There are several goals, returns on investment (ROIs) and other data that a business needs to keep a careful eye on, but one of the most important (and biggest) happens to be the ROI of lead nurturing. This is because making sure your customers are getting the best experience as soon as they engage with your business is the best investment you can make.
There are real ways to calculate the actual ROI of all of your lead nurturing to make sure your business always remains on target. But, before any of that, it’s good to start with the basics and work from there.
Back To Basics
In essence, lead nurturing is convincing the would-be customer to buy your product or service. However, some leads are going to be more “ready” than others. For example, a lead might be nurtured right now, but will buy in a few months. Others might be ready to buy right now. Whatever the case, leads these days will need more than a commercial or other gimmicks in order to become customers. Relevant content such as webinars, white papers, guides and much more need to be a priority for your business.
Most leads are not going to be ready to buy right at the beginning, they will need time to measure the value of all the businesses competing for their attention. This means you shouldn’t just write them off and go on to the next buyer, but instead put up steps that ensure in the near future these leads choose you instead of the competitor.
Most businesses have a “process” to keep leads interested. Some key elements to consider are the following:
- Segmentation. Also known as segmenting, this is the practice of creating demographic groups of your most sought after customers. These are the customers that you consistently market for and you know what they generally want through marketing research. This helps with lead nurturing because you can create a couple different sales funnels for different types of groups of customers, ensuring they get a customised and memorable experience.
- Personalisation. Speaking of customised content, the name of the game when it comes to all of your lead nurturing must be personalisation. Don’t provide generic content with generic information or statistics, inject some life into your white papers, infographics and webinars with personalised data about your own business, making you look even more valuable to the lead.
- Gating & Progressive Profiling. Always try to get more data from your customers, but don’t be completely sleazy about it. The best way businesses can achieve this is through “gating,” which asks for incremental information in exchange for customised content. This includes an initial sign-up that only asks for name, then you can request more information when they want to download a white paper (industry they work in, for example). The latter is also known as “progressive profiling.”
Planning Your Lead Nurturing Campaign
Now that you’re ready to begin a new campaign for lead nurturing, where exactly do you begin for better results? It’s a pretty simple step-by-step process: understanding your preferred customers, knowing what exactly they need, mapping out a user experience, and then implementing everything. This includes new white papers and other free content, email campaigns, landing pages and everything else you want to use to nurture your leads.
Remember, always try to keep it as simple as possible. Lead nurturing on your end is about being able to make minor changes on the go, which is much easier when you have simpler processes. When you’ve figured out what is working and what isn’t, you can make the necessary changes immediately and keep going on smoothly with your goals instead of taking down your landing page or content completely to make any updates.
However, keep in mind that the first 30 days of contact are very vital. Keep in touch with your leads with layered content via enticing email campaigns and a continued cycle of free content. The lead might have downloaded that first white paper, but what’s stopping them from going elsewhere now they got what they want and nothing more?
Data Analytics Of Lead Nurturing
You’ve been using your lead nurturing to collect as much data as possible to make the best customised sales path for your customers. At least, that’s the entire point of lead nurturing campaigns–besides garnering even more customers and revenue. However, if your data is lacking and you would like to get more out of it for your ROI, it’s time to check out these methods of data collection.
- Always implement push notifications at certain levels of the sale for your sales staff. This allows for your sales team to be alerted when a certain customer has passed a particular threshold and might need to be contacted with a live person to further them along the sales funnel or some other point of contact. This can be triggered from an email, certain content they download, and even how many times they visit your website.
- Be able to make a budget work with a third-party data and research provider, allowing you to get better insights into your preferred leads as well as pain points they’re trying to fix.
- Figure out what’s hindering some customers from not completing the sales path and moving on with a different business. This will usually mean doing some market research and monitoring the data of your downloads and leads landing on your site pages.
- Always keep it automated. Try to streamline as much as possible to make nearly everything automated so you can keep better track of data and where exactly the lead is in terms of your nurturing, letting you focus on the customer entirely.
All of this data needs to be archived into a larger database, allowing for you to cull out the information necessary to figure out your ROI. Things like download and click-through rates, visitors to a landing page, retention, sales numbers, and length of the campaign on top of the budget that you allotted to the lead nurturing. All of it needs to be able to be graphed and seen visually.
It’s good to set up reports for weekly and monthly results, based within a six to nine month period. This is because companies most companies are going to be planning within at least a five month period with their marketing campaigns, so your ROI is guaranteed to be much healthier with a realistic timeline and goals.
Speaking of, don’t try to reach too far when it comes to goals and ROI. Make it realistic and you will see the actual ROI of all of your efforts, rather than inflated (or very deflated) numbers and data. Even if it’s a 5% change in sales, it’s still a tangible number that shows you’re doing something right.
Once you have the ROI and data that you need, be able to tweak and update your lead nurturing to the point where that 5% change becomes a 10% and then eventually a whopping 50% or more of a change in your sales numbers. All because of that highly focused attention to your leads and being able to nurture them. It’s much easier than it looks and as soon as one campaign is extremely successful, the others will simply follow suit.