Lead Optimize Outsourced Marketing

It is easy for well-intentioned lead nurturing efforts to turn sour if not handled properly. Prospects that are irritated with your contact points will opt out of your contact list – obviously not the desired outcome of prospect marketing. How do you create a lead nurturing plan that will do what it is supposed to do, and build a long-term relationship with your prospect?

Lead Nurturing Defined

Lead nurturing is a sales technique that involves caring for the business-prospect relationship regardless of whether the prospect is ready to make a purchase. Regular, ongoing communication with a prospect that is genuinely viable will ideally lead to a lasting relationship, so when it is time to buy, they come to you. The goal of a lead nurturing effort is a sale and a loyal customer.

The Right Way to Care for Prospects

The best way to nurture your prospects is to pay attention to what their concerns are, and counter act them with valuable information. This can be in the form of phone conversations, emails, newsletters, white papers, webinars, or direct mail.

Generally speaking, prospects prefer to receive information in bite-sized chunks rather than in long, information-dense documents.

Many people have strong preferences regarding how they receive information. Depending on their technological capabilities, your contact can come via phone, voice mail, email, snail mail, events, or fax.

In Anne Holland’s Chief Marketer post “Lead Nurturing: Why Marketers Should Stop Relying on House List E-Mail” , Anne points out the drawbacks to email-exclusive lead nurturing. She gives three reasons why email is not conducive to building a relationship with your prospects:

1. Email does not always get to the right place, thanks to company filters and delivery problems.
2. Not every prospect prefers email over other forms of communication.
3. E-mail is sterile and impersonal.

For quick notes, offers, and news, e-mail is a great medium. For building a warm, lasting relationship, you must engage other senses. The sound of a human voice, the touch of a human hand, a direct eye-to-eye glance … these are all more profoundly engaging than a visual message in an already crowded in-box…

For the human voice, consider investing in more business radio PR, podcasting, and trade show speeches. For the sense of touch, start sending physical mail again. That’s right — instead of white-paper PDFs and e-mail newsletters, send snail-mail printed pieces to top prospects. For eye-to-eye encounters, change your trade show and road show focus from lead generation to lead nurturing. For example, instead of a bigger booth, invest in an intimate “best prospects only” show brunch or dinner party. (And don’t rely on e-mail alone to invite people!)

Answer A Question Each Time You Make Contact

Put yourself in their shoes. Prospects have questions - from “who is this?” to “why me?” so your nurturing efforts should answer at least one of these questions every time you contact them:

1. Is it a good value and why?
   
2. Does the company have a good reputation?
3. Is this product or service what I really need to make my life better/easier?
4. Is this company the best, or are the competitors a higher quality?
5. Do I even need this? (Weren’t things going well before?)
6. In what ways will this help me?

The #1 Lead Nurturing Error Committed by Even the Most Experienced Marketers

Lead nurturing is not about constantly “checking in” with prospective customers to find out if they want to buy from you yet.

True Story - I recently heard a story about a busy training department in a large Ivy League university. On occasion, the department would purchase management curriculum. They regularly received more than 20 calls per week from training curriculum companies that were “checking in.” It became so irritating to the training manager that she began avoiding the companies that had been harassing the department. When it came time to make a purchase, she chose a company she had never heard of before because she feared that the “lead nurturing” from the other companies would only get worse after the purchase.

This reaction to overzealous salespeople is common. Only a handful of the dozens of companies that were calling the department ever asked how she preferred to receive information about their company. They never built a relationship. Even if they answered the “six essential questions”, their frustrating tactics shut off two-way communication with the prospect before it even started.

How to Get Started on the Right Foot

Follow these tips to build lasting relationships with your prospects:

• Let the prospect tell you how to communicate with them. Ask how you can keep them informed about your business – what communication method is most convenient for them?
• Limit the number of times you contact the prospect.
• Make sure you are working with the right person
• As an organization, develop a plan for lead nurturing. Include what communication tools will be used, what content will be included, and how many times a prospect will be contacted.

Brian Carrol gives a great detailed sample of a business-to-business lead nurturing schedule in “How Lead Nurturing Improves Lead Generation ROI” as well as an example of how to start a nurturing effort.

You Might Like This Simple Method Better

Lead Nurturing is really only complicated because you are trying to do it on a large scale (and probably lead other people do it as well) while recording your actions and progress as well as managing all the other tasks you in your usual schedule. At its very heart, lead nurturing is about forming a deeper relationship - a friendship - with clients so simplify it in your mind and just make friends of your customers - and mean it. Learn about what they like and what they need for their business and for their success and help them with those things.

Have you ever carefully researched an item, decided to buy, then could not find out how to buy the company’s product through their website? In frustration, you probably gave up to purchase the product elsewhere. You have just witnessed that company’s biggest sales mistake. Many businesses have flashy websites with all the best marketing but with one major flaw – no clear call to action. I usually call them contact opportunities because you are really giving the customer another opportunity to contact you.

What is the “Call to Action”?

The call to action is defined in its simplest form as “an activity requested of a customer.” The activity can be purchasing a product or service, taking a survey, signing up for a newsletter, or any other desired action.

An interested visitor has read all about your product’s benefits and features, but now what? The call to action tells the visitor about the next step.

Why is the Call to Action Important?

In online marketing, the call to action can make or break your marketing effort. It is your prime opportunity to increase the conversion rate on your site. Having an effective call to action can improve your conversion rates by 25% or more.

Many times, people visit sites with the intention of “just looking”. Virtual window shopping can turn into a purchase through an attractive and effective call to action. A large chunk of visitors want to be sold on something.

