Lead Nurturing Is Not about Marketing – It’s about Building Trust & Establishing a Relationship

According to a study by xant.ai, 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first to an inquiry. Further, a recent HubSpot study found that response rates decline as the age of a lead increases.

When you get a lead that isn’t an immediate sale the question comes down to what happens after initial contact. Without proper care, nothing becomes of the lead. Therefore, the efforts put into generating inbound marketing are lost to some degree. It would be great if all internet marketing efforts led to direct sales, but that isn’t the case. It is important to recognize those leads that still have the potential to develop into something that hopefully, is a sale. Maybe even repeat business.

In a nutshell, lead nurturing takes the inbound marketing leads generated and helps them still develop into future sales. It is reported that as high a percentage as 70% of generated leads could still result in sales. Using proper lead nurturing techniques, you can still retain these leads. With proper nurturing, you may even be able to still cause them to develop into sales.

More about What Lead Nurturing Is

If you have invested your efforts in creating lead generation through internet marketing, those leads are crucial to your business. Yes, even the ones that are not direct and immediate sales. This is especially important for inbound marketing techniques because these potential customers have already taken the first step towards buying, which is being aware and interested.

Following up by offering information or promotions that could still help entice consumers is lead nurturing. It is what helps still convert potential customers into actual customers. For this reason, though, it is about building and establishing a relationship not just trying to push someone into buying a sales pitch.

Why Does Lead Nurturing Work?

The bottom line is that people do not like to buy, especially if they feel they are being sold. Even for products they need or want, there is a certain amount of hesitancy. Lead nurturing is a way of taking your internet marketing efforts and making people feel good about buying. In fact, if done correctly, this approach actually helps people feel they made a decision and had buying power, not that they were talked, conned or forced into it. Lead nurturing is about establishing trust.

It is true you will not see immediate results. In some cases, even after investing follow up time and effort into lead nurturing, you will not see a sale. This can be frustrating, but it a small price to pay. Your best return in your internet marketing strategy is to have a direct sale. Second to that, however, is the results you get from lead nurturing.

The trick is that it is difficult to determine the amount of time this may take and how many leads will still end up being converted to sales. The good news is that in some cases with proper nurturing of your leads even if someone falls through on a sale, they may still change their mind at a later date.

If you have build trust and established a relationship, then you can also expect that some of those who say no may still come back around when the competition neglects to offer good lead nurturing.