October 2012 – Lead Liaison

A Small Businesses Make-Over Using Marketing Automation

October 31, 2012/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Small businesses make-over using marketing automation. Staying in touch with leads and nurturing them through the sales process is a realistic challenge many organizations face. It’s vitally important businesses convert leads into paying customers. Small or new businesses face overwhelming challenges from existing competitors when reaching out to customers; such as getting their attention, finding leads, and converting leads into sales. They don’t have adequate manpower and technical ability to fire up their sales engines due to lack of resources and experience. Financial constraints also prevent them from carrying out resourceful marketing campaigns. This often results in impending marketing problems, which risk profitability, growth, and sustainability of the business.

Luckily, marketing automation is there to help small businesses easily achieve sales and marketing objectives. Here are some benefits of using marketing automation for a small business:

Marketing automation allows small businesses to streamline sales tools, augment social media and email marketing efforts, and accelerate marketing performance with a focused outreach strategy.
Marketing automation automates core components of the selling process and enhances visibility across a variety of channels while adding more “teeth” to agile marketing campaigns. Better client monitoring allows enhanced targeting and less repetition. Business can maintain and enhance relationships with customers, partners, vendors and other stake holders using marketing automation tools.
Marketing automation combines various outreach mediums such as social media and email campaigns for greater customer attention. Sales teams leverage marketing automation to monitor prospects or customers online interaction across a number of channels and identify their level of interest in a brands products and services. When a visitor lands on your website, automated tools welcome them at various points delivering tailored messages, such as free trial offers, customized solution offerings or personalized greetings.
By adopting a marketing automation process, small businesses are in a position to view and track data analytics, follow up on visitors frequenting your site, increase the ability to develop leads and improve chances of converting them into a sale.
Marketing automation provides better interaction with prospects through automated tools which enables businesses to set up appropriate rules for contact with customers, vendors, and partners. Automation facilitates easy ways to reestablish and maintain relationships with clients and prevents repetition. By delivering the right content at the right time, it helps accelerate sales cycles and keeps marketing communication thriving.

Integrating your strategic plan with marketing automation technology allows small businesses to optimize their lead management process, bridge communication gaps, and maximize marketing strategy that empowers your organization to achieve more with less.

Why Lead Nurturing is Essential to Sales

October 30, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Nurturing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Not all leads are created equal. Some are one-off sales who buy as a result of direct response marketing. Others research available options and select their choice. And there are some that require a little hand-holding in order to get them to buy. Lead nurturing provides a way to cultivate those buyers into sales-ready prospects. It’s important to understand why lead nurturing is essential to sales.

According to marketing studies, only 3% to 5% of all inquiries are sales-ready. That means 95% to 97% are not sales-ready. Moreover, 50% of qualified leads aren’t ready to purchase at the time they are first engaged through marketing content. The duration of a buyer’s decision-making process can take days, weeks, months and sometimes years and many products engender multiple marketing engagements and sales attempts before a commitment to purchase is made. This means your marketing efforts must engage leads multiple times to move a prospective buyer through the buying cycle. Experts estimate B2B buyers need approximately 7 to 9 touches before they’re ready to buy.

This is why lead nurturing is essential to a productive sales department.

Surveys show 80% of leads passed from marketing to sales gets lost, discarded or ignored. If half of that 80% were nurtured to the point of accepting a sales engagement, how many leads could be retained instead of slipping to a competitor? For example, if a marketing campaign generated 100 leads then 40 qualified prospects could be engaged to a point where they are more likely to make a purchase decision in your favor. And with a marketing automation system, it becomes easy to maintain engagement and prioritize leads as they are nurtured.

Lead nurturing doesn’t mean beating prospects over the head with promotions; it requires a thoughtful communication strategy that provides prospects with a non-intrusive way to explore your offer. Email messaging can be effective (if used appropriately). Free white papers or newsletter subscriptions are also productive lead nurturing techniques. If used effectively, the process should persuade prospects to make their own decision through their internal buying processes.

If a qualified lead is lost, a business must often work harder to regain that lead with future marketing activities. If they have already expressed interest in your offer, it makes sense to maintain a connection until they are ready to buy.

Get in touch with us to learn more about how Lead Liaison can re-invigorate your lead management and lead nurturing processes. We welcome the opportunity to further explain why lead nurturing is essential to sales.

