How to effectively acquire B2B and B2C clients and make them become regular customers? Learn what lead generation and lead nurturing are, and boost your sales!
Leads can be obtained in many different ways, but to get the desired conversion rate, one needs to determine a consistent strategy at every stage of the sales funnel. What is lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead scoring? What impact do they have on the sales process?
What does the lead nurturing, lead generation, and lead scoring strategy involve?
Lead generation is the very beginning of the road to finalise a transaction. Preparing a potential customer to make a purchase can increase the conversion rate on acquired leads by up to 50%. However, an inappropriate approach to lead generation can be counterproductive. Lead generation is a process of building an audience base using appropriate technologies, marketing campaigns, and tools.
Lead nurturing is a multi-stage and consistent process that aims to lead a potential customer to conclude a transaction. It is estimated that around 70% of leads are not ready to buy when they are transferred to the sales department. Therefore, a well-developed strategy of lead nurturing should include providing relevant information to a potential customer at every stage of the purchasing path.
To optimise sales activities, it is worth developing a lead qualification system, i.e. identifying the most profitable and interested recipients. Lead scoring is a qualification of leads which usually consists in awarding positive and negative points for actions taken by potential customers. Various criteria may be assessed, such as behavioural and demographic characteristics, social media involvement or response to advertising and sales activities (e.g. push advertising or newsletter).
How to obtain leads?
Before a user becomes a lead, they should be encouraged to leave contact details on the website, e.g. name, phone number, and email address. However, in the case of the push advertising tool, you can contact the recipient and build a subscriber base without collecting contact details.
What does the lead generation process look like?
It consists of several stages – presenting an offer, redirecting to the landing page thanks to call to action and filling in the registration form, owing to which we collect leads. The main methods of generating leads include e.g. push advertising, email marketing, content marketing (e.g. through e-books, articles, reports), social media (e.g. Facebook Leads Ads), SEO (organic traffic), Google Ads.
How to use lead nurturing to increase sales?
Lead nurturing allows you to keep your audience engaged by providing them with persuasive and personalised content, as well as benefits they will achieve through products or services they offer. It should be remembered that late contact from the seller or long waiting times irritate and discourage users. To make a purchase, recipients need immediate information.
Each company individually designs various variants of shopping funnels and campaign scenarios. Base segmentation and lead scoring remain necessary at this stage. Lead nurturing focuses on leads that are at the bottom of the sales funnel.
When a customer has decided to buy a product or service, it is worth offering them an attractive rebate or discount for subsequent purchases. It is also good to remind of your existence;
- by sending valuable
- customised content (e.g. via push advertising or newsletters).
Lead nurturing consists of messages that the client should put together into a coherent whole and give an exhaustive answer to the question regarding benefits of cooperation with a given brand.