What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing is a process whereby a prospect receives a sequence of customized emails easing them through the buying process by educating them about your product or service. Lead nurturing will improve your lead-to-customer conversions and generate more business. A successful lead nurturing program will help generate more sales and will have 4 key elements:

• Awareness
• Learn
• Evaluate
• Conversion

Awareness

Customers can’t buy your product or service if they don’t know who you are. The first stage is to make them aware of who your company is, what it is that you do and the types of companies you can help. It is important to note that this is not the beginning of the sales cycle but rather just creating awareness of your company and brand. The email the prospect receives should not contain an attempt to sell them anything.

Learn

Once prospects are aware of who you are and what you do, the next step in nurturing them is to educated them about needs or pain that your product or service fixes. People want to educate themselves and be smarter before making any decisions. This next email in the lead nurturing sequence is to provide them with information about how your product or service can fill their need.

Evaluate

At this point, the prospect is aware of who you are and the need your company can help them with. They are now interested in evaluating how your product or service stacks up against your competitors. They will likely look to online forums where independent parties have written reviews or comparison charts. Instead of letting them do the searching, the next email should contain information as to why your product or service is best at meeting their needs. Testimonials, case studies and comparison charts are helpful at this stage.

Convert

Now the prospect has been educated and has evaluated it’s options and now they want the buying process to go smoothly. The final email should be an offer in order to move them to a close or get them requesting more information or even calling one of your sales reps. If a prospect does not convert at this stage, they should receive more information to learn and evaluate and continue until they convert or opt out.

Lead nurturing, if done successfully, is a cost effective way to generate and reduce the cost of acquisition. If you follow the steps above, you’ll likely be ahead of the competition on and your way to better sales results.