What’s Lead Nurturing and how it changes your sales game in 2021? [Tips and Tools]   Many of us used to think about the generated lead as a closed sale. Convinced of how good our pitch is, we send...

What’s Lead Nurturing and how it changes your sales game in 2021? [Tips and Tools]

 

Many of us used to think about the generated lead as a closed sale. Convinced of how good our pitch is, we send it and almost open the champagne celebrating the closed deal. Unfortunately, the reality sometimes hits hard and makes us realize how deep the gap between these two is. But there’s a way to avoid the disappointment of too-high expectations – diving more into lead nurturing. But what it really is and what tools the market offers to automate this process?

 

It’s actually nothing weird that companies worldwide admit that their biggest goal is to convert the leads into paying customers (74%, according to Hubspot). Products and services we create are not just staring at them; they should bring us a stable revenue. That’s why staying in an early stage of a lead funnel is the biggest headache of sales teams – Marketo research says about 80% of leads will never turn into a closed deal. What’s more, they also say 96% of website visitors aren’t ready to make a purchase decision. The same goes for marketing efforts – 53% of teams researched by BrightTalk give more than half of their budgets to lead generation. These high numbers show clearly that teams are sometimes like the child in a mist when it comes to a successful customer journey.

 

That’s why we need to put more effort into reinforcing the relationships with our potential customers, no matter the sales funnel stage. And here, the lead nurturing comes with a helping hand.

 

So, what’s lead nurturing exactly about?

 

The idea behind lead nurturing is to cultivate the relationships between the prospects and our offer. Once the seed is planted, we need to take care of it to get accepted and pick the fruit. The same is with our messages: we build trust based on listening to the prospects’ needs to provide them with answers necessary to make a purchase decision. It’s about ensuring they understand the value of our offer before the sales reps contact them.

 

But it’s not just about increasing the click-through rate. Of course, it’s exceptionally nice to see the rates are going higher and higher, but what we really get because of implementing a lead nurturing strategy is even more effective and adaptive communication on various lead funnel stages.

 

Luckily, the developing technology helps us make our messages more personalized. It allows us to create the belief in customers’ heads that we don’t only want to sell them the product or service. Instead, they’re certain we hear their needs and genuinely understand them. In the end, we can offer a solution that solves their problems.

 

Implementing a lead nurturing campaign, you can complement your offer on various stages of the lead funnel, according to changing users’ needs. By making these interactions more meaningful, you get an excellent opportunity to catch their eye without sending an endless email chain of just plain offers. And you’ll be positively surprised how the ROI increase doesn’t compare with the time and effort put into the communication.

 

What is automated lead nurturing?

 

Running effective lead nurturing campaigns helps make sure the leads are squeezed at their most and no piece of valuable content is wasted just because we send them to the person who’s vaguely aware of the solution we’re offering.

 

Thankfully, the technology makes reaching potential customers way easier. Using marketing automation tools, we can track the leads and their decisions, divide them into segments based on interaction and their niches and grade them. All to make sure our efforts and the copy we send are precisely tailored to the users’ needs.

 

Of course, it takes a while to set up the automatic lead nurturing solution. However, the effort and save time are worth it – the tools help us react appropriately to the particular stage of the sales funnel.

 

Many examples show how valuable is implementing a successful lead nurturing strategy. Centrics IT switched to automated solutions that directed the leads straight from different landing pages to the appropriate sales reps. They achieved a 59% increase in lead generation and generated $1.5 million in revenue thanks to the new technology. Impressive!

 

How do you create a lead nurturing campaign?

 

A successful lead nurturing campaign is based on carefully crafted steps. Going through them makes you sure you’ll see the increased conversion rate in the end. Let’s dive into them!

 

Understanding a sales cycle – each step of the buyers’ journey gives us the unique opportunity to provide the potential customers with the information they can engage with, Determining a persona – before crafting and sending the content, you should know what’s the audience you want to target, what are their needs and pain points, Setting goals – having unclear expectations leads the sales to achieve nothing, at least nothing scalable. However, if we set a plan based on numbers, e.g., We increase (rate) by X percent over X months, we’ll get the opportunity to adjust our actions to reach it, Content mapping – many companies rely on the same content on each lead generation stage. It’s a common mistake – our message should be adjusted to the specific personas and answer their needs and pain points. They should feel they’re informed about the mission of our product or service, Lead nurturing messages – lead nurturing is not about sending an endless chain of emails to the potential customers, convincing them they should choose us, not the competitors. Carefully consider the number of messages you’ll send to the specific group of prospects and what to highlight in the copy, implement the best practices for your lead nurturing campaign using the right email marketing tools such as Post SMTP (the best email marketing plugin for your WordPress website), Sendinblue, etc. – implement the best practices for your lead nurturing campaign using the automaton tools, Testing – always remember to take a look at what you send to avoid mistakes in spelling or grammar, Collect the data and analyze it – using an automated solution, you’ll get the chance to collect valuable data on various user behavior, like CTR, conversion rate, or unsubscribe rate. Analyze it to deliver even more effective further results.

