by Wikus Engelbrecht
1. ottobre 2010 02:37
Sales teams often face a common problem: They have too many leads to follow up on, and no idea which lead is more likely to generate a sale. Your email marketing can offer the solution by helping you build the trusting customer relationship needed to convert a potential sale.
Clickz.com recently announced findings that long-term leads (i.e. leads or prospects that take longer to make a buying decision) form up to 80% of potential sales. Unfortunately, these are also the leads that are most likely to be ignored by your sales team. How do you address this problem? The answer could lie in setting up a lead nurturing email campaign.
The purpose of such a campaign is to both introduce the subscriber to your product or service, while at the same time gathering information from them. That way you’re preparing the recipient for the sales push, but the information you gathered on the recipient also gives the sales team insight into where that person is in the buying cycle and what their needs are. This means your sales team can contact potential clients at the time when they are most likely to buy.
Here’s how to go about it.
What do you consider to be a valuable lead?
First of all, you’ll need to decide what your ideal lead looks like, so you know what kind of lead you’re trying to create. What sales leads would you consider worth following up on? (It’s a good idea for your marketing and sales teams to discuss and define this together.)
When answering this question, consider whether or not your potential client really needs your product or service, and, if so, how urgently they’d be looking to make a purchase. How big a client are the likely to become - how much and how often will they spend? Make sure you’re dealing with the correct person. If you’re pitching your ice cream to the six-year old, keep in mind that the real person you should be selling to is Mom. When dealing with a B2B sale, you don’t want to market your product to a junior, but rather to an authoritative decision maker in the company.
How does it work?
Think about past sales calls you’ve received, or pitches you’ve heard. When these come out of the blue, we typically dismiss them. Sometimes you’ll even find a few months later, when one of your friends have bought the product, that it is actually something that you want - but when you first received that call you had never heard of the product and so had absolutely no interest in it.
Your lead nurturing email campaign should slowly introduce potential customers to your product. Remember, you don’t want to overwhelm them with an aggressive sales push; you simply want to slowly begin sending them emails containing short bits of valuable information, addressing their need and explaining how your product can offer a solution.
So, think about the questions your clients will be asking themselves: What’s in this for me? How will this product or service improve my life? Do I really need it? Can I afford it? Is this the best option, or will another company offer me a better deal?
Now set up your value-laden, informative email series and slowly supply them with answers to these questions. (TriggerMail is an ideal tool to set this up.)
Include useful elements, like discount coupons, links to articles or PDF downloads, or webinars – anything that might provide them with more information that could entice them to buy.
And then?
Once you’ve set up your nurturing email campaign, you should see an increase in quality sales leads – which also means a higher sales conversion rate. As with all your campaigns, check on your reports and statistics (and, in this case, also follow up with your sales team) to track your progress. If you run an effective lead nurturing campaign, continually tweaking it according to the trends you pick up among your subscribers, your campaign will eventually send through a constant flow of quality sales leads.
A lead nurturing campaign takes the guesswork out of your sales process: Instead of being faced with masses of leads they know are unlikely to convert, your sales team will be able to focus on those prospects that they know are ready buy.
