Every single one of us can surely think of a few situations when we felt less-than-valued by the companies trying to earn our business. Those companies certainly don’t inspire confidence and we certainly don’t want to give them our money. So let’s focus on ways that your business can avoid that by building lead nurturing campaigns that help leads trust you and feel confident in your business.
Here are 5 things every business can start doing right now to show leads that you actually want to help them find the best solution — even if that solution isn’t you.
1) Start With a Proper Offer
Before you even get to nurturing, you need to generate leads to be nurtured. When running ads, a unique and valuable offer with a strong call to action entices more people to engage with your business and gives you your first opportunity to demonstrate why you’re the best option.
Whatever your offer is, actually make it worth their time and/or money. Don’t pretend you can give someone the deal of a lifetime unless you really can. People sniff out bad deals and offers all the time.
So how do you make a good first impression and present a solid offer? Here’s 2 simple tips.
First, don’t try to be sneaky in your language or offer. Yes, you want to catch people’s attention and get them interested in learning more. But clickbait is not a sustainable model for generating leads or building trust. You’ll likely just slow down the nurturing process because the people who do give you their info won’t be the right type of leads.
Second, make it easy to follow through on your call to action. Even if you get people to hit a landing page with your initial ad, the next steps can’t ask too much of them. “Too much” is, of course, subjective. It ultimately depends on what your business actually does and what you’re giving people in exchange for their information.
Just remember that the more hoops people have to jump through, the fewer leads you’ll end up with. And the ones you do get still might be annoyed with you.
2) Don’t Leave Leads Waiting
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. (You’ll hear it from basically anyone who knows anything about nurturing leads.) You need to get in touch with leads as quickly as possible!
Whether for good or for bad, we live in the time of instant answers. And we’re all busier than ever, which makes our time feel even more valuable. The longer someone has to wait to hear from a sales rep or the longer it takes for them to set an appointment with you, the more likely it is they’ll start exploring other options. And let’s be honest: They probably contacted a handful of companies for more info at the same time they contacted you.
Immediate phone calls sound nice, but that’s hardly every scalable. And follow-up emails are okay for certain things but often get lost or ignored. For instantly starting conversations with leads, you need to be texting.
Skipio’s business texting platform enables you to, for example, set up customized texts to automatically go out anytime someone fills out a lead form. That way you start building rapport and learning about someone’s needs within minutes, no matter the time of day.
3) Consistently Talk With Leads
Obviously no business intentionally ignores their leads. But still, hours, days, and even weeks pass by the time some leads get contacted. That’s why we love when Skipio clients use our platform to automatically reach out to every new lead via text. But it’s not just the initial outreach you need to make airtight.
Say someone books an appointment to meet with you, but they never show up. That lead is not suddenly a lost cause or someone you can forget about. You now need to get them back on the calendar. Or at the very least you need to have a conversation to see if they’re even interested in that. The same goes for cancellations. Don’t let those leads turn cold!
By developing a specific cold lead campaign within their overall nurturing strategy, Skipio helped Krista Mashore Coaching re-schedule appointments with leads who no-showed to phone calls. Before, those leads were never contacted again. But with this campaign in place, Krista Mashore Coaching generated an additional $49,000 in just 30 days. By following up with those no-show leads, everybody won.
No, you likely won’t be able to stay in touch with every single lead. But basically every business can do a better job of reaching out and following up.
4) Be Patient With Your Sales Pitch
Immediately trying to get someone to buy is the opposite of nurturing. Now, this tip is most applicable to businesses with higher priced products/services — think long-term memberships, subscriptions, or contracts that require a certain level of commitment. None of those are purchases that people take lightly.
If you just got someone’s information and immediately try to get them to purchase, even if they’re technically the perfect customer, they’ll be turned off pretty fast. You must take the time to actually listen to them and their potential questions or concerns.
Build off the initial offer and reason they got in touch with you. Prompt them to ask questions and guide the conversation in a direction so that you can continue demonstrating the real value the business offers and give them the best solution.
5) Share Relevant Examples and Information
Many businesses want to get people to an appointment or consultation — and then there’s a call to action to buy. For those businesses, the appointment/consultation is a specific milestone of the lead nurturing campaign. To get there, you need to focus on the value you provide. This means answering questions quickly and thoroughly and preemptively addressing concerns.
Some leads need to see real life use cases and customer stories, if only to gauge the credibility of your business. Others need examples of how they specifically will benefit from working with you. (Your marketing specialist or team should have plenty of sales enablement material at the ready for you to use.)
No matter the info they ask for or you voluntarily share, be honest about what’s actually possible. And if during your conversations and nurturing you find out that someone isn’t a good fit for your business, don’t try to turn them into a customer anyway.
You waste everyone’s time and money if you try to close that sale. Not to mention the potential damage to the business’s reputation when people realize you’re trying to take advantage of them for a profit. Instead, point them in the direction of a business that does what they need. That way you don’t burn any bridges and build a reputation of integrity.
Ultimately, leads simply want to know if you can solve their problems and do right by them as a customer. When you optimize your lead nurturing and create lead nurturing campaigns that reflect these principles in every step, people notice. And they choose you as their solution.
