Lead Nurturing. Lead Generation. Marketing funnels. Sales Funnels. Sales Life Cycle. These are all the various words to describe the process from beginning to end of a customer journey. See, there’s another word, Customer Journey.
The bottom line is when you are in business, you need paying customers (or clients). In order to get those customers, you have to develop leads. We know that leads aren’t always ready to buy when you first meet them.
I remember when I worked in retail, a bookstore. As soon as a customer walked in the door, he or she was a lead (potential customer). They may be looking for something we had to sell. Now, once they walked in the store, especially if we didn’t know them, we weren’t going to walk up to them with book and hand and say, “Excuse Mr. Customer, are you interested in buying Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? It is our best seller right now and surely you will love it!”
That could work depending on the customer. But wait! Maybe the customer wanted to buy a new movie on DVD (we sold DVD’s too). He may not be interested in a Harry Potter book at all, but maybe he wants the latest Jason Bourne movie.
Now, if we already knew the customer, they would be in the camp of a regular customer. We know that maybe they would be interested in the Harry Potter book. Perhaps we know they would like the Harry Potter book because we sold them the previous 4 Harry Potter books that had come out.
Over time we developed a relationship with our customers. In fact, when I moved away from the city where I worked in the bookstore, a couple of customers got my mailing address and sent me postcards.
So, there was one central element of how we nurtured our leads. That central element was a relationship.
Now, how does that work for a WordPress site care business? How can a WordPress site care business nurture the leads he or she gets from their website? How can the WordPress site care business nurture the relationship of their leads?
Today we are going to look at four things that deserve consideration when nurturing leads for your WordPress site care business.
Personalize your approach
As we said in the introduction, nurturing a lead is essentially developing a relationship. Sure, you don’t want to pour too much of who you are into a relationship that goes nowhere. One of the things we might ask a customer in the store is, “Is there anything I can help you find?” This gave the customer a chance to ask us a question.
Of course, if the customer wanted to remain conspicuous, they could do that too. The good thing is once you have asked the customer, they can come back to you later if they wish to have help. It opens the door for further dialogue.
Autopilot explains why we need to personalize our approach,
The goal of marketing personalization is to connect individually with each prospect. Don’t make prospects feel like just a faceless, nameless number out of the crowd. Use marketing personalization to improve your lead nurture
Many inbound marketers will talk about segmentation in their email software or in a client relationship manager. One way to begin the segmentation is to ask your lead if you can help them with anything.
This is a smart thing to do early on in the process. For example, if you have a new subscriber, you can utilize your autoresponder to ask this kind of question.
Be careful with automation
I love automation, don’t you? After all, you are probably using something like Aweber, CovertKit, Drip, or MailChimp to deliver your emails to your list. Heck, you even use MainWP to automate the WordPress update process.
There is so much to that automation does to help make our lives more efficient. However, when developing a relationship with a potential client, be careful. I offer to hope on Zoom with people when they have questions. This has lead to projects for me. I am using an automation tool (Zoom) but getting a chance to visit with someone as if we were sitting in a coffee shop.
In fact, recently, Tesla realized their production of Model 3 was slowed by, you guessed it, too much automation. In a tweet, Elon Musk said humans were underrated.
Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018
Don’t let automation take the human element out of your relationships.
Pay attention to your Sales Life Cycle
Ever start a relationship with a new lead to watch it stretch on for a year or two or more? It’s frustrating, especially when you have bills to pay. When you are selling products and services that are in the four, five, and six-figure range, the sales life cycle is often a little bit longer.
It is hard to get someone to part with that amount of money quickly. Now, to be sure, they often do a lot of research before they get to us, so, when we get them in our funnel, it doesn’t seem as long sometimes.
Johanna Rivard points out that it takes time to make the sale,
On average, it takes about ten touches—or points of contact—for leads to turn into sales, but that still depends on the type of your business and your sales cycle.
Consider mapping out your customer’s journey so you can evaluate approximately how long it takes for them to take action. You may get to a point in the relationship that you are continuing the follow-up emails and checking in with your leads.
If you can get your lead on your opt-in email list, follow-ups are more efficient as you send out emails to your list.
Offer low hanging fruit
Recently I attended a WordCamp. One of the sponsors was a company who did WordPress management. The company offers a free plan for maintenance to get an initial buy-in. The free offer is very, very limited, but the presenter told us that they almost always sign up for one of the paid plans.
A low hanging fruit type of service can be a website audit or some kind of consultation. You may offer them at a low rate or make them free. The point is, it is a much easier buy for the lead and in doing so, you establish a relationship with a client.
In order to decide what to do, think about the types of problems that potential clients come to you with. They break a site with an update, having issues with a plugin, their site is slow, etc. These are all potential products and services to use to draw customers into your funnel. The goal is to have a long-term client.
Once you deliver on the service, make sure they are subscribed to your email list where you send regular emails. You might even develop a process of graduated services that you use to move them through your funnel towards your site care plan.
Wrapping it up
When nurturing leads, it can be tricky sometimes. While you want to nurture your client to the day they choose to do business with you, you have to remain relational. We have to strike a balance between efficiency and relationships.
Sometimes that means forgetting what the gurus tell us about the process because the process is dynamic and doesn’t always adhere to our plans.
Resolve to stay in touch as much as possible. Get those leads on your email list, email them regularly, give them good content and be helpful. These are the hallmarks of a great lead nurturing process.
How does lead nurturing work for you? Drop your thoughts in the comments below.
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