All articles, commentary, etc. that does not fit under Best Practices, Press Releases, Testimonials, or Documentation goes here.

Lead Liaison

10 Winning Email Drip Campaigns – Part 1

/1 Comment/in , , , /by

Winning Email Drip Campaigns – Part 1Lead nurturing can be accomplished through several channels: phone, direct mail, social media, and email. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, nearly 60% of Internet users check email daily, so a winning email drip campaign is a logical choice for lead nurturing.

Studies show it takes an average of 3 to 30 impressions to become successful at creating interest through an email marketing campaign. So how can you be effective at lead nurturing through a drip campaign without filling your prospects’ mailboxes with useless marketing fluff? The short answer: provide value. Although the purpose of a drip campaign is to create top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) for your offering, each message should be valuable to your audience while earning trust in your company.

In this two-part series, we’ll discuss 10 ways to provide useful information that makes an email drip campaign effective and engaging. The ideas in this series are not presented according to any specific metric, but each should be used within a comprehensive engagement strategy in order to be effective at nurturing leads.

  1. Newsletter – Invite prospects to subscribe to your newsletter. Avoid simply asking for a subscription; provide a sample of the content to whet a prospect’s appetite for more information. By giving readers a sample of stories it will allow them to determine if a subscription would be beneficial. One effective technique is to provide the actual headline and a portion of the article with a Read More link to a signup form.
  2. Best Practices – Business professionals are constantly seeking ways to improve. By providing information that assists your prospects in their business activities, your company gains trust and value. For B2B consulting or B2B service vendors,  providing free information can be effective in persuading prospects to purchase premium offerings, such as research studies or software development contracts.
  3. White Papers – Thought leadership is a highly coveted position among B2B marketers. Producing white papers filled with relevant statistics and hard-to-find data has been shown to be a productive means of lead nurturing. Introduce prospects to your white paper through email messages. Use a lead-in within your message to generate interest. You can create several drip messages by highlighting different findings within the paper.
  4. Info-graphics – Create a visually appealing email filled with statistics and other data for quick consumption. USA Today is a major media outlet, due in part to its focus on easily digestible graphs, charts, and lists. This strategy works for B2B email campaigns because readers are often sifting through multiple emails at a time. An info-graphic gives prospects a quick dose of relevant information and provides a valuable reason to reach out to your prospects.
  5. Webinar – Sending an invitation to a free webinar you are hosting or participating in can provide value to your leads. One effective technique is to introduce event topics and presenters in the email message. It helps to provide an easy registration process and a follow up message with simple connection steps to make attendance easy for your prospects.

It’s important to schedule email blasts with a frequency that isn’t too pushy but allows you to achieve TOMA as soon as possible. In Winning Email Drip Campaigns – Part 2 we’ll discuss five more ways to nurture leads by providing value to your prospects through effective email messages.

For more ideas on drip campaigns and other lead nurturing strategies that boost your marketing effectiveness, contact us today!

Lead Liaison

Guaranteed Lead Proliferation Using Sales 2.0

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Guaranteed Lead Proliferation Using Sales 2.0For those who desire cutting-edge sales techniques for turning warm leads into constant streams of B2B sales traffic, current Web 2.0 technologies and normal sales stratagems collide head first into lead proliferation principles using Sales 2.0. This incredible art of social selling and collaboration opportunity, which every marketing professional has been seeking for years, has come in handy when B2B lead generation schemes have tightened down over the past decade.  Since many businesses spend hours online researching products and services which you offer, socialization seems to make sense when trying to push leads through funnels ready to close sales indefinitely.  Here’s how increases in sales flow comes with Sales 2.0.

Changes Sales Strategy

Under normal circumstances, B2B lead calls open with who you are and what you offer; since Sales 2.0 has turned normally lengthy sales calls into more unique sales presentation opportunities, the need for introduction becomes moot since social media and Web 2.0 handle your ‘who you are’ for you.  Focusing on how you can help B2B customers becomes the central focus instead of uncomfortable introductions which tend to throw off your sales balance.  Overall, changes in sales strategy are formed through proliferation of social media channels and make your sales pitches even more fine-tuned than before.  This increase in lead ‘security’ only gets better as time goes by and campaigns are refined.