How your Company is Missing Valuable Sales Opportunities

October 29, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Revenue Generation Blog, Sales/by Lead Liaison

In today’s uncertain economy, every company has to recognize and actively pursue every possible lead that crosses their path. Every prospect that comes in contact with a company has the potential to be converted into a sale. The problem is many companies miss the connection or they don’t realize that the lead is part of their target market. In those cases, marketing automation and lead qualifying are essential for revenue generation.

These are the four most common reasons for missing valuable sales opportunities.

1. Not recognizing quality leads

If a company is not evaluating a potential lead’s online activity, then there is no way for them to know whether or not they would be interested in purchasing their product or services. It‘s impossible for one human being to monitor everyone’s activity. Marketing automation is necessary in modern business practices as it provides real-time B2B visitor lead tracking in addition to lead qualification. Every company needs a proven method for qualifying leads via lead scoring in order to establish which ones may benefit from a lead nurturing process or get passed directly to sales.

2. Not taking the time to understand your leads

Once you have qualified a lead the next step is to properly segment your database by analysing demographics and interests. First group them into categories and then rank them by their potential for conversion. A company can develop a specific approach for each segment. By not taking the time to break leads into predetermined groups, it will be impossible to connect with each one directly and therefore many will end up slipping through the cracks. Tip: use dynamic database segmentation techniques such as Lead Liaisons Dynamic Target Lists to segment contacts using a “set-it and forget-it” methodology.

3. Not nurturing leads effectively

A lead will be persuaded by compelling and informative literature. If the information a company sends is irrelevant or uninteresting it simply won’t be read. A potential customer can also be turned off if they are being bombarded with articles, newsletters or obvious attempts at self-marketing. There needs to be a reasonable flow that is not obtrusive or offensive in order to gain their trust and respect. In the early stages of lead nurturing, focus on educating the prospect. Think like the buyer, not the seller.

4. Not monitoring the lead nurturing process

It is essential for a business to analyze and evaluate which campaigns elicited an immediate response and which ones did not. There is no point in repeating a plan that does not have a solid conversion rate. The only effective way to plan future campaigns is by understanding which techniques created the greatest number of responses and how they can be adjusted to generate more revenue.

Missed sales opportunities are the greatest frustration facing companies today and it doesn’t need to be that way. Through well planned marketing automation and lead nurturing, a company can increase their chances of turning leads into revenue. The key to success comes from understanding why valuable opportunities are being overlooked and then learning how to prevent it from happening in the future.

Converting Leads through Smart Nurturing

October 26, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Nurturing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

A lead has marginal value until it can be successfully converted into a sale. Businesses spend a considerable amount of time and money securing quality leads and cannot afford ineffective nurturing. Use some of these guidelines to convert leads using smart lead nurturing. If the information that is sent out is not relevant and informative to a lead’s specific interests then the content will be of no value to them. That is why the first step is to qualify leads and segment them based on their browsing history.

Rank and Segment Leads

Qualifying and segmenting leads means breaking each one down into categories then ranking them based on buying potential. It is crucial to assess each lead individually then figure out how they fit into predetermined segmented groups. A company cannot use the same methods to target all leads, but they also cannot create a unique campaign for every potential customer. That is why it is necessary to group them based on similar interests. Once leads have been formally segmented, a company can then create informative content tailored to each unique group profile.

Create Compelling Content

Every lead expects to receive valuable content that will teach them something worthwhile or improve their life in some meaningful way. This information can be presented in the form of whitepapers, webinars, eBooks, blog posts, reports, or any other resource that will educate the reader. It needs to peak their interest within the first few sentences or it simply won’t be read. If the lead nurturing campaign does not grab the lead’s attention, it will be jettisoned and become absolutely ineffective.

Frequency of Nurturing Matters

Another thing to consider is the frequency of lead nurturing efforts. A smart lead nurturing plan should be sent at least once a month, but never more than once each week. A good campaign needs to maintain a powerful presence without being obtrusive or overwhelming. People receive numerous emails and articles from various sources, so they can quickly be viewed as a nuisance if they take over someone’s inbox.

Converting leads into sales requires a well-thought out, strategic plan. Qualify and group each lead first and then develop an approach catered to each target market segment. Content in every smart nurturing campaign should attempt to establish a business as being an expert in their field, so potential customers feel confident turning to the company’s services when the need arises. The image that is presented in a lead nurturing campaign is exactly what could make or break a sale.

