The process of converting leads into customers can be tricky. In order to convince your leads to purchase from you, you need to properly nurture and educate them about your company's offerings. Unfortunately, too many businesses go overboard in how they present their products or services. Instead of being helpful and accommodating, they annoy customers with irrelevant content.
There is a fine line between providing valuable information to leads and being pushy or irritating. To avoid crossing that line, you'll want to be aware of the mistakes you may be making that are driving your leads away. Simple blunders like sending too many emails, failing to consider the various stages of the buyer's journey, and not providing tailored content can cause your potential clients to become infuriated with your marketing.
Let's take a look at a few of the biggest lead nurturing mistakes you may be making, and see what you can do to get back on your customers' good side!
Sending emails is one of the best ways to connect with your leads. Since someone generally needs to express interest in your business in order to receive email correspondence, you'll know you're connecting with highly qualified leads through this channel. However, even interested leads don't want to be bombarded with low-quality content multiple times a day.
Too many companies believe they'll get a sale simply by sending out dozens of emails every week. Unfortunately, focusing on quantity over quality rarely works out well. Sending too many emails can easily annoy your recipients, causing them to ignore your messages or even unsubscribe.
To get the most out of your email list, you'll want to focus on sending high-quality emails a few times a week at most. To accommodate your leads' various needs, you can segment your lists and send more emails to individuals who have expressed greater interest in your content. Rather than maximizing the number of emails you send out, try to send extremely valuable and interesting messages each and every time. Make sure they are all informative, have great headlines, and help the recipient in some way.
Convincing a lead to become a customer isn't always something that happens overnight. It takes time for a lead to decide whether or not a purchase is right for them, especially if it's a substantial investment. If you properly nurture a lead, however, they'll be able to get the information they need to come to the right conclusion.
Unfortunately, many companies forget that there are steps between becoming a lead and purchasing a product. Each stage of the buyer's journey is important in moving a lead through the process of purchasing. When just one phase is forgotten about or ignored, the lead can fall out of the sales funnel, meaning your company has lost a potential sale. If you're immediately jumping from the introduction to purchasing phases, you could be losing a lot of otherwise qualified leads.
Leads often become annoyed when they feel like a company is just trying to take their money. In order to combat this and ensure your leads are getting the content they need, you'll want to provide them with relevant information at each phase of the buyer's journey, such as with these examples from Hubspot. You can do this using everything from emails and blog posts to videos and reviews. Listen to what your leads are looking for and what questions they have, and do your best to provide them with the right answers.
Although most of your leads may be looking for similar solutions to the same set of problems, they're going to travel through the education phases of the buyer's journey differently. Since everyone responds more to some content forms than others, you want to ensure you're providing various kinds of information for each individual to engage with.
Many companies stick to the content forms that are easiest to create. Media like blog posts and newsletters can be completed more quickly than webinars and videos, but they can leave a major portion of your target audience without the information they're looking for. If your target audience enjoys absorbing content in a way that you're not producing, they're going to turn to competitors who are providing a better experience.
To resolve this, you'll want to get to know the members of your target audience well enough to understand how they like to view their content. Blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics, and podcasts are just a few of the options you should consider when determining what content to create. You'll also want to diversify the way you send that content to your target audience members, using the channels they spend the most time on. This means taking advantage of social media, email, and more.
When a lead first comes to your company, the nurturing process should immediately begin. Depending on how they've expressed interest so far, you'll want to start sending them information about the products and services you offer. However, just as you don't want to bombard them with message after message, you also don't want to completely ignore them.
Having a lead nurturing process in place is important for ensuring your target audience members get the content they need to make a purchasing decision. If you're simply collecting leads and hoping they come to the conclusion to buy on their own, you're not going to see many successful sales. Instead, your leads will forget about your offerings and probably buy from someone else.
In order to successfully convert your leads into paying customers, you need to find the right amount of content to share. You can do this by testing the frequency with which you send content, experimenting with different channels, and setting up automation features to ensure messages are sent on time, such as in the above example from Infusionsoft. Through establishing a specific lead nurturing process for your target audience members, you can get them the content they need to make the right purchasing decisions.
Nurturing your leads sets the foundation for the rest of your relationship with your customers. If you annoy them in the early stages, they may be unlikely to ever return to your company. In order to make a great first impression and convince them to buy, you'll have to give them the content they need right when they want it most.
Let's recap the four mistakes you may be making when nurturing your leads. You might be:
How do you think fixing these mistakes will improve your sales? Let us know in the comments section below!
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