Recent Metrics Show Us Hope

Since marketing professionals always seek the easiest road to sales closure, recent Sales 2.0 figures collected from various sources reveal just how powerful your campaigns can become when collaborating Web 2.0 with regular sales mediums.  These stats show just how important Sales 2.0 is:

  1. B2B sales reps are 30% guaranteed to hit sales targets using competitive strategies
  2. Roughly 46% of sales professionals believe their pipeline accurately displays future B2B sales
  3. Over 51% of projected sales deals never close
  4. One in nearly five sales personnel emphasize the value of each product or service sold
  5. Sales 2.0 is nearly 40% more likely to attract new B2B leads than print advertisements

Making social media and old school bull-nosed sales tactics work for your business to business customer interactions simply makes sense for the future, and is the current reality in marketing nomenclature.

Getting Your Crew 2.0 Prepped

Many different advanced sales techniques are wrapped into Sales 2.0 packaging, especially when LinkedIn and advanced CRM communication devices are implemented daily.  Imagine marketing through RSS while serving that particular feed into mobile devices; it gets that down and dirty.  To adequately handle B2B sales at this level, specific preparations need to be made within your own sales crews, like:

  1. Understanding what business entities are active on your website although no forms were completed.
  2. Conjugating thought leadership properly and funneling organizational social media campaigns with hefty marketing incentives to create an aura of positive salesmanship.
  3. Supporting sales processes, nurturing leads which are aged and effectively communicating returned leads from sales departments so new marketing directives can be invocated.

Conclusion

Remember, the end result of any Sales 2.0 campaign strategy is having an effective manner of marketing professionals funneling leads into sales for closure.  If closure isn’t within the realm of attainability, leads need to head back into marketing for reworking.  Web 2.0 and your current sales strategies, when combined into one exponentially powerful system, will guarantee lead proliferation simply because Sales 2.0 cannot fail when every phase of marketing and sales are in complete syncopation with each other.

Lead Liaison

Lead Nurturing for B2B Marketing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Lead Nurturing for B2B MarketingHave you ever wondered what lead nurturing for B2B marketing is? A successful company expects to have hundreds, even thousands, of visitors on their website each day. If companies setup effective promotional offers, catchy call to actions and dynamic landing pages then there are opportunities to convert approximately 3% of these visitors into known leads (person is identified). The trick becomes converting these leads into revenue. One critical strategy companies should use to increase their lead conversion rate is a well-executed lead nurturing campaign.

A lead nurturing campaign is the bridge that transitions leads from one stage in the buying process to the next. Companies can bridge this gap by sending a series of automated emails to leads intending to educate them and give them a “call to action” which progresses a lead to the next stage. As the lead is directed through the planned stages there should only be subtle suggestions to convert, with the content aimed mainly at building a solid and trusted relationship.

Lead nurturing for B2B marketing is a discipline focused on qualified sales leads that are not currently looking to make a purchase. Consequentially, a successful B2B lead nurturing campaign involves delivering content that has noticeable value and is compelling enough to engage a lead. If it is done well, lead nurturing can build a strong brand and make a company the preferred provider long before the prospect has even begun the buying process. Lead nurturing software allows for qualified sales leads to be tracked, while relevant content is automatically delivered through a variety of proven B2B marketing channels.

One objective of lead nurturing for B2B marketing is to maintain a visitor’s permission to stay in contact with them.  This is the most crucial objective of lead nurturing and without it a company will lose the lead completely. Content has to be catchy and informative to keep the prospect interested. If the lead does not see sufficient value, they will disengage by unsubscribing or by filtering lead nurturing efforts as spam. Recipients can also just ignore or immediately delete the message, which defeats the entire purpose.

Another key of lead nurturing for B2B marketing is providing ideas, information, or points of comparison through strategic education. A potential buyer may not be interested in making a purchase for a while, which means a company has the opportunity to gently persuade them over a longer period of time. During critical lead nurturing periods, content should be used to educate prospects and guide their thinking in the right direction. Content should incorporate specific requirements and ways of viewing the market which will convey thought leadership. This way, once they are ready to buy, they will be convinced that choosing the source behind the useful information they received is the only way to go.

Lead nurturing for B2B marketing is a powerful and effective way to automatically stay engaged with qualified leads. By doing this right, a company can establish buyer preference, recommend solutions related to a specific product and successfully convert leads into sales. This is only possible if the lead nurturing program delivers relevant content that also offers value to the lead and keeps them interested enough to preserve their permission to stay in contact.

