A lead nurturing strategy is crucial for companies who want to retain their clients and grow their business. Whether you run a home-based business or a retail e-commerce company, chances are only a small fraction of your customers are going to be prepared to make a purchase. If you fail to nurture the many leads that are left behind, you’d be leaving a big portion of potential profits on the table. To be clear, lead nurturing is the process of keeping your target market engaged by offering them support in whatever way they need and ensuring they remain engaged throughout the buyer journey.
Send Gifts
Although the majority of companies do not send gifts to their clients and customers, it can be an amazing way to nurture your leads. This is especially true if you work in a high-touch industry or have high-paying VIPs on your email list. These gifts can be anything from promotional pens to t-shirts to wine and cheese platters. Gifts will help anyone feel valued and remembered, and these customers are much more likely to stay loyal to your company because they feel important to you.
Cart Abandonment Emails
The majority of online carts are filled and deserted. Studies have shown that there are way more people who will add items to the cart and leave them there than those who will add items and immediately finish the checkout process. In fact, estimates suggest that anywhere between 60% to 80% of carts are abandoned.
Regardless of the reason why they left in the first place, you can win back plenty of potential dollars with cart abandonment emails. Half of all cart abandonment emails are opened, and nearly a third of them lead to sales.
Even for companies that aren’t in the ecommerce space, perhaps you have a form that a person didn’t finish filling out or an individual that created an incomplete profile. Always have a plan in place to encourage them to finish what they started.
Send Targeted Content
Your company should send visitors and potential customers content based on activity. For example, think about your buyer personas (if you don’t already have them, now is a great time to create those buyer personas). As you might discover, there are different branches or segments of those personas. Targeted content demonstrates that you have a deep understanding of your audience needs. When you understand your different audience segments, you can create and send content that’s catered to various areas of your audience.
Re-engagement Campaign
You remember Small Business Saturday right? It’s natural for people who showed initial interest in your product or service to lose that enthusiasm over time. This is why re-engagement campaigns are so important. Start by creating a segment in your email marketing platform for inactive subscribers. These are subscribers who either haven’t opened your emails in a while or whose clickthrough rates are relatively nonexistent.
Then, start to think about how you can re-engage them. You might ask for specific feedback, send targeted content (as mentioned earlier), send permission reminders (requesting permission to continue sending emails), offer discounted products and coupons, and much more. These re-engagement campaigns are designed to put a spotlight on your brand so that you’re in a more noticeable position. Keep the language conversational and even a tad humorous. By being light-hearted, the recipient might feel more inclined to give the brand a second glance.
In the worst-case scenario, you’d get an unsubscribe. And even if this happens, you’d be one step closer to having a cleaner email list that contains recipients that are more likely to purchase and boost your metrics.
Consider Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is the process of giving each lead a ranking based on the potential value that they bring to your business. Many marketing automation platforms allow you to implement lead scoring into your strategy by assigning numeric values to different customer attributes, like browsing behavior, social shares, opt-in forms, demographics, purchases, and more. Scores generated using this tactic help you determine which of your leads need more nurturing and which leads are more likely to be converted with your typical tactics. Although lead scoring isn’t foolproof, it does offer a solid baseline into how you should approach different segments of your leads.