10 Tips for Writing the Perfect Call to Action

1. Focus your page’s content by clearly identifying your objective
2. Write your copy in a way that is friendly and conversational
3. Tell people about your product versus trying to sell your product
4. Place a call to action at the top and bottom (and middle) of every page of your site
5. Center the call to action on customer action - that is, tell the customer what to do
6. Make the call to action easy to find and understand
7. Tell the customer what you want so the customer can decide if they want to do business with you
8. Add trust builders such as guarantees and…
9. Consider placing a well-worded testimonial near your call to action
10. Make key action words stand out and easy to use by making them hyperlinks
11. Bonus: Don’t use “click here” as your hyperlink. In fact, don’t use “click here” if possible

Writing Your Call to Action

You can easily write an effective call to action by answering these two basic questions:

• What action do you want your visitor to take?
• What will happen if they do it?

Good Call to Action Examples:

Contact us to enroll.

Call now. Operators are standing by.

Here is a passionate viewpoint as to why “click here” is not an effective call to action in high performance email marketing, written by Stefan Pollard.

Your Call To Action - Ask for the Sale to Improve Conversions

There is a lot of discussion about how to best draw in tire kickers so that they make a purchase and become customers. Studies have proven that you need to ask for the sale – repeatedly – throughout the sales process and it is important to ask tactfully, and in a non-harassing way.

For an in-depth look at web-specific marketing and sales techniques that focus on increasing conversion rates, read “Encourage Sales Conversion & Reader Response through a Clear Call to Action,” by Jeffrey Smith.

Read closely. Fake testimonials are legal. False testimonials are illegal.

Did you know there are professional testimonial writers? They take the company’s or product’s most desirable attributes and expertly weave them into a lovely story about how Company XYZ’s product changed their (er, someone’s) life. Chances are the testimonial writer has never used the product or service. Just take a peek on any freelance writing job board and you will see job postings for testimonial and review writers for all types of online businesses. Is this the modern day shill?

In the court cases I found on the FTC site (in PDFs so large you would be mad if I linked you to them) the end decision regarding the legality of a fake testimonial was based on whether or not the fake testimonial accurately depicted the experience of the average customer. That is, they basically asked if the content of the testimonial was false.

Of course this practice is controversial. Is it ethical? Is it even legal? Are there varying degrees of its rightness, or is that just justifying lying to the public?

What are testimonials for, anyway?

Probably one of the oldest sales tools in the book, testimonials are supposed to be first hand accounts of fellow customers that tried the product or service and can vouch for its quality and value.

The ethics of writing fake testimonials or reviews are hazy. Here is a look at both sides of the issue.

For: Why using fake testimonials is OKAY

Of course, a business that uses fake testimonials is using them as marketing content. Fake testimonials are used in different ways. Here are some key points regarding the justification of fake testimonials:

• By editing or supplementing a testimonial, you are making it easier to read.
• You are combining a sampling of common customer comments, succinctly writing the testimonial in a tight quote. Nothing wrong with creatively editing comments, right?
• You are writing a testimonial, and then running it by the customer to save the customer time.
• The reality is, businesses do not publish the bad feedback. So using real positive comments to use as testimonials in advertising is not a realistic look at the overall business anyway.
• Many businesses use fake testimonials as a mean to an end. Using fake personal recommendations when a business is first starting out will hopefully draw in more clients that will then provide real comments, thus eliminating the need for fake testimonials.
• Using testimonials is helpful to a site’s conversion rate. They are confidence builders.

Against: Why using fake testimonials is WRONG

Here are a few alternative viewpoints about why using false testimonials is unethical.

• Potential customers like to see that other people just like them enjoyed a product they are considering purchasing. The problem is that there are so many fakes out there that it takes away from the real ones.
• If your product or service is not good, you cannot fake it for long without the word getting out on the street.
• People are smart. Because there is so much garbage, unless you can prove a reputable speaker is providing the comment, it is likely that the comment will be ignored.
• Many people see fake testimonials as false advertising. If you are found out, your business might be deemed untrustworthy.
• Using made up customer recommendations carries across mediums. We all know about fake testimonials on TV infomercials. Many of us carry that same disdain for fake testimonials into cyberspace.

Tips for successfully using testimonials to sell

1. If you can, give the person’s name and business contact information when publishing a testimonial. Many business owners claim that when they do this, the customer is often contacted by potential customers prior to making a purchase.
2. Don’t be afraid to ask your existing customers for testimonials you can use. You will be surprised to find that your satisfied customers can provide more diversely written testimonials than you could! You can use them to help gain buyer confidence without feeling like you are being less than truthful.
3. Always ask for permission from your customers when soliciting real testimonial comments.
4. The best value in a testimonial comes from one with credibility, from someone with authority and some type of expertise in the industry. Your credibility and conversion rates will most likely go through the roof.
5. Buyers tend to prefer the “product review”, like that used on Amazon and other huge e-commerce sites. There is a feeling of being uncensored, which people want to read over the formulated, staged comments.
6. If you feel strongly against using fake testimonials, consider having a Marketing Code of Ethics within your site that details your commitment to only providing factual information through your marketing efforts.

The Saga Continues…

In conclusion, I’m forgainst it.

There is little-to-no-point to sum this one up. This is one of those debates where the truth will not set you free because you’re going to make up that truth anyway and then you’ll probably write a little blurb from little “Johnny Doe of Wichita” saying how your point of view set him free.

If you want to read on…An ongoing dialogue on this topic is going on right now at Grow Your Own Writing Business. Lillie Ammann’s blog, “A Writer’s Words, An Editor’s Eye” has a lively discussion regarding writing ethics.

Additionally, some interesting academic text on business ethics for the online world.