The internet is brimming with thousands of articles, podcasts and videos telling you how to nurture your leads and convert them into customers. However, it’s not ideal to expect everything to fall into place just by bingeing on one video from a marketing guru. Like most business lessons, it requires hard work and patience (and not to mention, a great strategy) to turn your leads around and notice you.
Lead management is more of a leadership role and less of a managing one. It’s like raising a child or taking care of a plant. How they turn out to be will not be completely in your hands, but you can still make a hell lot of difference! It’s not just about sowing the seed or bringing someone into your world. You also have to follow up on them, spend time to nurture them, prioritise them, do your best and then hope to God that they don’t end up resenting you in the end, which is equivalent to ‘unsubscribing from your mails’ in business terms. With that being said, let’s get the ball rolling.
1. Having a strategy: Where is this headed?
It’s good to be spontaneous but it’s even better to have a plan. If you are doing something, do it right the first time. It will save you a lot of time, effort and resources. For example, a lot of property developers don’t have a Lead Nurturing Strategy for Real Estate. They just go with the flow, send out random emails/messages at random intervals, without customising the communication to the receiver, and they definitely don’t diversify their platforms. Without a strategy in place, you will probably end up being in a relationship with your leads that isn’t going anywhere. At the end of a year, you don’t wanna be this guy:
Spend 50% of your time researching and chalking out strategies that cater to your audience. Learn what your competitors are doing and do the opposite to stand out. Analyse case studies and test your strategies out to pick the one with the highest conversion rate.
2. Prioritising your leads: Are you barking up the wrong tree?
Warm, hot and cold aren’t just ways to size up your bathing water. They are also great ways to segment your leads in order to harness their true potential. Your Lead Nurturing Strategy for Real Estate, or any other industry for that matter, should mandatorily include this step. You can do this by figuring out your sales funnel stages and allotting spots accordingly.
Think of lead segmentation as running a classroom where you separate the high acheivers and give them extra attention to drive results.
Hot leads: have high potential, need handholding and frequent communication, like your fiancé whom you are about to marry.
Warm leads: have moderate potential, need just the right push to turn into a hot lead, like your crush.
Cold leads: have low potential since things didn’t go great with them, but it’s still good to stay in touch because you never know when they’ll change their mind, just like your exes.
3. Grabbing their attention: Why should they even listen to you?
An average person receives around 121 business emails per day and ends up opening only about 20–40% of them. The rest of the mails just go straight to ghost-town.
Remember that you only have a 2–3 second window of attention from your audience. If you land your pitch powerfully, you get to the next round, i.e. they will end up reading what you have to say.
Pick your words carefully. Stand out with personalisation and names. Say something unusual. Don’t yap like a salesman. Package your message differently. Change the rules. Use emojis if you can. ?
4. Leaving an impression: Why should they remember you?
If you get them to open your mail: good. If you get them to read till the end: great. If you get them to think about you after they have closed your mail: awesome! That’s what we are talking about!
There are several ways to make a mark on someone through an email. You could be:
- borderline funny
- brutally honest
- frank like a friend
- unexpectedly informative
Alternately, you could let your USP do the talking or make them an offer they can’t refuse, like buying their love with gifts, discounts and new user deals.
Here’s a great example of a simple verification mail that leaves a smile on your face:
A short GIF goes a long way
5. Buttoning up: The big blue button and other helpful tips.
Here is some parting gyaan that will help you lead your leads to customer-town.
- Aim for action: Make sure the Call To Action (CTA) is loud and clear. This is challenging in texts since you can’t put a shiny red button there.
- Leave the games to Tinder, this is strictly business: Keep your ego aside when doing business. When you first come across a potential customer, take the initiative to talk to them and introduce yourself. Even if you are a small business, sending an email or a Whatsapp message can make all the difference.
- Don’t get toxic: Do not be creepy, repetitive or too frequent in your communication. No one likes to be pestered 5 times a day. Know where to draw the line. Give them the option to opt-out of calls, messages and emails.
Know where your audience spend most of their time. If they are young, they are tech-savvy and will probably respond to Whatsapp/Instagram DMs. If they are middle-aged, calls would work better. viagra and drug screening If they are working, they must be checking their emails a lot. You just need to know where to find them.
- Use the stage smartly: Spend time to configure your messages according to the platform you are using. On SMS, you can play with emojis, whereas on Whatsapp texts, you can add e-fliers, photos and videos.
- Be kind: Always be polite. Show that you care. If you said you’d call back your leads, call them back.
All said and done, don’t expect yourself to become a lead conversion rockstar in a week or a month. As we mentioned earlier, it takes more than just reading an article. It requires hard work, strategies and most importantly, time, to work out a successful model for your brand audience. Be open to put in the work and you will see results – 100%. Or you could hire our lead servicing modules that we have built and tested over the years to work on different industries and brand audiences. For instance, if you cater to homebuyers, we have a powerful Lead Nurturing Strategy for Real Estate that will drive results for you. Try and describe your brand’s target audience to us and we will figure out an awesome lead strat for you?