Lead Liaison

Lead Nurturing Best Practices and Stages

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Lead Nurturing Best Practices and StagesThere are several lead nurturing best practices and stages to be aware of. Absence of effective lead nurturing practices results in the loss of 79% of generated sales leads according to a research by MarketingSherpa. Lead nurturing has emerged as a key concern for organizations as today’s B2B buyers prefer to educate themselves about a product before committing to buy it. They spend more time on research and studying info about product features, usability and customer services before engaging with the seller’s representative. Again not all prospects are interested in buying your products. But you can attract and drive their interest through constant engagements and by conveying time-appropriate messages.

All these present before us challenges of a sales funnel with a widening top and a complex sales cycle that require an organization to nurture leads with efficient process and targeted content while preventing any leakage of leads. An ill-equipped and inappropriate lead nurturing process may lead to a leaky sales funnel and high customer acquisition cost, blunting effective utilization of marketing automation strategy. The following are some important steps to streamline your lead nurturing practices for better results.

Start With An Impression

Start on an influential note. Identify and analyze the interests, exact needs, and behavior of prospected customers and help them build awareness accordingly. Create a pool of sources to enable yourself to draw and share explicit and implicit information as industry trends and customer behavior. Present yourself in an attractive way to generate their interest and influence their choice. Make sure the information you provide exactly matches what they look for. A deeper relationship and sense of trust thus created over a period of time is certain to influence the purchase decision.

Reinforce Impression

Send timely and personalized messages to reinforce your impressive start. You must have meaningful communication with focus on educating customers. Wherever possible, share whitepapers, podcasts, blogs, videos, which will reinforce your brand identity and product value proposition. Also, share your success story and demonstrate your value over competitors.

Sustain Prospect’s Interest

At this stage, keep your focus on maintaining the level of interest you have created in prospective customers and steer their choice to your advantage. Share feedbacks, show third-party information, and organize webinars to sustain communication. It is important to plan and control the process so that the relationship does not face any bottlenecks and create trust deficit.

Seal The Deal

If you have sufficient indication to think that a prospective lead is “purchase ready,” then propose a deal to them. The sales team should take over and send them a proposal based on your awareness of their purchase need and references. Follow up with a personalized message seeking their response. If possible, offer a free trial.

For sustained communication leading to a high percentage of lead conversion, keep a few additional things in mind.

  1. Keep the communication language simple and comprehensible with a considerate view of the real world
  2. Focus on prospective customer’s interest, likes, and dislikes while following leads or nurturing campaigns
  3. Ensure that your interaction with prospective customers is not highly pitched or of low mettle
  4. Send right message at prospect‘s time of preference
  5. Keep the communication meaningful and responsive
  6. Messages must include personalized and customer-specific message
  7. Avoid generic contents to the extent possible
Lead Liaison

Why BANT is Important for Lead Nurturing

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Do you know why BANT is important for lead nurturing? In order to have success at lead nurturing, companies sometimes include a BANT score within their lead scoring system. Those companies that do not include a BANT score are missing a critical component to having a successful lead nurturing system. Throughout the history of sales, leads have been lost for various reasons: they get ignored, discarded or lost. Or they miss the mark because the audience doesn’t fulfill four key components of a quality lead:

Why BANT is Important for Lead Nurturing

  • Budget – It’s important that a lead has the capacity to pay for your offering. This doesn’t necessarily mean they should be able to pay immediately; however, there has to be a reasonable expectation that the cost of your offering can be included a lead’s budget within an adequate timeframe.
  • Authority – Who is the intended audience for marketing messages and sales contacts? If it doesn’t include decision-makers or subordinates, then money is likely being wasted. Touchpoints should be directed at the most effective buying authority possible. Although primary decision-makers are often the best targets, subordinates who can obtain authority directly from decision-makers can be effective lead nurturing targets as well. At times, buying influencers can be an appropriate audience, but you can expect a longer sales cycle for the prospective buyer.
  • Need – Leads must acknowledge that there is a need for what you offer before they will buy. There are two types of need: current and anticipated. While lead nurturing, it’s important to determine the timing of a prospect’s need for your offering; therefore, “uncovering” the need for your solution is critical. Keep in mind, a need is not always recognized by your prospects, so your lead nurturing system should include ways to prompt need recognition.  For example, within industries such as emerging technologies leads often have to be convinced there is a need to improve current operations and be educated about a solution before a decision-maker will consider a purchase.
  • Timing – If a lead is not ready to buy, sales attempts will probably not be successful; therefore, it’s important to connect your sales department with a lead at the most appropriate time (usually after Budget, Authority, and Need have been addressed). Contacts throughout the lead nurturing process should be scheduled in order to advance the lead through each stage of the sales cycle. For example a direct response offer is often not appropriate for a lead entering your nurturing pipeline.

