Okay, so now that you have great content and you’re capturing leads, you need to follow up with them. Following up with prospects the right way is vital if you want to increase sales in a scalable fashion. In this post, we’ll talk about best practices when nurturing prospects for your small business with Infusionsoft.
Every week, we’ll share useful tips on how you can implement the Lifecycle Marketing strategy in your business with an emphasis on Infusionsoft.
Nurturing Prospects: Why & What
The Nurturing Prospects stage of Lifecycle Marketing is the step that is the difference between building a list and actually closing sales. The awesome part about this is that there are no limits to your creativity in how you follow up with prospects.
You want to leverage the Nurturing Prospects stage to educate and qualify potential customers. It’s important, as a marketer, you demonstrate patience throughout the marketing and sales process. Marketing is as much an art in persuasion as well as a science. You want to use this critical stage of the Lifecycle Marketing strategy to address their immediate pains, reframe the problem and position your business as a solution.
When they are ready, they will raise their hand for you to sell them. We’ll talk about that process next.
So, what if you sell directly online? No problem! For our online retail customers like Todd Staples from Stealth Auto, an aftermarket BMW parts supplier, they use Infusionsoft to educate and nurture visitors into modifying their BMW. They nurture these prospects to establish trust and increase the revenue per order since their audience is educated about their products and want them.
How to Nurture Prospects with Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft makes lead nurturing easy with its visual, drag-and-drop Campaign Builder. It’s full-featured, too, since you can take advantage of online and offline methods to follow-up with prospects. The work in Nurturing Prospects is mostly done within “Sequences,” which is one of the functions of the Campaign Builder.
I recommend that you examine your existing sales process. Take your best customers and research exactly how they purchased your products and services. Look at everything from every e-mail, phone call, website visit and question they asked. Reverse-engineer the process and map it out. Taking the time to do this once properly will enable you to really get in the spirit of the Campaign Builder. Having a defined outcome and process in mind will help you create a highly effective campaign.
The Infusionsoft Campaign Builder is designed to help entrepreneurs build out follow-up sequences that range from being short and simple to lengthy and complex … all while keeping it visual.
When nurturing leads, consider the following ways to follow-up with them:
- Traditional Email – Many small businesses use email marketing to follow-up with their leads and customers. However, be sure to respect their preferences so you only send them email that they are expecting.
- Email and Phone – Following up doesn’t only have to be in the form of email. Depending on the how you typically sell to your customers (either online or offline), you can methodically ascend into their offline life by using the phone to nurture them. This is where Internal Web Forms and Opportunity Records become very helpful.
- Premium Content Series – Not every form of follow-up has to be in the form of a sales pitch. In fact, your lead nurturing strategy should involve being generous with helpful content. The more informed a buyer is of your products, services and the industry as a whole, the more mature your sales conversations can become later. Make use of video, free reports and webinars to deliver premium content so your leads are educated.
- Direct Mail – You can’t forget the power of direct mail combined with excellent content. If you’re trying to build a list, it may not be a bad idea to try to deliver them a few different variations directing people to your lead magnets. Want to go the extra mile? Include a gift or a no-strings-attached incentive to establish trust and instill action among the target audience. If you’re tracking responses, you’ll quickly discover what tactics are working and driving results for your business.
- Automated Reminders – If you have a scheduled webinar or other live event that people have signed up for, you have the ability to send them a quick reminder in the form of a phone call. If you explicitly collect mobile phone numbers, you could use text messaging through a mobile-ready Infusionsoft App.
Above all, you want to have leverage the Nurturing Prospects stage close the gap between your lead magnets and your actual products and services. This is the time and place to share stories, case studies and supporting points on how your products and services solve a lead’s problems.
When landing pages and calls to action and lead nurturing sequences all align together to a your lead’s desire to solve their problems, you will see high conversions.
Lastly, never forget that leads are people, too. They are busy and aren’t always ready for the marketing that you will send them. Always respect their privacy and give them an easy way to manage the types of follow-up they receive, such as using Automation Links to encourage them to opt-out from further marketing.
Read more about this post, Lifecycle Marketing: Nurture Prospects to Increase Sales on The Infusionsoft Blog.