Pervasive B2B Lead Distribution Methods

October 25, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Distribution, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Looking for some good B2B lead distribution methods? Businesses aggressively seeking methodologies for effective lead distribution to their sales forces sometimes face invariable roadblocks which prevent those leads from finding their proper home. Although techniques commonly used by marketing teams work only part of the time when marketing to consumers, business leads are highly touted as ‘gold’ since the expected ticket prices are substantially higher. To quantify success in lead distribution, following the methods below will springboard your B2B lead circulation efforts so the right department within your company, or the right person, receives and nurtures the lead.

Round Robin With Top Producers

We’d all love to pass leads off to proven closers in mass quantities; since this isn’t entirely possible, passing out leads to top producers in round robin fashion will keep fairness across the board, allow historically unseasoned salespersons to shine under pressure and keep excessive workloads off one person. When your company is facing lead scarcity, perhaps start your distribution with top gun producers and work your way down as leads become available.

Stick With FIFO

Much like perishable foods, leads begin accruing shelf life when either bought live, or received just minutes ago. In order to prevent stagnancy in lead distribution, stick with first in, first out when leads come into your database. Organizing aging leads can become problematic if you’re not proactive in keeping each prospect assigned to a sales associate, and this can be taken care of through FIFO.

Pushing / Pulling

Businesses can benefit from well-organized office setups by having leads ‘pushed’ to the sales team as they call or fill out lead capture forms. This automated method of handling lead distribution makes utilizing both round robin and live transfer so different sales team members receive leads intermittently. On the opposite side of this are lead pulls which occur when larger call centers obtain sizable numbers of leads hourly and pull them from queue to call or email. Both distribution methods rely upon accurate lead automation methods albeit online or via call center.

The Hunt Group

Some larger volume sale forces find that load balancing can be problematic when thousands of leads are being handled by only fifty calling agents. Using the hunt group methodology, lead management teams attempt to find sales pipelines or available agents who can handle a customer, and pass the lead off to them. Although this method of lead distribution heavily relies on human accuracy and agent capabilities in handling large scale lead loads, proper metrics and lead scoring techniques could make hunt groups an effective stratagem for distribution of mass quantities of leads.

Tele-Qualifying

Becoming increasingly popular in the lead distribution sector of larger businesses is prequalifying leads through large-scale telemarketing firms who can properly route calls to exact sales agents prepared to handle the lead. This provides an excellent avenue to properly segment what each lead wants, where they best fit across your sales boards and who would best close the sale with the candidate. Mortgage lead qualification specialists perfected this method of lead distribution and many other companies have adopted it as their own.

Avoiding Grab Bags And More

If you’re using trash can lead dumping, or, simply tossing hundreds of leads in the air for anyone to pick, the percentage of closed leads is probably plummeting for your company. Choosing the most effective circulation method for your business to business lead efforts means understanding what is available to you, and the above methods have proven time and time again to properly route leads to closers equipped to handle specific customers for the sales closing.

Convergence of PRM and Marketing Automation Facilitates Superior Marketing Alignment

October 24, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Marketing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

One in every five B2B organizations use a marketing automation platform (MAP), and the present trend indicates that it will grow to 40% by 2016, according to B2B research and advisory agency SiriusDecisions. Organizations are increasingly integrating marketing automation with their CRM databases and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) strategy to facilitate efficient lead nurturing and achieve the most favorable sales potential. This three-way alignment optimizes stand-alone solutions and multiplies sales capabilities of the organizations, creating marketing alignment.

The Case for Marketing Automation Platform-CRM-PRM Integration for Superior Marketing Alignment

The prospect of efficient business processes and enhanced benefits has made marketing automation a key attraction for businesses. Organizations operate in a complex ecosystem that demands attention to a variety of factors. It has become increasingly difficult to track and report marketing progress and sales opportunities across partner networks while managing campaigns and opportunities. Many fall upon PRM solutions to maintain and boost partner-vendor relationship and ensure superior coordination among different channel players.

The PRM is aligned with the CRM, holding customer database and marketing automation tools for better visibility and tracking of performance of partners, co-ops, and other assets. While the former focuses on customer lifecycle management, PRM solutions take care of reporting and analytics suitable for partner lifecycle management. Marketing automation integrated with the two enables businesses to integrate records and track and monitor typical sales opportunities created in a partner network and specific interested customers.

