The Benefits of E-mail Marketing in Lead Nurturing

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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

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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

Measure Your Leads and Nurture Them More Effectively

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A good business owner already knows the importance of lead nurturing. Since you have better chances of selling a new product to your existing customers or leads, you want to make sure that you can establish long-term relationships with them.

However, nurturing your leads is not enough. Like every business process, it needs to be measured—evaluated. After all, how would you know if your strategies for nurturing your leads are working or not?

The Steps to Undertake

Coming up with guidelines on how to measure lead nurturing is a long and painstaking process. For one, it may take a while before you can finally see results. Second, not all of the steps that you’re going to undertake will work. Nevertheless, it still helps if you have some great ideas on how to do it:

1. Know when your leads are ready to be transformed to customers.

One of the main agendas of lead nurturing is to ensure that your potential clients can be converted into sales-ready leads. This means that they are more than willing to deal with sales agents and are open to buying products from you pretty soon. There are a number of factors that can help you come up with the criteria. First, you can think about how long the sales cycle will last. You also have to consider as to which part of such cycle your prospect is. It may also help if you already have a time frame in mind. You have to make sure that by that time, you can already convert a good portion of your leads to customers. Most companies would settle for 20 to 30 percent of conversion rate.

2. Keep track of the movement rate.

You can classify your leads into three: you have the passive, active, and sales-ready leads. The goal is to move your passive leads to active ones and your active to being sales ready. Now, it is very important that each of these types of leads can be properly defined. Passive prospects are basically those who can meet the requirements you set for ideal buyers of your product or service. However, it’s still very hard for them to determine which of the offers can meet their needs. There are also active leads. These are the ones who already have the needs to your products and services, and all you have to do is to make them sales ready. You can do so by tracking and setting appointments with them.

3. Score your leads. Lead scoring is actually considered as one of the most important aspects of lead management. This is very essential since you want to make sure that you deal with the high-valued leads first than the others. For you to come up with a dependable scoring system, though, you may want to determine the most ideal mode of communication with your leads. For example, sales-ready leads that can be contacted through phone will be given higher score than those who only provide their e-mail addresses. This is because calling them through phone can be pretty expensive and provides higher conversion rate.

Usually companies do come up with numeric values for each touch point. For instance, you may give 5 for cold calling and only 3 for text messages. It then becomes very convenient for you to sort your leads through their scores.

4. Identify which of the sales-ready leads can already be removed from your nurturing program.

Not all leads will have to remain in your lead nurturing program. Some of them can be written off; especially those who don’t need further communication for convincing as well as those who have lost complete interest over your business. You can simply use of your scoring system for this one. By scoring, you may have determined that the highest possible score a sales-ready lead may get is 20. If your prospects reach that, then you can just remove them from your lead nurturing program.


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