Leads who consistently engage with your business via phone calls, emails, or content consumption are considered warm while leads who resist interaction are considered cold. Although warm leads are easier to convert, that doesn’t mean you should give up on cold leads. Instead, you should bolster your lead nurturing strategy.
Sharing content like newsletters, blog articles, and social media posts is a critical aspect of lead nurturing. Anything you can do to revive or maintain interest in your business is a step in the right direction. However, you don’t want to run the risk of bombarding cold leads with unwanted or irrelevant content. Personalization is key – that’s what makes lead nurturing a tricky, time-consuming process. So how do you go about it?
To help you kickstart your lead nurturing initiative, we’ve compiled a list of steps below.
Step 1: Research
Before making contact, it’s imperative that you research your lead. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to personalize your messaging. In particular, focus on their interests and pain points. Figure out how to present your products as solutions to their problems.
Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas
Your first contact is critical. Contrary to what you may believe, your sales pitch should take a backseat. Including a link to an interesting article or inviting them to an event or webinar is a good way to show you’re trying to help them. Figure out what you have to offer them before making contact.
Step 3: Reach Out
It should be clear from the onset that you want to establish a relationship, not just generate a sale. To that end, your objective should be to provide value. Be sure to include relevant content, like a link to an article or an infographic, to demonstrate your interest in helping them.
Step 4: Reinforce Engagement
Sustain their interest with constant communication. Email lists are particularly helpful in this regard as they enable you to send automated or targeted messages on a regular basis. This keeps them thinking about your business – and pushes them closer to a sale. But how do you know they’re opening your messages? Visual Visitor can tell you which recipients are opening your emails and visiting your website. You can use this information to track engagement, monitor cold leads, and refine your email marketing strategy.
Step 5: Schedule Interactions
Automated emails are a great way to keep leads engaged but personalized messages will always be more effective. Ideally, you should find a balance between the two. The trick is to contact them regularly and take note of any changes which may alter your relationship. Their pain points are liable to change. Make sure you’re addressing them in your messages.
Step 6: Be Transparent About Pricing
Many leads will lose interest if they can’t find pricing details listed online. If you cannot divulge the exact price, you should at least be able to give an estimate. This will encourage cold leads to take the next step – or disappear altogether. This will allow you to focus on the leads that are most likely to become customers.
Step 7: Define Success Beyond Sales
Ostensibly the goal of lead nurturing is to increase sales. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the milestones which pave the way to sales. Keeping your leads engaged means getting them to say yes to little things along the way. Every time they open your emails, visit your website, or answer your phone calls, they’re saying yes to what you have to offer. Increasing these engagements is the key to keeping leads warm.
Step 8: Have an Answer for “Why Now?”
Indecision is the primary reason that leads go cold. They’re interested in your products but they don’t have a compelling reason to go through with the purchase right now. Consequently, it’s your job to give them that reason. How does acting quickly benefit them? You’d better have an answer.
Step 9: Use Visual Visitor
Warming up cold leads is a time-consuming process. And without sales intelligence software, how will you know your efforts are working? Fortunately, Visual Visitor can help you each step of the way. Our prospecting and intent data work in tandem to put you in touch with the right people at the right time. And once you’ve initiated contact, we can identify the leads who are opening your emails and visiting your website. In effect, we can tell you which leads are warming up. You can use this data to boost your conversion rate and increase your sales.
What’s the secret to warming up cold leads? Sales Intelligence software. Sign up for a free demo today and find out what you’re missing.