 

What’s the best lead nurturing tool for my team?

We’re aware that lead nurturing may be something new for sales teams. That’s why we prepared a list of tools that make this process automated and more accessible to maintain successfully.

#1. Sellizer

Significant support for success-oriented sales teams. Sellizer notifies you once the proposal is opened so that you can contact the prospects right after and complement the offer sent before. Using it, you’ll never miss any chance to get in touch with them to do your best to turn the lead into a closed deal.

 

Sellizer offers you fully-featured sales support due to the:

proposal management, real-time notifications right after the proposal are open (both SMS and emails), proposal analytics, sales automation, contact management, lead forms, automatic follow-ups, CRM and sales tools integrations, full API access and many more.

Using Sellizer, you won’t have to worry your message hit the right spot. Once you get notified, you’ll get an opportunity to spread the message: show the advantages of your products or service and clear the doubts if needed. On the other side, you’ll be able to conclude the unopened proposals, e.g., adjust the copy to make it even more catchy.

Besides the stats you’ve never accessed before, Sellizer provides you with the features that streamline the team’s workflow, like automation and analytics. Integrating it with your CRM software will make both tools even more powerful, which turn into a higher proposal opening rate and more closed deals for sure.

Sellizer is free to try for 14 days – it’s enough to convince you that’s exactly what you need to improve the sales results.

Sellizer offer the following pricing plans (yearly billed):

Early – $5 per seat per month, Solo – $22 per seat per month, Team – $35 per seat per month, Entreprise  – customized pricing

#2. Lusha

Lusha gives you instant access to the contacts adequate for your company. The tool provides you with information from B2B websites and social networks, all aligned to CCPA and GDPR.

The app is a website extension that helps you find prospects around the web. It’s based on credits: one credit means one contact detail.

 

It’s packed with many different features that streamline sales work:

email addresses and phone numbers, contact exporting, prospecting, saving contacts to your CRM system (it integrates with tools like Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Hubspot), bulk data enrichment, team management, full API access.

 

Lusha’s pricing features the following paid plans (billed yearly):

Starter – a free one with limited features, Professional – $71 per user per month, 80 credits, Premium – $79 per user per month – 100 credits, Custom pricing.

#3. Leadboxer

Leadboxer is a sales workflow platform that identifies and qualifies the leads. Based on big data and their Leadscore, it segments the leads based on the likelihood of the deal will be closed in the future. All to make your brand interactions even more tailored.

The tool tracks each digital step your potential customers are doing towards your brand and segments them based on their behavior. It helps you provide them with information relevant to the sales funnel stage they’ve been already at.

 

What distinguishes Leadboxer on the market:

unlimited contacts, events – behavioral signals like button clicks, lead segmentation, Leadscore, firmographic data like email addresses or revenue estimates, integrations.

 

Consider one of the Leadboxer’s pricing plans (billed annually):

Basic – $195 per user per month, Premium – $495 per user per month.

#4. Salesflare

Easy to use CRM system that offers automated follow-up suggestions for emails that remain unanswered. It keeps tracking the leads automatically so that you gain complete control over the sales pipeline.

It keeps all the essential data in one place and presents all of them on a visual dashboard. Thanks to the live notifications, you’ll stay up to date with how the potential customers are behaving towards your offer.

 

Salesflare offers your company:

campaign management, lead generation and categorization, contact database, automatic reminders, auto-responders, email marketing.

You can get Salesflare in one of the pricing plans (billed annually):

Growth – $29 per user per month, Pro – $49 per user per month, Entreprise – $99 per user per month.

#5. SharpSpring

Simple yet powerful marketing automation suite that helps your company stay on track with the conversion number. It sends emails right at every stage of the sales process to help your sales team turn the campaigns into conversations.

Companies appreciate the SharpSpring email generator that helps them create actionable messages that streamline the email marketing campaigns. It also tracks the sending results that allow reacting according to the users’ behavior.

 

Besides powerful email marketing, SharpSpring offers as well:

CRM automation, dynamic forms, VisitorID that recognizes the contact details of website visitors, CRM integrations, landing pages building, rich-data analytics and more.

Small businesses can get SharpSpring for $399 per month, billed yearly.

 

Conclusion

Once your sales strategy is implemented and the content is written, it doesn’t ensure it will work perfectly in the long run. To achieve more, it should be carefully adjusted based on the potential customers’ needs. Tracking the users’ behavior on each step of their Buyer Journey allows you to create the messages that provide them with details that sell the product or service you offer and make them sure they know how it really works and meets their expectations.

Remember that lead nurturing is not just another step of a sales process. It’s about building healthy and long-lasting relationships with potential customers. It’s way easier to talk to the people who understand your message, isn’t it?

The post Best Lead Nurturing Software you’ll actually use appeared first on Customer Acquisition for Startups and Ecommerce - the Best Experts and tools on Board.

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