Does it seem like your sales ready leads fall through the cracks, despite your best efforts at conversion?

An effective lead nurturing process is a proven marketing strategy to increase sales productivity. .

Lead nurturing focuses on helping your prospects get to know you, trust you, and consider buying from you. If you try to convert leads directly into a sale, you will likely scare those prospects away before they’re ready to buy. Instead, work on converting your leads into opportunities.

The definition of an opportunity varies from company to company, so think about what makes sense for your sales funnel and make sure everyone in your organization uses the same definition when it comes to opportunity identification.

Build Email Marketing Into Your Sales Funnel Strategy

Email marketing should be part of your lead management process as it is one of the most effective ways to nudge your prospects into a buying mindset. Your email list is a gold mine for relationship building, so don’t let it go to waste! Make sure your email marketing content is:

• Consistent – Develop a routine for your email marketing so you’re top of mind when your prospects are ready to make a purchase.
• Relevant – Use list segmenting to deliver content that matches your prospects’ challenges.

With some planning and upfront work, you can create an email campaign strategy that keeps your prospects engaged and encourages them to dive deeper into your sales funnel. When a new prospect lands on your email list, it’s important to engage them right away so they don’t lose interest. Consider a campaign to welcome and start the lead nurturing process with early-stage leads. The following are four email campaign ideas:

1. Send a Welcome Email – Thank your new subscriber for joining your list and share some basic information about your company. Include a call to action that will encourage them to interact with you, such as a link to your Facebook group.
2. Offer Useful Tools – Share industry tips, best practices, resources, and tools that will make your contact’s life easier. This will give your company early credibility.
3. Identify Challenges – The best way to figure out what your prospects need is to ask them. Send an email or run market research surveys to find out what challenges they have related to your industry, product or service.
4. Present a Surprise Resource – Deliver an extra resource that helps your prospect solve their problem. Your generosity and expertise will position you as a trusted expert in your industry.

Relationship Building with Email Marketing

Once your prospects are more familiar with your company, make sure you stick around to build the relationship. Consider whether these additional campaigns are a good fit for your strategy:

• Interaction Campaigns – If you’re working on something new, make sure your prospects know about it. Invite them to join you on educational webinars, test product updates, and participate in market research surveys.
• Content Campaigns – Blog posts, newsletters, explainer videos, and infographics are just a few types of content you can share with your list. You may even want to create content exclusively for them.
• Target Marketing Campaigns – You segmented your list for a reason: to guide appropriate prospects further down your sales funnel. Create lead nurturing campaigns that address a specific need and prepare your prospects for the buying stage.

Remember that email marketing is only one piece of the content marketing puzzle. The most effective lead nurturing strategy should incorporate additional content marketing tactics that focus on engagement and relationship building such as landing pages, webinars, and social media.

Wondering how to use content marketing for lead generation? We wrote about that last week.