So the impact of addressing BANT during the lead nurturing process cannot be overestimated. Using lead scoring is one way to qualify leads against your criteria such as BANT. If you would like to learn about more ideas to bolster your lead nurturing or lead qualification process, contact Lead Liaison for a free consultation.

Lead Liaison

Lead Generators

/0 Comments/in , , , /by

Lead GeneratorsAre you looking for ways to generate leads? I bet you were probably hunting for a telemarketing agency. In fact, when you search for lead generators in Google you’ll mainly get links for telemarketers in the results. If you landed here, that’s great news! It’s time you took a fresh look at how you’re managing your leads and consider using technology to bolster your strategy.

Dialing for dollars sometimes works; however, often times it’s inefficient and yields a low ROI relative to using software stacks that can bridge gaps in your sales and marketing and lead management processes.  If you’re like most organizations they have mixed feelings about hiring third parties to generate leads. These are usually on/off programs for most companies. Technology though, is here to stay.  You might hate it, but you can’t ignore it. If businesses ignore it then they’ll fall behind their competitors.

Lead Liaison uses innovative software technology that ignites your lead management process. We get you more leads into the top of the funnel, accelerate leads through the funnel and make sure leads don’t leak out of the funnel by helping you recycle them.

Most lead generators these days are technology-driven. For example, take a look at Lead Liaison’s revenue generation software™. Instead of using telemarketers, our lead generators come from our Software as a Service (SaaS). We provide proven technology to help businesses with six cornerstones of any lead management lifecycle: sales prospecting, lead tracking, lead capture, lead conversion, lead distribution and lead nurturing.

Sales prospecting helps sales people find companies and people – getting more prospects into the funnel. Lead tracking helps companies track who’s visiting their site and what their interest is. Anonymous visitors (new source of leads) and known visitors (name and/or email identified) are tracked along with their online behavior to build rich prospect profiles for sales. Lead capture and lead conversion tools help build landing pages, web forms, engaging email campaigns and more to get prospects to fill out forms and interact with your company’s brand. Lead distribution intelligently distributes leads based on sales team/individual performance or any number of lead criteria (company size, location, etc.). Finally, lead nurturing automates the ability to stay in touch with prospects over time by sending relevant and timely email communications from sales.

Without the help of technology and a lack of emphasis on lead generator software, companies set themselves up for failure. In most cases, configuring technology like Lead Liaison’s to complement existing lead management practices takes less than an hour. My guess is you’d probably spend more than that on the phone with a telemarketer telling them what you need.

In just a few small steps your lead generator machine will be in full force. Make sure to select the right lead generators for your business – choose technology first over telemarketers.

Lead Liaison

B2B Marketing Automation: Run In the Right Direction and Win

/0 Comments/in , , /by

B2B Marketing Automation: Run In the Right Direction and WinThe implementation of B2B marketing automation is often seen as daunting in the face of perceived complexity and unpreparedness. Implementing market automation is simple and cost-effective. It assures more qualified leads and revenue growth without making you put in an overwhelming amount of effort. The following are a few must-follow tips to follow to get your marketing automation plan going in the right direction.

Build your Marketing Automation Campaign on a Strong Foundation

Think of what type of skill sets you have and what type of volume you expect your marketing automation tools to handle. Tally your resources and thoroughly audit the expected performance criteria against the system you employ. Consider targeted customers, their motivations and expectations and make sure your marketing automation system can support them. Add contacts based on these selections then refresh and recreate your campaign content regularly. Plan the minimum details you need from customers upfront.

Improved Targeting and Sophisticated Deliverability

Your marketing automation system must be sophisticated enough to create a sense of trust in the mind of targeted customers. Test your email, the most important marketing automation contact tool, to ensure that its display, presentation, and readability suit customers and their mobile or laptop devices. Ensure that your email does not land up in the spam filter of recipients, blunting its appeal and value. Also, confirm email addresses and make sure you have prospects, customers and partners permission to nurture them.

Integrated and Multi-Touch Campaigns

Align marketing automation with your CRM and multi-touch campaigns. Two-way integration of CRM and automation empowers business processes and campaigns and helps achieve better sales potential compared to stand-alone solutions. It helps keep superior relationship with vendors and customers while expanding the sales funnel without committing extra resources. Multi-touch strategy with provision of five to 10 touches over a period of time is a must to cultivate prospects from interest to sure sales conversion. Enable more touches customized as per client preference in every buying-cycle step.

