Lead nurturing: The answer to increased conversions

When customers first discover your business, they might not be ready to commit. It’s rare for sales to happen straight away. In fact, only 10 per cent of leads convert at the first point of contact. By letting the remainder fall off your radar, you could be missing out on important future customers.

Lead nurturing means keeping in touch with people who are already curious about your wares, and strengthening the relationship to convert them from an interested viewer to loyal customer.

Provide valuable content

One way to do this is to capture the lead upon first meeting by offering valuable content. Incentivise the visitor to share contact information with you using free whitepapers or access to gated material.

Consider what is most important to your customer in relation to your product or service. For example, a hair salon could provide tips on keeping hair lustrous in winter, while an accountant could offer up information on how to reduce taxes. Identify your ideal customer’s pain points and provide solutions to their problems. The lead will hopefully find the free advice useful and reward you with their loyalty.  

Capture their details in your database marketing system (easily done for Bloomtools clients), with a simple sign-up form on your website (reccommended within your websites design).

Follow up with leads

After capturing customer contact information, be sure to regularly follow up ( with trigger and scheduled emails, sms and phone calls) to stay top of mind and encourage them back again. Differentiate between active customers, hot leads and casual visitors. Continue to offer value – through content, offers and access to insider events. You should be able to gauge how much is enough by noting the response to your email campaigns, such as open rates and clickthroughs.  If you use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) you could also set this sequence of events up so you could guage each step and results (talk to your Bloomtools consultant about trialing the Bloomtools CRM system).

Automate customer outreach

You can automate much of this process using database marketing. Target your customers based on their individual information to maintain relevance. You can segment your customers by demographic or past behaviour to ensure you are optimising your communications with them.

Lead marketing is an important part of any marketing campaign. It ensures you do not waste earlier efforts and, if done in the correct way, can create customers who spread the word about your business.