What would you say to a guy who wonders why a girl is not speaking to him after proposing to her on their first date?

I'm sure you would tell him that no girl is going to marry a guy without first getting to know him. That is the whole point of dating. It is for the couple to get to know one another so that they can determine whether they are compatible.

It is designed to build TRUST!

And if it is not there, marriage proposals are definitely off the cards.  

Yet so many marketers do just this.

They get the email addresses or phone numbers of potential customers and immediately propose to them on the first date.

Customers, just like relationship partners want to be wooed. They want to be warmed up first. They want to get to know the person or brand pursuing them. This is the way that gentlemen do it. And today, consumers are looking for brands that are gentlemen, not players.

Leads do not become customers automatically. Just because someone has shown an interest in some of the free content you offer, does not mean that they are automatically ready to buy.

As you can see in the above diagram, only 10% of leads actually become paid customers.

And it takes a lot of hard marketing work to get them from a lead to a customer. That 10% needs to be worked for. And the way that we work for it is through lead nurturing.

Having a lead without lead nurturing is like asking a girl for her number but never calling her and then wondering why she does not marry you...  Just because she gave you her number does not mean that she is automatically going to marry you.

What is the problem?

Yip, she does not know you.

You will have to make use of that number many many times to pursue relationship with her before she is ready to marry you.

“Lead Nurturing” sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc.

Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to pre-qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.

Another definition: A lead nurturing email campaign is an automated, personalized, email campaign that marketers use to take users on a journey that may impact their buying behavior.

So, essentially, lead nurturing is the dating phase of the relationship where you carefully craft content and send it to your  leads at just the right times in order to prepare them to be proposed to by your sales team, or by your sales pages.  

As a marketer, you definitely want to capture as much lead information for as many people on your site as you can, but not
everyone is ready to talk to sales.

Getting leads is awesome - but not all leads are at the point where they can be considered sales-ready.

Only 5% - 25% of the traffic on your site is actually ready to do business with you at that moment; the rest are doing research.

By definition, lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey, positioning your company as the best (and safest) choice to enable them to achieve their objectives.

An effective nurturing process actively moves the prospects you’ve created through your marketing and lead generation efforts, through a sales development process to the point where they become paying customers.

So the goal of lead generation is to use a lead magnet to capture the contact details of potential customers. Then they become leads.

The goal of lead nurturing is to then feed those leads strategic content and engagement in order to prepare them for sales.

So, once you have the email address of a lead, the goal is to use that email address to form a relationship with them.

The first email you need to send is a welcome email and a link to whichever lead magnet they signed up for.

Thereafter, you need a clear strategy in place to nurture them along the sales funnel. The ultimate goal is to prepare them to engage with your sales team so they can be converted into a customer.

The email marketing strategy is based on building trust with the lead. They need to see you and your brand as one they can rely on to solve their problem.

And the best way to do this is by:

- Educating
- Informing
- Engaging

The content that you share with your leads via email should be geared towards:

1. Educating them about their problem and what solutions there are to fix them, as well as how you can help with that.  

2. Informing them of new products you offer, promotions you are running, and so forth.

3. And of course, getting them to engage you by asking them questions in your email for them to respond to, getting them to view a video and share their comments, completing a quiz, and so forth.

In this way you can build up a trust relationship with them that is built around the knowledge that you understand them and their problem (educate), that you have the tools that can help them (inform), and that it is easy and fun to relate to you (engage).  

This is the strategy of Lead Nurturing.

As you can see in the above example, a lead nurture campaign involves a planned set of emails that go out to new leads from the first day that they become leads.

This will be different for every business, but the principle is the same. You want to drip feed your leads content that will help them gain trust in you and show them that you can actually help them.

Through email you point them to different forms of content that you have created. Some of the content you can share with them includes:

Social media posts
Infographics
Blog posts
Informational emails
Podcasts
Free Videos
Free Webinars
Free courses
Free trials
Free ebooks, white papers, or case studies
Free consultations
Free services
Etc.

Throughout this process you may also schedule individual sales calls or direct emails to specific leads based on the steps they take.

For example, one lead my watch a video and make a specific comment on it. Based on that you will gain information about that lead which may make them ready for a sales call. Or another lead may take your free course and complete it. Based on that you can then email them to book a video call to chat about their results and what they can do to move forward with one of your paid products.

As we have said, the goal of a nurture campaign is to prepare leads for sales calls. But each lead will get ready at different points from different pieces of content. For this reason you need to have a variety of lead nurturing content that you can use to nurture your leads.

You can see some more examples of content in the image below.