Consider Timing

Make sure you send appropriate automated messages to the right person at the right time. Source the client or partner data and analyze the same to establish their preferred timing. Messages received during out of office hours or nights may be considered intrusive, leading to negative reaction. However, messages sent on birthdays, special holidays, and leisure times are received with a positive feeling and are more likely to elicit response.

Improve Lead Management

An improved lead management process is a vital part of a successful marketing automation. Use both implicit and explicit data to generate and nurture leads. Implicit information includes clicks, page visits, and email subscriptions while explicit information includes data specific to industry, geography, classification based on requirements, jobs, behavior, etc. Create different lead-stage campaigns to prevent any leak in the sales funnel. Both short-term and long-term communication measures focusing on competitive pricing, education, demos will help attract prospects.

Once your marketing automation is up and running, try to fine tune it regularly to continually achieve higher ROI. Analyze results based on market intelligence and feed the automation system accordingly.

Lead Liaison

Most Undervalued Inbound Marketing Strategies Around

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Most Undervalued Inbound Marketing Strategies AroundConsistently high ranking websites will often profess hard-core search engine optimization, gleaming content creation and white hat link building techniques will not only assist in perfecting search positioning, it will make your overall internet marketing strategies increase significantly.  There are even more sustainable inbound marketing strategies and tactics, however, that are often overlooked, unused and simply scoffed at when marketing professionals begin their mass campaigning – tactics that can increase other vital areas while obtaining worthwhile targeted leads.   Some of the most undervalued, overlooked and most use-able internet marketing tactics we’ve found to still work wonders are highlighted below.

Facebook Advertisements

Sure, you may not have interests in Zoosk, care about free cellphones or have the desire to play Pawn Stars using numerous Facebook applications.  The Facebook ad system is, by and large, one of the best platforms to get your word out to the masses on a targeted level.  Instead of slapping up your advertisement to the entire Facebook world (terrible for click-thru rates, by the way), you can target your advertisement to those who have verified they like your particular niche.  You can target specific areas, age ranges and even cities.  Having this platform for internet marketing purposes is a gift; hopefully when Facebook’s stock takes off the platform will be left alone since it makes the company literally millions a month.  This platform is perfect for B2B lead generation, too, and for obvious reasons.

Since geo-targeting advertisements means plenty of repetitious ads will be shown, rotating advertisements to refresh your ‘pitch’ or angle will prevent user disinterest while harvesting the traffic you seek.  Selecting mobile B2B users as well as regular computer users will get people on the go.

Emailing Isn’t Dead

Many fear their domain-based emails will soon be moot to the overall marketing scene considering millions of social media users have @Facebook or other social media email addresses to save time while fighting spam.  Fear not, my friends: there will always be millions of old-school internet practices while include emailing friends since attachments haven’t been perfected in other social platforms.  Also, when speaking of email addresses, consider these thoughts:

  1. New TLD’s will soon be added, making .com, .net and .org the most prized possession around.
  2. Hosting companies will always offer, and improve, emailing standards and techniques to accompany domain purchases.
  3. Emails are as valuable as phone numbers; once you have aged contacts who never change their email addresses, you have addresses with value.  Not that you would sell them, right?
  4. Email lists are easier to cross-implement into social media campaigns as you’ll already have contacts to invite, friend or network with.
  5. Email marketing efforts are being recreated, perfected and still show positive numbers even to this day. Although a future filled with virtual everything is imminent, emailing will still jump on board  even if the platform changes to audio emails.  Spend your email marketing dollars wisely, build long-term lists and keep everyone on your list engaged in activities your website promulgates while your list continues to grow.

Video InStream Marketing

After loading your chosen video, you may see an annoying advertisement for something irrelevant to the new Nickelback video.  That annoying advertisement, however, is video marketing gold for those who use InStream services.  Considering over 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, and millions of more videos are added to other sites, in-video marketing definitely takes the cake as back-burner goldmines for savvy internet marketing professionals.   Advertising using keywords via YouTube is effective, although the CPC rates are higher; using InStream video marketing ads, you could experience roughly 66% lower CPC rates while still reaching the masses.

Since you’ll only pay for legitimate views to your video, and often times the ads can be set to popup several times throughout the snippet, you’ll potentially have higher website visitor-ship resulting from these in-video ads. And, much like any other paid advertising platform, your ads will only appear to targeted areas, people and ages you specify.

