10 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Lead Nurturing

‘Lead Nurturing’ is an important marketing strategy as it builds solid relationships with your leads, that creates a trust for your leads to do business with you.  Most of the small businesses are struggling to nurture their leads, are you one among them? Would you like to find the common mistakes that you are doing in the process of lead nurturing?

Converting leads into customers is one of the biggest challenges in the sales process and the strategies varies for every product and service. Appropriate and efficient lead nurture strategies should be applied to build trust among the audience which in turn increases lead conversion rates and increases sales.

And also, the sales team is investing more time and energy in the process of creating new customers. Simple and common mistakes should not break the conversion of the lead.

Here are a few common mistakes that salespeople normally do:

(1) Miss to identify right prospects

Identifying, reaching, and qualifying potential clients is a key factor for all businesses. The needs of prospects/leads may vary from time to time, capturing the right leads and targeting them at the right time is a key action. Though complete market research is done earlier, understanding who is your prospect, what are they looking for, when you can reach them and how you can provide your support is extremely important in lead generation and nurturing. Misidentification causes poor results to the entire sales process in terms of conversion and revenue.

(2) Inadequate email marketing

Email marketing is a simple yet powerful way to target leads. Personalizing email is important, but generic or , irrelevant content in emails would discourage your leads from moving along the sales path. Also, personalizing an email is not just adding the name of the recipient in the subject, instead it should merely expresses what you do, instead of addressing the lead’s specific concerns. Another common mistake is, consolidating all the leads together and running a single email campaign irrespective of their needs.

(3) Fail to attract with lead magnets

The real success of marketing is how far you can attract customers towards your product or service via email campaigns, websites or ads. In general, the lead magnet can be anything – a free app, guidebook, trial, download, analysis report, e-book, case study, or a free consultation. However, every business needs to understand which lead magnet suits their target customers. Most of the time, many fail to attract their customers with appropriate lead magnets.

(4) Not providing awareness & education

Building awareness and sharing knowledge about your niche are important to make the audience look into your product. Many times, the organizations miss to provide awareness, with simple repetitive messages with their brand name. Also, many forget to educate leads about their brand’s specification and its benefits and how they different from their competitors. In such cases, the leads would avoid/bypass your business and product/service. 

(5) Delay in responding

In today’s fast-paced world, everyone needs quick  solution. Usually, every business should have a SLA for responding to customer queries. Don’t make your customers to wait for your reply.. Delayed communications will make your leads unhappy.

(6) Lack of follow-up

Researches show that approximately 50% of leads who shown interest in products during an email campaign are not followed up properly. Businesses can use effective CRM tools to keep a track of follow-up details of leads who showed interest in your products/services.  Businesses who ignore regular follow-ups are losing their chances of sales opportunities and closing the doors for their leads.

(7) Annoying short-interval campaigns

The interval of setting up campaigns has to be carefully planned. Though sending nurturing emails regularly is encouraged, sending one email per month with relevant content to leads is far enough. Further, it is good to send emails to your leads during their business hours which tends to increase open rates. Sending an email, ad message to leads every day or every week would be annoying. Also, sending multiple emails at the same time would irritate leads.

(8) Improper Communication

Good communication is the heart of sales and marketing. Businesses communicate to their leads via content and design. Creating and publishing interesting as well as informative content with appealing designs would inspire your leads. But improper communication creates more dissatisfaction and a bad impression towards the organization.

(9) Ignore to analyze the campaign results

The success of the lead nurturing is evaluated by analyzing the campaign results in terms of email open rates and click rates. When a business ignores to analyze the campaign results, it would be considered as a huge opportunity been wasted. Because you miss to identify the root causes for low responses, determine the required improvements in the lead nurturing process and test different solutions like providing new content or different communication channel.

(10) Poorly designed websites or landing pages

Even though all the aforementioned pre- & post-campaign activities are done perfectly, sometimes you may not get amazing results. There are other factors that may influence the results and one of them is poorly designed websites and/or landing pages. You cannot gain lead’s attention or build a trust for your business when your web pages contain poorly phrased & more cluttered information. Also, the insecure website connection (e.g. without SSL certificate) would create a negative impact for your leads.

Every lead is distinct and has different needs, problems and concerns. One automated communication cannot fit all the customers. Considering this, the marketing team needs to plan and actively nurture their sales leads. I hope this blog helps you to understand and avoid the obvious lead nurturing mistakes to maximize your sales.