As an SME you rely on your sales and marketing efforts to attract new leads and turn them into paying customers. By making lead nurturing an integral part of your inbound marketing strategy, you can convert more leads into sales and turn them into returning customers. Read on to learn more about lead nurturing and how it can help your business.

What is lead nurturing?

The purpose of lead nurturing is to build long-lasting relationships that turn leads into loyal customers. Lead nurturing takes your lead generation processes one step further and converts your hard work into visible profits. It is estimated that those who stop at generation lose on average 80% of the leads collected, whilst those who practice nurturing see around a 50% increase in sales.

Why does lead nurturing work?

• Nurturing helps you to understand more about your leads and demonstrate how your services can solve or reduce their problems. By providing useful information you are laying the foundations of a trusting relationship with your future customers.
• Once you have received an enquiry from a lead, studies show that the longer it takes to respond, the less likely it is that it will result in a sale. Automate your lead nurturing strategy so you never miss out on making that all important first contact.
• Automating your lead communication allows you to interact with potential customers on a consistent basis. This keeps your brand fresh and at the forefront of your lead’s mind throughout the buying journey,
• Communicating with leads throughout the entire process also gives you extra opportunities to upsell and cross-sell more of your products or services. It is your opportunity to educate potential leads on all of the ways you can help to solve their problems.
• Lead nurturing leads to a rise in referrals and new lead generation. When people see that you are consistently delivering high-quality content that is also useful, they are more likely to recommend you to their network and share your content.

How to nurture your leads with Act! CRM Cloud

Effective lead nurturing is working smarter not harder, and marketing automation is the perfect tool for this. With Act! CRM Cloud and Automated Marketing you can create workflows that continuously manage your entire nurturing process for you.

The first step is to design a landing page that effectively attracts and gathers leads. With Act Marketing Automation it’s easy to create landing pages and forms that reflect your brand. With a huge choice of templates and form options you can create a page for every aspect of lead generation.

Next, using automated workflows, design emails that will appeal to your leads at each stage of the customer journey. These touchpoints will ensure you connect with your leads at important times during the buying cycle, increasing the likelihood of a sale.

Act Automated Marketing can also take your lead nurturing a step further with marketing to sales workflows. This lets you send tasks from your marketing workflow to your sales team, automatically creating actions for sales users based on email reactions from your leads.

Finally, with Act Automated Marketing you also have the option to resend emails that weren’t opened the first time. This is the perfect opportunity for some A/B testing on your email subject lines as well as improving your overall campaign open rate.

For more information on the Act CRM Cloud and Automated Marketing get in touch with our sales team on 0121 323 2304 or email us at info@softext.co.uk