Lead nurturing is a crucial way of engaging with the prospects that are poised to make purchase from you down the road. Today it has become an indisputable requirement for all the major fast growing businesses. The process has evolved over a period of time and today it has acquired so many dimensions that it can be used to accomplish much more than merely educating prospects. Let us explore the different ways it can be leveraged to get the maximum benefits.

Lead nurturing at the initial phase of sales process

Starting early in terms of nurturing the leads that have been captured always helps. It's about automating the marketing process right from the beginning and simplifying the process of building relationships with the prospects. Suppose a lead is generated. It might come through a website, trade-show, referrals, webinars, social media or somewhere else. Now the lead gets an automated, introductory mail from your sales team. Later on a follow-up mail is also sent out (the time gap depends on the sales cycle length) accompanied by another piece of informational content (for example, a white paper or a leaflet) to educate the prospect about the how your product or service can help solve a problem. More follow-up mails can be sent from time to time with additional content to move the prospect swiftly through the sales funnel.

So you have already established an engagement with the prospect. And now when the prospect is ready to buy, you will not have any problem reaching out.

Using lead nurturing program to beat competition

Your prospects undoubtedly look at other vendors before making a decision. But you can definitely use lead nurturing campaigns to stand out from others. Your marketing team has perhaps already started to prepare competitive analysis documentation, use it for adding value to your lead nurturing program. You can capture competitor information through a CRM system or track your competitor online and dish out messaging specific to each competitor.

You can provide free trials while you are nurturing your leads. This can be a really effective marketing strategy as it has proved time and again that those who opt for free trials are way more likely to buy than those just browsing your website. You can utilize the trial period to offer helpful tips to the prospects to enhance their experience and engage with them in a more fruitful way. Trials have fixed time frames and you can design your lead nurturing campaign accordingly to trigger results. Say you send out an email to the prospect two weeks before the trial ends intimidating about the trial cessation and encouraging a purchase of the full version. If you do not get a reply immediately, you can send always send out a more hard-sell email a few days later. This way you can also involve the marketing people in the sales process.

Conclusion

There are several ways to design and use lead nurturing campaigns to realize company's bottom line that is to close as many deals as possible and generate revenue.

Author's Bio: 

Celena Watson - Passionate writer and blogger. I have written on many different topics which include demand generation, outbound sales, inbound sales, lead management, lead nurturing, inside sales, demand generation and many more. For more info visit online reputation management