Vendors and manufacturers can also set up on-demand services through marketing automation using social media, telemarketing, and email. By integrating PRM and CRM with marketing automation platforms, businesses can offer instant portal access and training courses in their chosen language and medium. A big plus is that partner branding can be aligned with marketing resources and increased ability to monitor and manage leads and campaigns.

There is no need to employ multichannel strategies, tools, and resources for deal registration and management of opportunities. Often channel managers run helter-skelter as they work with manual systems and spreadsheets to deal with partners and customers. Marketing automation facilitates use of same system by brand owners and partners, reducing time and gap in interaction. With vendors rolling out campaigns and leads in no time to partners using the vertical-sharing system, both can work side by side, enhancing coordination and cooperation.

PRM-Marketing Integration: Summary of Benefits

Integration of PRM with marketing automation offers three important benefits.

1. It helps in automatic lead distribution to partners without any coordination issue.

2. It helps bridge the gap between a business and its partners. All solutions are immediately available to partners. They can interact, learn, receive training, and lead sales efforts without overburdening the business.

3. It is easy to monitor and manage a campaign and activity on leads and holistically measure direct and indirect sales benefits to partners using the marketing automation platform.

With increased availability of SaaS solutions, there is no major technical obstacle that impedes PRM-marketing automation integration. Many consider budget and disconnect issues caused by failure of the system as key hindrances. However, the benefits of aligning the two outweigh the concerns. No doubt PRM can be a stand-alone solution, but when integrated with marketing automation, its compatibilities multiply, assuring better lead development and campaign execution.

Four Steps to Effective Lead Scoring

October 23, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Scoring, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Sales lead scoring is an essential part of a lead management system. Leads enter your pipeline at different stages of the buying cycle, so it’s important to calculate how ready each marketing lead is for engagement by your sales team. In order to set up a lead scoring system, input should be gathered from your marketing and sales departments. There are four initial steps to take when developing an effective lead scoring system:

Define qualified leads. The first step is to separate the curious from the interested. How prepared is a lead for engagement? The sales team should provide input when determining who is qualified. Leads that indicate a need for your product, who have the ability and willingness to purchase, and have expressed interest in your offer are generally considered a qualified lead; the next step is to grade the lead according to level of interest.
Establish scoring criteria. What factors should be used to differentiate your leads? There are no hard and fast rules used to determine scoring values, but a lead scoring system should include attributes that indicate a lead’s identity, industry, level of interest or engagement source. For example, the responding party to a marketing touch point (e.g. CEO or purchasing agent) is an important attribute. The lead source is another variable to include – did the engagement come through a white paper download or a webinar registration? Examine each attribute of your marketing channels and your markets that can be used to assign a value that reflects its importance.
Determine the scoring weight (point value) for each attribute. For example, how important is the lead source? A lead who has viewed a white paper should be given more points than one that has followed a Google Ad to your website. Leads that complete a survey may be at a higher engagement level than those who have responded to an automated call. There should be point values assigned to each attribute which indicate a lead’s willingness to be contacted by the sales team. The level of engagement (i.e. the amount of time spent investigating your offer) is often used to calculate an attribute’s weight.
Establish a scoring range and threshold for transferring the lead to the sales department. Determine a scoring range – it can be 0 – 5 or 0 – 100 – by which leads can be prioritized for future engagements. However, don’t use a lead scoring system that limits the maximum score and ability to slide scores up or down in large intervals. For example, systems that cap lead scores at 100 hampers flexibility. Try to use a marketing automation system that ranges up to 1,000 for maximum versatility. When choosing your range make sure it allows for all variables that will be included in the system or your process. Once the range is determined, a threshold should be set which will move the interested party from marketing lead to sales prospect. At what point should the lead be passed to sales? That should be determined with the help of the sales department, and the scoring threshold should reflect the greatest willingness to be engaged by salespeople and readiness to purchase your product.

Lead scoring takes the guesswork out of determining whether a sales agent should be alerted about a potential prospect or if the lead requires nurturing prior to a sales engagement. Once you’ve established a lead scoring system, it should be installed in your automated marketing program.

Five Steps to Building an Effective Lead Nurturing Program

October 22, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Nurturing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

There are five fundamental steps to building an effective and productive lead nurturing campaign. A solid lead nurturing program needs to consist of finding worthy leads by utilizing lead qualifying and scoring methods then segmenting leads based on their personal interests. It also involves developing a compelling content strategy, optimizing landing pages and tracking results. The more thought and planning put into developing a compelling lead nurturing program, the more likely it will secure new customers.

