Nurture programs serve a dual purpose. From a customer’s perspective, they’re a vital service for leads who need more information to make pivotal buying decisions. By supplying prospects with details about their professional challenges and the steps they can take to solve them, you’re giving them the knowledge they need to convince other decision-makers in their organization.
From your perspective, nurture programs are more than pure altruism. They’re essential to optimizing your ROI on every lead. Through a well-designed nurture process, you can convert 10 to 20 percent more leads, on average. A little back-of-the-envelope math will show you the effect that has on your cost per lead and your company’s bottom line.
How do you build a better nurture program? It starts with an intelligently implemented and managed marketing automation process that fully supports account-based marketing. It also depends on smart segmentation and nurture program design. We believe strongly in custom solutions rather than one-size-fits-all options, but here are some general guidelines to develop nurture programs.
Welcoming New Leads
First impressions matter, and your first impression on new prospects is your introductory lead nurture program. Your first contact should be brief but informative and ask for a few baseline details to ensure that all contact information is correct.
Welcome nurture streams are typically designed to lead into more subject-specific nurture programs. Our programs, for example, address our prospects’ areas of interest in marketing automation, lead generation, data enhancement, and database management, among other subjects.
Reactivating Dormant Accounts
On average, developing a new lead costs seven times as much as re-engaging an existing lead. Given that huge disparity in cost, it’s clear to see why it’s well worth your time to get dormant accounts active again. A typical nurture stream for leads who have gone quiet might include a “don’t miss out” message offering a significant discount or sample.
Leads who become active after this offer move to a standard nurture track; prospects who don’t respond get a follow-up reminding them that time is running out on the offer. If there’s still no response, the next message might ask them to update preference pages to reflect how often they’d like to be contacted.
Thanking Loyal Customers
Your customers have been good to you, and with loyalty programs, you can be good to them too. Nurture programs for existing customers can be geared to upselling and cross-selling as well as offering service and replenishment for existing products they’ve bought. Make survey requests part of a customer loyalty nurture program. You can learn so much from your customers that it would be a waste to miss this opportunity to gain insight from them.
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