LEADCRITICLead Nurturing a Pain Point
According to MarketingSherpa’s Business Marketing Survey, lead nurturing is an area that is a point of pain for many businesses. They asked 980 marketers in a variety of industries if they have a process for lead nurturing. Surprisingly, only 56% have a solid plan in place.
56% have some defined lead nurturing process in place, but only 36% of them are satisfied with that process. I believe that most lead nurturing programs out there are not really as successful as they could be in optimizing communications during the sales cycle.
What to do? Many companies are turning to marketing automation. But, whether you’re using a marketing automation solution, whether you’re just working internally, one thing that makes a big difference is segmenting prospects early in the process.
If they came in via a specific lead aggregator, that information should tell us something about who they are and what they want to know. What is their loan request, credit score, geographic location? If they came in via a white paper or a webinar, the topic of those things should tell us a great deal. This valuable information can be added to throughout the communication process to make a more relevant message.
Look at lead nurturing as truly nurturing a relationship that gets deeper and will expand over time. It’s not easy and is a sore spot for many businesses because there’s a tremendous amount of complexity, a lot of moving parts. Most lenders understand their sales cycle, and they understand what people want at different times, but they have a very hard time tying that content and information back into meaningful consumer communications.
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Raj Parekh | Jul 16, 2008 | Reply
Jason,
Great post. I think we are in support of your conclusions. I for one am a proponent of SoftVu as I see how it helps the clients in our portfolio who use it. Nurturing becomes such an essential part of extracting the ‘lifetime value’ of the lead and a customer. However, until recently, it was largely overlooked. We just got off the “use and throw” lead buying culture in the mortgage boom, but now efficiency, and deriving maximum value of all the system and investments a company makes into marketing are issues that are coming to the forefront. Fortunately, we work with great people like the team at SoftVu to bring this expertise and capability to our clients.
Joao | Sep 17, 2008 | Reply
Great posting! It is near impossible to get a lead nurturing program to work if it is a manual process. It needs to be automated. I think that marketing software is indispensable.