Here are more details on those five factors and how they can help convert more leads into revenue.

1. Lead scoring

Leading scoring is a process that ranks each potential visitor based on their likelihood of purchasing a company’s product or service. It searches for clues in their online profile that coincide with their typical customer and then it ranks them on importance or relevance. A company can discover significant information on a lead simple by examining their browser history. Also consider using Lead Grading, a feature of Lead Liaison’s platform, to identify how well a prospect matches your ideal buyer profile.

2. List segmentation

After you have qualified each lead as being valuable, the next step is segmenting them into distinct groups. By using demographics and their personal interests to segment leads into designated categories, efforts can be targeted by group instead of on an individual basis. Use Lead Liaison’s Dynamic Target Lists to “set it and forget it”. Dynamic Target Lists enable marketers to establish list building rules that always run resulting in an always-updated list of targeted contacts.

3. Developing a content strategy

A content strategy is the key to the success of any lead nurturing program. A company must first determine what type of content you want to send and how frequently you should send it. Every piece of information sent needs to be relevant information and grab the reader’s attention. If the content fails to impress then the entire campaign fails.

4. Landing page optimization

The first page that a lead sees is a crucial element in whether or not they convert into a sale. Start by reviewing the intended customer flow to determine where each segmented lead will most likely end up. Then create a dynamic landing page designed to convert a lead into a sale.

5. Tracking results

There is no point in creating an effective lead nurturing campaign if a company is not able to track and review the results. Businesses need to know what works and what didn’t so they can plan future campaigns accordingly. An effective lead nurturing program has to evaluate each attempt and how easily it was able to convert leads into sales.

Following these five factors will help your company build an effective lead nurturing program. Your business will have the ability to tap into each potential customer, group them by interests, and then develop content that appeals to them. It will also direct them to a powerful landing page to seal the deal and track the results of each successful conversion.

8 Metrics Of Precise Business Lead Qualification And Nurturing

October 19, 2012/0 Comments/in Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Businesses that directly cater to other businesses often times lack precision in quantification, scoring and proactively nurturing leads. This lackluster approach, not purposely taken, could cost potential sales to fly away permanently, drastically diminishing your marketing ROI until another path must be devised to pick up the slack. Today we examine the eight metrics of precise business lead qualification, what’s involved in each process and how each step takes exacting effort to properly grade each lead that comes across your desk. Our intent is to save businesses time, money and frustration when gathering leads relevant to other businesses they wish to furnish services or products to.

1. Identify Contact Methodology

In order to accurately mark your lead as plausible for engaging, tracing the source of where the lead found you is an imminent necessity. Since every business marketing team desires to understand where their marketing dollars are being ostensibly spent, tracking where the lead came from through a simple questionnaire, customer service inquiry or even direct email contact will help keep your marketing efforts tracked.

2. Review Request Reasoning

This is where the adage of selling ice to an Eskimo comes into play. Step two in our process is identifying the needs of your inquiring business to match those needs with your service or product offerings. Should your business misalign with their needs, the lead needs to be File 13’d since it will do little good to keep it in your database, unless you foresee drastic shifts in business offerings in the near future.

3. Separate Levels Of Seriousness

In business, you have askers, doers and some which remain on the fence when making purchasing decisions. Your database or spreadsheet needs to clearly mark your leads’ level of seriousness for your sales closers to move in and seal the deal, or at least rescore the lead as probable. Taking this step is vital for marketing professionals who want specific reasoning to target future lead possibilities.

4. Identify The ‘Why’

Eventually, you’ll meet an impasse where the business which contacted you will either cordially accept your business based off cost, level of return and customer service, or simply turn their cheek. Taking the time to converse with your lead will render why they felt inclined to invest in your services or why declination was given. Careful documentation for internal usage will allow your HR, VP and other business officials to make necessary product or service adjustments and get more “yes’s”.

5. Follow The Lead’s Interactions

This step is vital should your lead capture efforts render leads for service offerings. Once your lead has converted to a sale, every interaction needs to be recorded and documented to assure top levels of service have been given, carefully detailing the interactivity of customer service, techies, and other business officials who discuss business with the other business representative. May seem mundane to some, yet this step is for basic quality control and internal training of customer support personnel while also important for future sales potential to this lead.

