LCM Part 2: 3 Steps to Turn Warm Leads into HOT Prospects

Welcome to part 2 of our Life Cycle Marketing series! In our previous article, we spoke about ways to attract your customers to your website (and therefore your products and services). If you haven’t read the article, here is the link.

If you followed all of our steps, you should have started attracting new leads and potential new clients… but what are you supposed to do with them now??

The concept of selling to brand new customers can be easier said than done, and there’s a lot to think about. How quickly you can achieve a sale through a new lead or prospect often depends on where they are placed in the LCM cycle.

Some of your leads will be “hot to trot” – meaning they really want your product and can’t wait to buy (brilliant!)… But what about the leads that don’t buy straight away? Maybe they’re interested but not yet ready to commit. They might need a little more time to decide or they need more information to know how your product or service can benefit them.

Don’t spend hours getting leads in the first place only to have them disappear into the ether (or worse – go to one of your competitors) because your ‘buy process’ wasn’t well thought out.

As a consumer, you will already be aware that most people prefer to be “guided” through a buy process, instead of being “pushed” through it.   So how do you guide them to your shopping cart at a pace that suits them? Here are our 3 steps to turn warm leads into HOT prospects:

1)      Design the perfect nurture program

Marketing studies have shown it takes approximately 7 to 10 touch points to convert a prospect to a customer, yet most businesses forget to send new customers more than one email. If this sounds familiar, you could be missing out on some valued customers that just need a little nurturing to become one of your raving fans!

So what is a nurture program? To nurture is to put yourself in touch with your customers and make them feel important and special…

What does that mean for your business? Imagine if you had only one customer and all the time in the universe to guide them through your ideal sales process. Got it? Now ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of emails would you send them and how often?
• What information would you give them that would be of interest?
• How many phone calls would you make and when?
• At what point would you suggest a product or service for them to buy?

Ideally, you want them to feel like they are your only client in a good way. Not in a desperate way. Don’t overdo it and make them feel creeped out. It could send them running to your competitors!  Balance is important – just put yourself in their shoes and you are well on your way to designing your perfect nurture program.

2)     Automate the delivery

Trust us: automation is a thing you need in your life. The best way to think about automation is about MULTIPLYING yourself in the sales process, not removing yourself from it.

If you automate your ideal nurture program, you have suddenly scaled this process to handle every prospect in the same way, every time. They can even come at you in multiples and still experience the same ideal experience that you want to give them (without you having a nervous breakdown)!

You know what’s even better? It works with existing clients, too!  Everyone knows it’s much less expensive to keep an existing client than to gain a new one and, with your existing clients, you can build a supercharged nurture program to upsell them another one of your products or services.

3)     Create great content

The next step of this nurture process is to provide your client with valuable content to keep them interested and coming back. Great content serves two purposes:

1. It increases your potential customer’s trust in you and establishes you as an authority in the subject matter you’re writing about. When you provide valuable content to your leads and your customers about your products and services it shows you have a deeper commitment to your clients and it separates you from every other business in your market.
2. It attracts links to your website which could mean additional revenue from ad placements and more time for the potential customer to get familiar with the rest of the content, services and offerings on your site.

OK, so now you know you need to design a nurture program, automate it and provide followers with valuable content.   Awesome. But how do you do it?

In our next article in this series we will look at the best methods of content delivery, using ‘trackable behaviour’, and tips for selecting the perfect automation delivery tool for your business… sure-fire ways to make that sale – every time!

For more information:
Contact Us