Getting prospects to decide quickly is the best thing for your marketing campaign. If they respond with a ‘yes’, they move on to the fast-lane of your sales funnel. If it’s a ‘no’, you still gain valuable information on improving your campaign. Both results are extremely valuable.
There is, however, the ‘maybe’: the “I’m interested, but not convinced” stage where you can really shine and gain more sales. “Maybe” is an opportunity for a “yes”.
Ideally, this is what you have done so far:
Committed to a singular objective and created a landing page;
Evaluated dozens, if not hundreds, of designs to select the one best fitting your goal;
Written a concise, sparkling copy for your page; and
Created a mobile-friendly design.
All of these steps can be expanded to turn interest into a decision in the process of lead nurturing.
Nature versus nurture
When a prospect says ‘maybe’, it is often, in fact, a ‘yes’. However, if you’re not paying attention to the way you handle these - or worse, abandon them - they’ll quickly forget about you and you lose not only the sale, but also the effort you put into your funnel up to this point.
Nature (i.e. organic transition from prospect to lead) does have an influence, but given its unreliability and randomness, it might as well not exist. So you need to be prepared for nurture and the best way to do that is through email.
Email is not dead
As Stewart Rogers points out numerous times on VentureBeat (1, 2, 3), in all of the tools digital marketers use, email is still the most reliable and convenient resource. It’s also the only form of communication with a reactive element.
Once you get an email, you have to react to it. You have to decide to read it, not read it, read it later (which typically means you’re not going to read it), delete it, and so on.
No other medium has this reactive quality. And this is what makes email the best way to follow up on the interest your prospect showed you, and why you should - if nothing else - make sure you capture their email.
Lead nurturing is seduction, not a pickup
If your prospect says ‘maybe’ to your well-polished sales copy, asking for a straight ‘yes’ right away isn’t going to work. Remember: your landing page is the final step in your marketing funnel. Your nurturing email series is a new avenue.
Yes, we said “series”. Email follow-ups that work are thoughtful, polite, and gentle. That being said, this doesn’t mean they have to go through it fully. Include your fast-lane-exit-CTA in each email. You never know when they decide to buy, and knowing that will give you even more than just a single sale: valuable data that will improve your future campaigns.
Take your entire marketing campaign, and divide it up into 4 parts. Those four parts will create, along with some sales-specific components, your email nurture campaign. With proper structure, you can make sales and provide useful information without the explicit intent of selling your product. This will establish trust as well as authority within your market. The latter will help prospects remember your business when looking for a similar solution later, even if they’re not converting right now.
How much is too much?
Commonly speaking, nobody likes email anymore. So when someone entrusts you with their email address, make sure you honor that invitation.
This means that your emails shouldn’t exceed 400-500 words in length. People get dozens if not hundreds of emails every day, and the less they need to read through, the better their reaction will be. As with every rule, feel free to break it if you must, but tread carefully.
Politeness also means not giving useless, repetitive information. Summarizing a perspective, or presenting previous information in a different light is acceptable (you don’t have to write an entirely new campaign), but repeating yourself will lead to opt-outs instead of conversions.
Launch an effective campaign
As a startup, getting started in generating revenue isn’t an easy process, and you’re now much closer to success. In the future, we’ll discuss the tools you can use to maximize efficiency in your conversion process. We will also address the importance and intricacies of testing during your campaigns and how you can make agile decisions based on live data.
If you think all this is just too much to handle and coordinate, consider seeking help: the money you spend on professionals will tenfold revenue and allow you to focus on what you’re really good at: your product and your business.