Lead Nurturing Beyond Email with InfusionSoft
Traditionally, a buyer’s life in your business is completed by the time you move forward with a sale. The term “closing a sale” may have come from that. The word “close” connotes finality of a relationship with that particular buyer. The vendors then exerted no extra effort to keep the buyer for future business. If the buyer returns, it will be from his initiative and his return will be treated as a new relationship. Nowadays, buyers’ behaviour has changed. Most of them prefer doing business with as few vendors as possible. If they can buy several items from just one seller, they would. Buyers like these are the ones businesses want to keep. Their loyalty and continued patronage is king. Where do we find and how do we keep these buyers? We do it by building leads and nurturing these leads.
The way we do business now, building leads and nurturing them is an important part in selling. After a buyer is done with his purchase, the next step would be to keep him as a returning customer. Marketers build and keep their leads through email marketing and recently, through marketing automation as well. The thing is, emailing alone does not deliver the result we hope for.
Emailing is effective in nurturing leads but building them in the first place is difficult. Even if you have a sophisticated automation system, your contact database can only go so far. The thing is, contact databases expire quickly. Most often than not, the email addresses that you have are inactive. Or, they may be active but the owners don’t read the mail. You may even be guilty of that. How many emails do you have unread at this point? How many do you send straight to the junk without opening them? My point, exactly. To compound this further, inboxes are now smart when it comes to filtering marketing-related emails. Take Gmail for instance. They have a tab for promotions were marketing-related emails get sent. Do you know anybody who bothers reading them? Yeah, I know. These realities point to the ineffectiveness of emailing when it comes to building leads.
Multi-Channel Nurturing with Infusionsoft
Thank goodness multi-channel nurturing is now possible. The concept, simply put, is you deliver series of targeted marketing messages across multiple platforms to encourage leads to take the buyer’s journey. The concept is simple but the challenge is in syncing the entire process smoothly and aligning it with buyer’s behaviour.
What are the best practices when it comes to multi-channel nurturing?
- Leverage integrated marketing tools – The basic tools needed for multi-channel nurturing are the following:
- Marketing automation – Admittedly, email is still an important channel for communication. Use email to send informational and educational content to leads. Make sure though that the content and frequency is aligned with buyers’ journey.
- Social media monitoring/publishing – Monitor social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and others for mentions. Give attention to people by responding to their posts, liking them, making their tweets your favourite, so on and so forth.
- Paid retargeting – Leverage retargeting on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Make sure that your messages capture the current needs of your recipients.
- Dynamic website content – Make sure that your website is not boring. Visiting it should be a pleasant experience to your leads. Not only should it be delightful to look at, it should be user friendly, too.
- Sales enablement tools – Get your sales team involved at the right moment. Alert them of any buyer behaviour that may trigger movement in the buyer journey.
- Align your content to buyer’s journey – Leads that are provided with targeted content have a positive effect on sales opportunities. An effective content is not one message that you keep on blasting. To do this correctly you must have a good grasp of where your leads are in their journey and what type of content do they need help them move along their trip.
You can do this by:
- Knowing your target buyer well by gaining a deep understanding of their personality.
- Map out their buyer’s journey.
- Track where they are in their journey. A buyer’s journey starts from being a lead up to being a customer.
- Match the content of your messages to where they are in their journey.
- Be Inbound – When done incorrectly, multi-channel nurturing may come across as “spammy”. Avoid this by making sure that your messaging and its content are helpful and released at the right time. Being helpful means assisting your leads in their decision process by providing them with pertinent information. Do not make the mistake of badgering them with your campaign.
Yes, email marketing and marketing automation will always be there but we have to go beyond that in engaging and nurturing our leads. Use the tools mentioned above to help your leads appreciate your business more.
