Lead nurturing sounds like a lot of work, giving attention and nurturing those individuals who have expressed an interest in your business, products and/or services. And while it may sound like a waste of time to revisit those leads for a minimal return on this investment, lead nurturing can actually yield some big results. Lead nurturing for inbound marketing essentially involves building rapport and earning attention through value. Rather than spamming your potential leads with sales emails with discount codes, clearance products and other sales-heavy content, focusing on answering and addressing simple pain points will give you much more in return. This kind of nurturing is all about strategy, as you build up a level of trust, dependence, reliability and friendliness with your potential customers. The more you help your leads with issues now, the more likely they are to come to you to buy when they need the products or services you are selling. So, how do you go about nurturing your leads using inbound marketing? For one, give leads the freedom to choose. Think about this: how often do you read through entire emails from companies that pitch offers or clearance items? Probably not very often, at least not every single line. Why? Well, most of the content may not apply to you. Plus, sales emails are just not that interesting if you aren’t looking to purchase something right now. Give your leads the freedom to choose what content to see to maximize what they see and read. When they opt into your email list, ask them what they would like to see more of. Are they curious about your services, more specifically a branch of your services? Or are they curious about just one specific product? Using the information provided from users, only send emails pertaining to their chosen subjects. No matter how you approach lead nurturing for inbound marketing, keep these five things in mind:

1. Be personal in your emails. Write emails from people, not a company. There’s nothing more powerful than a human writing to a human rather than a large corporation writing to a single individual.
2. Have a purpose and be useful – sales emails aren’t always useful for your leads. Instead, seek to educate, inspire, help, assist, and entertain in your emails.
3. Use those pain points to really be there for your leads. Do you understand your leads’ desire to get fit and shed the pounds after the holiday season? Provide affordable and effective weight loss solutions? Understand their lack of time to get to the gym? Offer flexible hours, payment plans, and workout classes.
4. Drop the cold calls pushing people to buy from you. There’s nothing worse than getting a phone call from someone when you may or may not be looking for what they are pushing.
5. Use your leads’ previous behaviors to figure out where to take them next. For example, a person who has expressed an interest in purchasing a project may lose interest if they receive an email pushing service packages and clearance items.

Taking care of your leads is one of the most important components in marketing, especially when you are trying to set yourself apart from your competitors. If you’d like to see how we can help you take your lead strategy from a traditional sales process to a friendly, professional, and caring approach for your inbound marketing, call us today!