So one of the powerful things about lead nurture software and tools is that many of them provide tons of data about each lead. Such as:

Name
Birthdate
Age
Lead magnets downloaded
Time of lead capture
Content viewed
When exactly what content is being viewed.
Responses to emails
Comments on social media content

These are just some of the powerful metrics that marketing automation software can provide the marketer with.

With this information marketers can carefully plan strategies which engage different customers in ways that are perfect for each step that they take. Such strategies are more likely to nurture leads effectively and ultimately produce successful sales results.

See below an example of the different types of metrics that lead nurturing can produce at the different phases in the process.

Lead nurture campaigns are designed by thinking about the steps that you want buyers to take and the content that you will feed to them after each step.

You will think through all the potential steps that they could take or the things they could be thinking about and develop a piece of content or an engagement for each one.

The purpose is to help them overcome any objections that they may have about purchasing your product or service.

1. Maybe this brand wont really know how to help me?
2. What if I am not happy with the service after a few days?
3. Will it not be too expensive for me long term?
4. What if their strategy works for others by not for me?
5. What if I am just not clever enough to succeed with their programme?
6. What if it is too difficult to learn?
7. What if I don't have enough time to do it?

In order to help them overcome objections, a lead nurturing campaign should educate consumers about their problem and the solutions there are to fixing it, how you are the best brand to help them overcome those problems, and provide opportunities for engagement so that they can get to know you and trust you.

Then there will be nothing left for them to resist becoming a customer.

See examples below.

As you can see in the above diagram there are 5 steps in this campaign. Each step is designed to get the lead to a place where they will be ready for a sales pitch.

1.1 Designed to capture their contact details and provide valuable info to help them solve their problem (show that you are an authority and have a plan to help them)
1.2 Designed to establish communication with them via Email and invite engagement.
1.3 Designed to educate, inform, and engage them for 7 days after first contact.
1.4 Designed to provide them with something personal that adds great value and moves them closer to solving their problem. Generosity is a great way to set yourself apart from other brands. Key thing is to help them understand the key things that they need help with to solve their problem and achieve success. (individual, personal, specific)
1.5 Designed to discuss a plan with them to achieve their goal and pitch a paid product.

Design your first lead nurture campaign for your brand.

Design it to integrate with your website home page and make use of the lead magnet you decided to create in chapter 8.

See more info here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zYt6xpRAejw9krQoG1CJ-r-UubW8PujX/view?usp=sharing 

One of the problems with mass email marketing is that you miss the opportunity to connect with leads as soon as they subscribe, which is when they’re most interested in hearing from you.

Research shows that the odds of a lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are 21 times greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after an inbound lead converts on your website.

The benefits of immediate follow up calls seem quite evident, but -- despite this -- most organizations still aren’t acting very quickly.

Consider the following stats:

• The average first response time of B2B companies to their leads is 42 hours
• Only 37% of companies respond to their leads within an hour
• 24% of companies take more than 24 hours
• 23% of the companies never respond at all

Automated lead nurturing solves for all of this. Do it well, and you’ll never miss another good-fit lead again!

People do business with businesses they know and trust.

The first time someone converts on your website, the likelihood that they really know who you are or understand why they should do business with you is pretty slim.

Lead nurturing is an opportunity to show that you are an expert in your field.

66% of buyers indicate that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in choosing a solution provider.

Get off on the right foot and don’t let leads slip through the cracks with an automated lead nurturing campaign.

Lead nurturing emails are a great way to learn more about your leads - what challenges are they facing?

What features or products are they interested in?

By presenting different questions or types of content and seeing who responds to what, you can qualify your leads and set yourself up for warmer sales conversations.

Similarly, you can learn more about your leads via this email nurturing and segment your emails going forward on what you learn to have more effective communications going forward.

As mentioned earlier in this ebook, segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue, so you should take any opportunity you have to segment your leads.

Automated lead nurturing is a great way to maintain engagement when a lead has already made the move to interact with you.

And, if that lead has stopped visiting your site or reviewing your offerings, lead nurturing is a great way to remind them about your business.

Market2Lead found that nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle.

Lead nurturing represents a way for the marketing team to help with the sales process and nurture more leads through the sales funnel.

In the case of past customers, lead nurturing offers a way to broaden that customer’s awareness of what you offer.

The same Market2Lead study found that nurtured leads have a 9% higher average deal size, showing that there is an opportunity to not only increase the number of sales but the size of sales using lead nurturing.

Even though you’re emailing lists of existing leads, lead nurturing has the potential to attract new website visitors and generate new leads.

Especially if you’re doing a good job of sharing valuable content, your leads are likely to forward your email along to coworkers or friends, expanding your reach and attracting new people into your business.