In today’s world where businesses are run by following advanced marketing models, there is hardly an organization that does not use a contact nurturing process. Contact nurturing is one of the foundational business activities where a group of prospects are engaged regularly via a series of messages. Contact nurturing is initiated after a lead is captured via the business development process and an initial engagement is established through the contact engagement process. The goal of contact nurturing is to stay top of the mind with your leads by sending them relevant and appealing information in super-personalized messages. This process is carried out until a lead is converted into a customer or a lead goes irreversibly cold.
For instance, I signed up to learn more about a latest video game three months prior to its release. The development company kept sending me information regarding the games, updates, promotions, key points, guides, etc. even after the game was released. Initially, my plan was to buy a different game, but after getting super-personalized emails with amazing details, I gravitated more towards that game and after a few days, I went ahead and bought a copy. They instantly sent me a thank you message and offered me some free stuff that I can use in the game.
See the trick? They literally pushed me from “I just want to explore” to “Holy moly, I need to check this out,” where I got so interested that I ended up buying the game.
That’s the power of contact nurturing.
Contact nurturing is a fantastic business process, but it comes with some pain points as well. A manual contact nurturing process works if you have only a handful of leads that can be nurtured with limited resources. However, if you have a big list of leads and more leads coming in every day, a manual process will not cut it. You will have to move to an automated contact nurturing process.
An automated contact nurturing process is similar to the manual contact nurturing process with same philosophy and process flows. The only difference is in an automated contact or lead nurturing process all manual, boring, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks are completed by a system. For instance, unlike in a manual process, an automated contact nurturing process can send millions of super-personalized emails in a couple of minutes because all tiny tasks in the email sending process are automated. Right now, almost all top organizations use some kind of contact nurturing automation technology and rest are jumping on the bandwagon.
Why? Because of the perks!
There are many benefits to adopting an automated contact nurturing process. Here are our top four benefits.
1. Reduce Manual Tasks & Save Time
The most prominent benefit of any automated process is reducing a bunch of manual, boring, repetitive tasks that can be done without any human intervention. For instance, an important part of the contact nurturing is message personalization. In a manual process, you need to use an email template, copy contact details from the CRM one by one, copy the email address, copy and edit the subject line, and then send it to a lead. Usually, sending a personalized email takes up to 30 seconds if you are working quickly. Now, imagine sending 1,000 emails manually! The process would take 500 minutes, or over eight hours. Do you want to spend a whole day sending emails to your leads? Probably not. And yeah, don’t forget about all the other tasks you need to accomplish like replying to email responses or keeping track of contacts who have already been touched.
However, when you deploy an automated contact nurturing solution, all of these manual tasks are eliminated. For instance, you don’t need to do email personalization by yourself. All you need to do is to create an email template and set areas where you would like to include personalized content. The solution will automatically pull data from the CRM, personalize the template for each of the leads, and send a hyper-personalized email to every single one of them. Similarly, you can eliminate all manual tasks from all other contact nurturing steps. Which means, you do not have to tie yourself up with these tedious jobs anymore since, a large chunk of tasks is handled by the system, saving you a big slice of time that can be utilized elsewhere.
2. Minimize Communication Hazards
In a manual process, you send an email and then what? You tap your fingers and wait until a lead responds. There is no way to know what happened after you sent an email. As well, when you are dealing with thousands of leads, it is only natural to misplace a couple of leads. In fact, it is normal to mess up the whole database of leads because you need to send many contact nurturing emails and it is extremely difficult to keep track of responses, your replies after getting responses, any further replies, etc.
Sound complicated? It could be! There’s a real potential for chaos if you misplace even a single lead.
However, with an automated lead nurturing process that chaos is preventable. The system automatically tracks responses on your behalf. Also, every single interaction is recorded in a centralized database, so you know who was contacted when and how. Therefore, you can reduce communication hazards to nearly zero.
3. Increase Team Collaboration
If you are a one-person team in sales or account management, you may be able to survive with a manual contact nurturing process. However, when dealing with thousands of leads with a significantly large number of team members involved in the process, a manual process may not be the best solution because you cannot synchronize your team to achieve a common goal.
With an automated process, you can automatically assign tasks to your team members. For instance, you can assign one team member to paid lead nurturing. When a lead from paid advertising is not responding to your nurturing emails, this team member will be notified instantly. Similarly, you can assign another team member to nurture inbound leads. You can also assign specific team members to specific lead accounts. Every single team member can see the latest update regarding a lead in the system so if needed, they can take over without a fuss. This way, all your team members are doing their individual tasks alongside helping out each other while being fully aware of what’s happening. As a result, you can scale up your lead nurturing operation.
4. Close Deals at Scale
You already know the purpose of lead nurturing, which is gradually pulling the lead to a place where they will be willing to make a purchase. If you are not closing more sales, every single thing you do is futile because in the world of sales, closing deals is everything.
With an automated contact nurturing system, you can engage thousands of leads at once. You always have the option to boost your marketing efforts and bring in more leads without the fear of losing any due to not being able to nurture them in a timely manner.
One of the biggest reasons for businesses not being able to scale is the capacity issue. If they do not have enough resources to nurture every single lead, they think they cannot scale their lead generation process. However, when an automated system is in place you are pursuing them all at once, boosting purchasing intent at scale, leading to a greater number of conversions.
Which would you prefer: having 10,000 leads and converting 1,000 of them or having 100 leads and converting 10 of them? In both cases, the conversion rate is 10% but 1,000 deals will get you 100 times more revenue than 10 deals, right? Only the lack of an automated contact nurturing system stands between you and the scaled-up revenue you can have!
So, here are our top four benefits of having an automated contact nurturing system. If you are interested, it’s time to start looking for one.
“Wait! Where can I get one?”
You do not want to build an automated contact nurturing system by yourself because, admit it, it is a lot of work. As well, you do not have time to get your hands into technical stuff like coding an HTML email. Plus, integrating all the different tools like email software, a CRM, an autoresponder, marketing automation, etc. is a hassle.
Luckily, there is a 100 percent ready-to-go marketing automaton solution! SimplyCast has built a plug-and-play contact nurturing solution that can be customized to meet any business requirement. We built this solution with our in-house technology and used our own digital engagement applications, so you will experience the smoothest integration possible while using this solution.
Want to learn more? Don’t wait! Speak to our experts today.
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