The webinar on ‘Lead Nurturing Essentials to Drive More Conversions’ raised several pertinent questions about marketing, lead nurturing and lead management. For those of you who missed it, here’s a brief Q&A of the discussion.
Question 1
How to integrate outbound marketing efforts with inbound lead nurturing? Is it possible to do so using a lead management system like LeadSquared?
In the context of your inbound and outbound marketing efforts, the programs would be different for different companies/industries. Let me give you an example of what we do in our inbound and outbound marketing. Our primary customer base is companies who are in B2C space and some segments of B2B space. A lot of companies in this space are in search of a marketing automation company online. We run online ads such as Facebook ads. Our primary traffic comes from organic search and ads. When these people come to our website and submit forms, that’s the point when the lead nurturing program starts.
The nurturing program consists of interaction by emails and a series of auto responder emails. We use LeadSquared for our own marketing which gives us capability to send emails based on the kind of page people have visited. Hence, the email can be personalized based on the interest of the person. We follow up on the emails by offering free guides. These guides could be about generating leads, lead nurturing, marketing and generally business-specific guides. Thereafter, we speak to those interested and ask them to try LeadSquared. From then on, the interaction is more over the phone.
Question 2
Creating new content is challenging. Do you have any suggestions on how I can meet this challenge? Are there any tools/services that would help in content writing?
Creating new content is challenging and a lot of companies would face this problem. Companies who are able to create fresh, engaging content on a continuous basis would be successful in generating good organic traffic on their website. The company needs to invest on good copywriters, and those who can write good quality content. You can have freelancers or full-time bloggers for this purpose. There are tools available but that will not help you generate unique content. You could also try re-purposing your content but that will not help to a large extent.
Question 3
While doing email campaigns, my emails are going to spam/junk (via benchmark). How can I ensure that my mails reach my customers’ inbox?
Any group of emails that are sent concurrently to a bunch of people where you don’t have permission to send to them, that’s spam. Email clients or email platforms have very sophisticated algorithms to figure out whether an email is spam or not. If you want to avoid spam, there are a few things that can be done.
1. DKIM SPF Setting: This help document will guide you.
2. Invest effort on improving the content of the email. The content of the email plays an important role in flagging the email as spam.
Take a look at this post on Email Deliverability to ensure your mails do not hit the SPAM box.
Question 4
We are a start up company dealing in web design and software development. What is the best method to generate leads for us?
Since you are in the web design and software development industry, the primary mechanism for you would be doing your own market research and then reaching out to folks by email and then calling. That’s how most of the web design and software companies work. If you are providing a specific service for which people might be searching online, then you might want to invest on Google Adwords and other kinds of ads. However, if that is not the case and you are proving the standard IT kind of service, then focus a bit on market research to figure out what kind of companies would be interested in your service and then reach out to them by email and tele-calls.
Question 5
How can we track the movement of the leads?
You need to have a system (like LeadSquared) in place to actually track the different activities of the leads and depending on that, they can move to different stages.
Question 6
Can we track individual leads in LeadSquared?
Yes, you can track individual leads in LeadSquared. The image below will give you a better idea of individual lead tracking in LeadSquared.
Question 7
What are the major points differentiating warm and hot leads?
The terms ‘warm’ and ‘hot’ may be used differently, depending on the industry. Generally, the term ‘warm’ refers to leads in the middle of the funnel. A hot lead would refer to a lead that is about to close (someone who moves from being a lead to a customer in your sales funnel). There may not be a lot of steps required before the lead converts to a customer. Warm would mean that the lead is interested in your product or service but you need to send more relevant and enticing offers for the lead to convert.
Here’s an example of how lead scoring can help you distinguish between warm and hot leads:
For more webinar content, visit our blog to access all our previous webinar recordings.