LinkedIn Ads And Mailings

Serious internet marketing professionals appreciate the value of LinkedIn’s professional network since they can display feature-rich advertisements to those who would most likely view them.  Since professional networks such as this are slightly higher for advertising costs, you will definitely have much better luck marketing your services throughout the million-plus different networks.

Internet marketing pros that have LinkedIn accounts can network with individuals who, in turn, give you permission to trade insights, email your offerings and also gather close contacts with their permission.  You can extract their contact information and send them periodic newsletters that fall within their interest category or simply keep in touch and grow a close business relationship with them.

Conclusion

Stepping outside the norm to give other platforms such as emailing, InStream marketing, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn the chance to work for you will prove equally beneficial to that of your SEO, content marketing, video campaigns and even landing page pushes.  Never count out what isn’t popular because that particular internet marketing strategy is making someone money, and that someone could be you.

Lead Liaison

Ten Tips for Lead Conversion – Part 2

/0 Comments/in /by

Five More Tips for Lead ConversionYesterday we posted Part 1 of our Ten Tips for Lead Conversion series. We learned to qualify leads, get their permission to stay in touch and/or offer them a chance to opt-out, use automation for personalized responses, offer instant value, allow interaction and listen to the lead! Here are five more tips for lead nurturing to help you get the most out of your marketing automation and revenue generation software:

6)       Give the Lead an Opportunity to Interact. Website pages, Facebook chat, Twitter, a dedicated phone number or a direct e-mail address should be offered to the lead for fast and personal contact. Make it easy for them to connect to a live person that will respond quickly.

7)       Keep Track of What is Working. It is crucial that a company understands what lead nurturing campaigns work and which were unsuccessful. Make sure to track the results of all interactions and calculate which articles and emails had the greatest effect on converting leads in sales. Use prospect profiling tools or dashboards to display who’s hot and who’s not. Integrate alerts to notify sales people when hot leads engage with a nurturing campaign. Use real-time lead tracking tools to identify who’s visiting your website and what they’re looking at.

8)       Ask for their Business. Once a prospect has been qualified and has shown interest, it is important that a sales person recognizes potential and attempts to close the deal. If it is not in person or done over the phone, a call to action request to buy is also appropriate. Most lead nurturing programs have an action that will automatically schedule a task in your CRM.

9)       Inquire about a Referral. A company does not need to wait for the sale to close to ask for a referral. If a lead seems particularly impressed and satisfied, ask for the referral as soon as possible. Solid referrals are priceless.

10)       Learn from Mistakes and Adjust. Lead generation systems and lead nurturing campaigns should always be assessed and tweaked if it fails to achieve pre-determined objectives. Not everything is going to work and modification will be necessary, since the market is constantly changing.

Have any additional tips for lead conversion? Please let us know and leave a comment! Alternatively, you can contact us by using the short form at the top right hand side of this post.

Lead Liaison

Ten Tips for Lead Conversion – Part 1

/0 Comments/in /by

Five Tips for Lead ConversionSales lead nurturing is essential for lead conversion in today’s fast paced market place. The ability to convert leads into revenue is a critical factor that affects the success of every business. If a company is spending a significant portion of their marketing budget on lead acquisition or generation, it must earn the reward of that investment by converting a high percentage of those leads into sales.

Here are five tips for lead conversion.

1)       Qualify Leads First. Quantity is less important than quality when it comes to successfully converting leads into revenue. Use a leads online history to judge if they are worth pursuing with a lead nurturing campaign.

2)       Ask Permission to Stay in Touch. Give the lead options to receive follow-up by email or phone and then follow through by staying in touch without coming on too strong.

3)       Utilize an Automated Response System. Create an automated e-mail acknowledgement that alerts the prospect that they will be contacted and give them a method of contact if they require something urgently. Advise them of a specific time period when they will be contacted and make sure to always respond to the prospect within the agreed upon time frame.

4)       Offer Instant Value. This should be information that they can use even if you are unable to convert the lead into a sale. It may be done in the form of a “how to” guide that is carefully crafted to inspire a purchase or an entertaining piece that is relevant to their interests.

5)       Listen to the Lead. This can be done electronically by scanning e-mail communications and online history to understand what the prospect is seeking or why they visited specific pages and links. This step includes organizing and analysing all relevant information, which can be easily achieved by a lead nurturing software program.

By using these five tips for lead conversion, a company will be more likely to generate new revenue streams by converting qualified leads into sales. A lead should never be wasted which is why effective lead nurturing is fundamental to improving a business’s conversion rate.