You’ll never remember to follow up with every prospect or customer at the exact right time. It’s just not going to happen! That’s why automated lead nurturing exists.
When you add automation to lead nurturing through texting, you save even more time and mental energy. Time and energy that you put toward other revenue-generating activities. As an added bonus, because it’s texting, you also close more sales.
But don’t think that automation stands in the way of complete personalization. After all, you chose texting as your method of outreach for a reason.
Here’s how to create lead nurturing messages that show your human-ness within an automated workflow.
Use Templates and Fully Customize Them
Building lead nurturing workflows with messaging templates is great! You should definitely use them — whether they’re written by you, someone else on your team, or some rando online who you trust.
The whole reason you’re texting people instead of just emailing or calling is because of the instant, personal connections. Leads respond when messages feel relevant and personal to them.
So without customizing a template to your tone, voice, and the specific situation, it sounds generic and even robotic. People quickly pick up on those issues and ignore such messages.
Focus on Pronouns Such as You, Your, and Yours
Research shows that sales professionals who use “customer-first” language get more conversions. And it makes sense! People want to know you care about them, not just their money.
When you naturally include pronouns like “you” and “your” and individualize messages to their needs, they notice. Leads might not fully realize that this language affects their decision-making, but small details like this do matter.
Don’t Be Weird About Personalization
Sometimes automated messages, whether they’re emails or texts, sound off because there’s too much personalization happening.
Like think about a time when a company was trying to sell to you and they awkwardly forced in your first name. Maybe it was used at a weird point in a sentence or they included it too many times.
That being said, definitely use people’s names along with other bits of personal info you have stored in your CRM. However, personalization done poorly makes it seem like someone was lazy with a template or even that AI wrote the message. So, write your texts how you talk and don’t take the scheduling aspect into account — apart from keeping your words consistent with timing.
Test Timing and Cadence
Many people will claim to have the “perfect workflow” or a “foolproof schedule” for lead nurturing. But are those plans based around text-based follow-up? Do they account for what customers actually expect and prefer for communication?
While there are certainly guidelines to follow, like not texting people at 5 am, outreach needs will vary, even between lead sources. Automated text nurturing rightfully varies from automated email nurturing, which more marketers and sales professionals are familiar with.
For example, think about the natural progression of a conversation. When you start automated text nurturing, schedule messages for normal business hours when you know you’ll be available to respond to anyone who engages. Then logically go through how long you would wait to reach out again if you were going to manually send a follow-up text.
From there, keep testing your timing and follow-up cadences. It takes time to find the sweet spots of outreach and follow-up.
At some point you may write an awesome message that you’re sure will get responses, but then it bombs. The simple solution is often changing the timing. Maybe people aren’t responding because you scheduled it for when a lot of them are commuting.
Improve your entire team’s lead nurturing
Just like with other nurturing strategies and methods, a text that works one day with one group of leads might not have quite the same success with different people. But that’s why you accumulate data, keep learning, and testing!
Skipio makes this easy for an entire team to do. Check out Skipio for teams and learn how to integrate our platform with your current systems for the best automated lead nurturing available.
