Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics
Your visitors won’t just go straight from leads to customers. They may need help along the way. Here are tactics for giving your leads the extra nudge they need to make a purchase — and feel good about it.
Don’t Sleep On Web Design
Just because your primary focus is content doesn’t mean that presentation falls by the wayside. Your website is the hub of all your marketing efforts, and it’s the one part of the web you can really control, so it’s worth the effort to make sure it’s as good as it can be.
Make sure your CTAs are located above the fold — high enough on the page that you don’t have to scroll to see them. The location of “the fold” can be hard to predict, given the variety of devices and browsers these days, but the idea is not to bury the CTA — that’s what guides visitors down the funnel to make a purchase.
Be judicious with your CTAs — both in quantity and placement. The buyer’s journey tells us not to push a sale on someone who’s still in the awareness phase, just looking for information. For each piece of content, think about what stage of the buyer’s journey the viewer will likely be in.
If they’re reading a broad, informational blog like “How to Hack Your Morning Coffee,” a link to another blog or a whitepaper might be appropriate. If they’re looking at your prices, product pages, or comparisons with your competitors, your CTA can be more direct in pointing them toward a purchase.
Finally, make sure your site is well-designed, fast, and efficient. Page load times can have a huge effect on conversions, and burying information in a maze of menus and links is a good way to frustrate and lose visitors.
Make sure your images are crunched and optimized for everywhere they appear, whether it’s thumbnails or mobile browsers. Contact information should be up-to-date and easy to find. Don’t lose leads to bad or confusing web design.
Reports of Email’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated
Your email campaign can also help your lead generation and nurturing strategies.
Subject lines should be catchy and relevant to encourage an open. The best-designed emails won’t do you any good if no one is reading them, so really put some thought into your subject lines.
In the body of the email, remember your CTAs. CTAs should be worded similarly to the subject of the email to encourage the association in the reader’s mind — if your email subject says “5 Secrets to Better Coffee,” your CTA shouldn’t just say “Learn More,” it should say “Learn the 5 Secrets to Better Coffee.”
Remember, email isn’t an afterthought! It’s inexpensive and brings high conversion rates — after all, everyone who signed up to be on your email list is already interested — and has an average ROI of $38 earned per dollar spent. It’s also mobile-friendly, so you can reach people on the go and while they’re already on their phones.
CRM Software Is Your Friend
CRM stands for Customer Resource Management, and it’s an integral cog in the content marketing machine. Their main job is to help you keep track of your visitors and leads in an organized, easy-to-sort way.
For example, you can tell where your visitors came from and which pieces of your content — blog, social, email — they’ve already read or made contact with. You can keep track of who’s reached out to them from your end, how recently, and how many times. You’ll know which pieces they’ve downloaded and which emails they’ve been sent.
The upshot of this is that you can create workflows — pre-designed plans for guiding them through the funnel. If your readers are coming to you through social media, offer them a particular blog post. If they read that blog post, suggest a download or to sign up for your email.
If they fill out a contact form, give them a call. These workflows can even be automated, triggered by filling out a form, downloading a whitepaper, or liking a social post.
All of this can be planned ahead to make sure that you’re not sending duplicate emails or content, nor are you being too aggressive or too timid. But it’s not a set-and-forget solution. You’ll need to be keeping a close eye on your conversion rates to see what’s working and what needs tweaking.
Make sure you’re segmenting your lists, leads, personas, visitors … everyone. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so you’ll need to tailor your content to the exact person seeing it and their situation.
Send Follow-up Emails
Less intensive than a workflow, you can just send a quick follow-up email to the leads you garner through your site. It’s quick, free, easy to automate, and as simple as “Thanks for signing up/downloading that thing you downloaded!” But that’s it. Don’t push for a sale, don’t ask for more info, and don’t try to have them sit down for a phone call with an advisor. It’s a nudge, not a shove.
For higher-level content and interactions, your follow-up emails can be more in-depth. You wouldn’t go on a second date with someone who never got in touch with you or expressed any interest after the first date, and neither will your customers.
If you talked to someone on the phone or in person or gave them a quote they asked for, you need to follow up with them. Make sure they know you’re there, ready to help if needed, and that you can be their point of contact if they need anything. Feel free to throw in a piece of content you think they might find relevant, too!
Don’t Get Crazy
A quick addendum to all the above: don’t overdo it. If you are too annoying, you will repel customers and sales. People don’t want to be bugged. You’ll need to be able to read the room when a potential customer says, “Not right now” or “We don’t have the budget for that.” Either you’ve pushed them too far, or they weren’t the right person to pursue in the first place.
That’s okay! Not every visitor will become a lead, and not every lead will become a customer. It takes practice to figure out when to push, when to back off, and when to give up and focus your attention on other leads. Keep track of the patterns you notice for what works and what doesn’t.
