Earlier this week, we released the white paper, Lead Nurturing Best Practices for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs). Since this is such a hot topic among SMB marketers and sales people, I thought I would share sections of the white paper with you. Specifically, this blog post will cover:
- What is Lead Nurturing?
- An example of how you can use Lead Nurturing to improve your business
- The Lead Nurturing value proposition
Below is an excerpt from Lead Nurturing Best Practices for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs):
“Lead nurturing is the marketing automation process of interacting with new and existing leads—usually via personalized emails—in order to help connect your sales team to qualified sales prospects that are ready to engage with sales.
For example, after someone comes to your website and registers to read a white paper, your lead nurturing program might initiate the following:
- Send an email from a sales rep thanking the prospect for showing interest and an invitation to click a link to a free trial of your product
- Wait 2 days to detect them clicking on the free trial link and after that time
o If they haven’t clicked the link, send them a reminder email about the free trial
o If they did click the link to the free trial page but didn’t initiate a trial, send an email asking why and to reply back if they have any questions about the free trial you can help them with
- and so on…
Lead nurturing flows like these are very easy to set up and monitor and, if done well, can make a positive impression on the prospect and keep them moving through the sales and marketing process. Lead nurturing automation is critically important for most small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), such as early-stage technology companies, services organizations and others. Here’s why:
1. It makes your sales and marketing machine more efficient – Small teams within resource-constrained SMBs can process hundreds of leads per month per sales rep using lead nurturing without hiring legions of people to follow up on leads. By stimulating inbound sales inquiries and helping to automate lead qualification, lead nurturing reduces time spent cold-calling and manually following up on what could turn out to be unqualified leads.
2. It gets you a higher return on your leads database – It uncovers new sales opportunities within existing leads as their needs and budgets change over time.
3. It creates a positive customer experience – Pushing out relevant, actionable content at the right time to the right people from the right people can help prospects form a favorable impression of your company and move them through the buying process more fluidly.”
Download Lead Nurturing Best Practices for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs)