6. Exit Survey

Once your product or service has been amply delivered to the business, it’s time to take an exit survey to grade your delivery, knowledge and overall handling of this business lead. This doesn’t have to be an exhaustive two-hour affair; a few simple yet succinctly written questions could capture loads of information. For example, asking the business lead to “Describe your overall business experience with us” could capture vital information used to improve services delivered to future leads while also deciphering whether your benefits are meeting or exceeding the costs.

7. Save and Document

Once you’ve closed the lead from your exit survey, you can save this lead in your database and document the overall experience your company delivered to the business client. This documentation can be a singular paragraph or two-sentence statement put into a ‘comments’ section of your CRM. This statement can immediately be recalled when future interaction is made. You now have one lead in your database that has been properly acquired and needs only to be nurtured.

8. Follow-Up

Notwithstanding to your normally aggressive sales approach, contacting the representative of the business you did business with after one week of the lead being closed will not only show you’re truly interested in delivering quality goods or services, it proves your sales department has more than altruistic commission figures in their heads when dealing with business leads. Don’t offer sales coupons, pitches or pander other products similar to the one sold; simply approach as you would an old friend.

Conclusive Thoughts

Each step in our lead qualification and nurturing piece carries the highest vitality since you’re dealing directly with other businesses and corporations. The way you treat your leads is a reflection of business efficacy, strong standards of practice and ability to handle leads which your marketing teams assist in capturing. Keep everything outside of status quo when your business collects every lead, and treat every lead like it was your biggest – it just may actually be one day.

Five Effective Lead Nurturing Tools

October 18, 2012/0 Comments/in Best Practices, Lead Nurturing, Revenue Generation Blog/by Lead Liaison

Lead nurturing is a strategy of maintaining contact. An effective campaign should build a relationship that turns marketing leads into qualified prospects. In order to change a lead to a prospect, it usually takes multiple communication channels used during different buying phases. There are several digital and customer-facing options that are effective in building relationships. Let’s look at five lead nurturing tools that can transition leads into sales opportunities:

Web Content Articles

Publishing articles that interest your markets is a good way to connect with leads. Companies maintain contact by providing knowledge, ideas, advice or reviews to their audiences. Selecting topics and creating articles that are relevant to both your business and the interests of your markets is critical to success. Links to a landing page or squeeze page connect the reader with your company or product. Content articles can be effective when they’re posted on the company website, but are more effective through distribution via content publishers and directories.

Webinars

Hosting or participating in webinars provides a vivid impression on leads. The practice of using webinars to attract leads has been used in B2B commerce for years. Shared knowledge and engagement through Q & A and post-event information requests provide a connection that builds trust. Webinars are often most effective within a tiered exposure strategy, where touch points are introduced during advanced stages of the decision cycle. Most hosting software vendors provide reports about attendance duration, IP addresses, and other valuable data.

Trade Shows & Conferences

Attendance at trade shows and conferences allows businesses to connect with their markets, partners, vendors and competitors. Lead nurturing can be achieved through presentations or exhibits. Presenters are seen as industry authorities, which boosts company credibility. Q & A sessions and social events provide great opportunities to establish deeper connections with leads.

Trade show exhibition should be used to nurture leads that are almost prepared to buy. The level of personal engagement that trade show exhibition can provide surpasses many other lead nurturing tools. It is a great way to announce new products, perform market testing and engage new markets.

Email

Email marketing can be effective at the start and throughout the lead nurturing process. Email drip campaigns provide continual contact; companies connect through news, offers, references, advice, and other helpful information. Email is effective for lead nurturing because of its message reinforcement capabilities, allowing you to review previous messages while adding new information. One strategy is to set up auto responders that provide solutions to questions or issues that are raised through other channels or previous messages.

Press Releases

Press releases provide occasional opportunities to connect with leads. Announcements that are newsworthy – such as events, releases, achievements and company activities (such as executive appointments) – allow leads to become familiar, and comfortable, with your company. It is important to note that press releases should be used to announce significant news that may be interesting to your audience; saturating readers with insignificant news will likely turn leads cold in a hurry.

Many of today’s lead nurturing tools not only connect companies with their markets, they provide detailed reporting on campaign effectiveness. This allows marketers to be nimble. The trick is to use each tool at the appropriate stage of the sales cycle.

To find out more about how Lead Liaison’s Revenue Generation Software™ can provide your organization with professional-grade, effective lead nurturing contact us.