Let’s start this blog with a hypothetical scenario with Company ABC! This company provides B2B services to mid-to-large level businesses. Their marketing model is based upon organic and paid leads. In general, their marketers promote their services via inbound, outbound, and paid advertisement campaigns to get prospects signed up via a digital form. Once prospects sign up, their details are stored in CRM software. Then, the Sales team members communicate and nurture them for a long time until they either drop off or convert as customers.
A familiar use case, right? Well, one important thing is missing here: the ratio of leads dropping out versus lead conversion rates. That’s the most important part because if leads do not convert, what’s the point of doing all this nurturing?
According to WebFX, companies that use marketing automation technology achieve a 53% higher conversion rate than companies that use a manual process to convert leads. A pretty much impressive number for any salesperson.
But still, many companies struggle to adopt an automated lead nurturing process, despite knowing that an automated process will accelerate their sales success rate by tenfold. It’s only natural because they face quite a few challenges in adopting such a process, such as:
- Setting up an automated contact nurturing roadmap
- Finding digital tools that are required to build an automated nurturing campaign
- Streamlining digital tools to ensure a smooth transition between lead nurturing stages
Since marketers and salespeople don’t typically like to get into technical/coding stuff, building a solution from scratch is nearly impossible and time consuming for them. It requires a great deal of effort even with a full technological team behind them.
So, what’s the solution? It’s simple: you need to use a pre-built, automated solution that will allow you to set up your lead nurturing process the way you prefer it.
But before that, you will need to know the basics of a lead nurturing process. In this blog, we are going to demonstrate the four easy steps to set up a high-level, automated lead nurturing process.
Step 1: Gather Personal Details
First, you need to gather personal details of your leads. Assuming you already have a business development model and a contact engagement model set up, you should already have all your leads’ details in a centralized database or CRM. However, if you are yet to have a solid business development process and automated contact engagement process, you can check out these blogs on setting up an automated business development solution and setting up an automated contact engagement solution.
Why is capturing leads’ personal information important? Because this information will help you to create super-personalized messages when you launch a contact nurturing campaign. Personalized messages are more likely to get responses from your leads than generic “Dear Sir/Madam” messages. People resonate with a message that is customized for them. So, it is highly recommended that you set up a business development and contact engagement process before you proceed with an automated contact nurturing solution.
Step 2: Create a Series of Regular Message Templates
In this step, you are basically creating a time-wired series of lead nurturing messages. For instance, you want to send nurturing emails to all your leads every week, for a year. So, using a marketing automation platform, you will have to create a timeline where you schedule to send a message every Friday. You have the liberty to choose the sending channel you want to use. It may be email, SMS, voice broadcasting, or fax. If you want, you can go for a multi-channel option too.
You also need to set up personalization criteria too. When you select the areas in your message to personalize, the system will take the message template, pull the contact data from your CRM, insert it automatically into the template, and send a personalized copy of the message template to each of your leads. Using this technique, you can send 52 personalized lead nurturing messages to each of your leads. You will not have to do anything yourself. The system will automatically trigger the pre-built and scheduled messages.
Sending thousands of personalized messages to thousands of contacts in minutes – that is impossible if you do it manually!
Step 3: Set Up a Staff Notification System
Now, do we want to keep sending messages without knowing how our leads are responding to them? Absolutely not! So, you can set up criteria to pause the lead nurturing campaign for leads who are not responding well to your messages.
For instance, you are sending 52 emails to 100 contacts over a calendar year. You see that out of 100 leads, five did not even open your emails four consecutive times. That is a whole month without any nurturing and that can be alarming. Now, in an automated solution, you can set criteria that if a lead does not engage with your messages at all for a month (four messages), the lead nurturing campaign for that particular lead will be paused automatically. As well, a notification will be sent to a designated team member about the lead not being responsive enough. That team member then can reach out to that lead manually and talk to them in person to ensure that the lead has not dropped off. In this way, you can reduce the rate of leads dropping out by automatically identifying difficult leads.
Step 4: Check Campaign Performance
Finally, you want to know how your lead nurturing campaign is doing. You can easily find this out by checking campaign performance metrics. You can see how many messages were delivered to your leads, how many leads engaged with them, how many of them took action, etc.
For instance, if you are selling a digital video game, you’d expect your leads to click on a link in the nurturing email and buy the game from there. You can check the email deliverability (determining the quality of your email), email open rate (how your subject line performs) and click-through-ratio (determining the power of your content). Using these metrics, you can easily generate insights and use them either to restructure your nurturing campaign, make changes to scheduled emails, and develop better nurturing campaigns.
There, your automated contact nurturing system is done! All you need to do is find the tools that are required to build an automated system and streamline those tools to work together.
“But we agreed that these tasks are difficult!”
Absolutely! That’s why SimplyCast is offering a 100 percent ready-to-go, pre-built, automated contact nurturing solution for you.
SimplyCast predicted the growing demand for an automated lead nurturing solution and used our in-house email marketing software, SMS marketing software, fax blasting software, voice broadcasting software, CRM software, and marketing automation platform to build a multi-functionality contact nurturing solution.
We can customize the solution for you based on your business requirements. It is super easy to use. Our clear and intuitive user interface ensures that you can hit the ground running while using our solution. No coding or technical knowledge required. Let us handle those parts while you focus on nurturing leads and closing deals at scale.
Sound interesting? Why wait? Speak to our experts today.
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