The process of sales is not everyone’s cup of tea. It is an arduous, complex, and long process that will leave you frustrated at times. The entire sales process can be mapped out like a funnel, because the large number of potential customers pouring in from the internet get filtered out as you move along the funnel – from one stage to another.
To best understand the process of sales, one should look at the sales funnels, which consist of four steps. These include awareness, interest, decision, and action. At each step, marketers and salespeople can apply different tactics to move a certain percentage of qualified leads down the funnel.
If you are looking to improve the conversion rates, the overall sales, and the lead retention rate, there is a process that you should be familiar with. It is known as lead nurturing. It is a process of reinforcing relationships with potential buyers at every stage of the sales funnel to convert them into paying customers.
While there are several lead nurturing strategies that will help improve the retention, lead generation, conversion, and sales of your business, what will work for you depends on your type of business and what audience you are targeting
In this article, we have mentioned a few lead nurturing strategies that will help you move leads down the sales funnel. However, you need to conduct thorough research to see which of the following strategies will work for you.
Create and Use Targeted Content
When it comes to engaging with the audience, businesses need to understand that one size does not fit all. To nurture leads in an effective manner businesses should use targeted content.
You first need to create and understand the buying personas of your target audience. Once you have done that, create a range of targeted content devised to engage and nurture each of the buying personas based on their goals, interests, and marketing triggers.
Take Frequent Feedback
It has been said several times now, taking frequent feedback from customers and doing immediate follow-ups is highly beneficial for a business. A timely follow-up call or email is the best way to turn inbound leads into paying customers. That is because the likelihood of converting a lead is significantly higher when the potential customer is contacted immediately after visiting a website.
Leverage Multiple Marketing Touches
A buyer’s journey differs from point to point. Yet, as per some research, leads go through ten marketing touches from the time they get to know about a product or service to when they convert into paying customers.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to nurture leads at every stage of the funnel is by creating and delivering content that answers all their queries at every step of the way. Other than that, consider the different content types including emails, blog posts, direct mail, eBooks, and whitepapers that can cater to a buyer at different touchpoints of a buyer’s journey
Align Marketing and Sales Strategies
When a business aligns its marketing and sales strategies, customer retention improves, and lead nurturing strategies become more successful. Both marketing and sales contribute to the lead nurturing process in different manners. You need to identify the exact stages and points in a customer’s journey where both marketing and sales play an important role. You can consider different triggers like conversion events, workflow enrollment, and lead scoring.
Create a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA) in which you can highlight the different shared responsibilities, goals, and expectations. This will help the two teams collaborate effectively and hold each other accountable for converting prospects.
Wrapping Up
As the experts in the field of marketing and sales have said a lot of times. There is no one technique or hard and fast rules for lead nurturing. Every business is different. Their target audience is different. Therefore, each business would have its own lead nurturing strategy in place.
All businesses can do is understand their target audience and their customer’s journeys to effectively convert prospects into paying customers. Businesses would have to conduct in-depth customer research for which they would need a reliable internet connection. If in any given case, they don’t have one, they can call Spectrum servicio al cliente and subscribe to one of their internet deals.