some marketers disagree with this practice, arguing that it is impractical and goes against the tenets of marketing. However, in most cases, potential customers do not buy a product unless they are sure of its quality. In this case, the sneak preview practice works best.


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