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Learning How to Ride the Lead Nurturing Bicycle

Posted by Jess Stark on 7/28/11 11:30 AM

What is the Lead Nurturing Bicycle?

Lead nurturing is a lot like learning to ride a bicycle. You have to take it in steps.

The first time you get on a bike, you won't be able to win the Tour de France. The same goes for lead nurturing - you're not going to win a sale the first time they download a white paper.

Let's look at teaching your child to ride a bicycle.  Each step needs to be done in order, and a little at a time over time.  If you try to stick an 18-month old on a 10-speed two wheel bike, he's going to topple over.

Step 1: Preparation

In learning to ride a bicycle, preparation means getting the proper safety gear: helmet, knee and elbow pads, gloves as well as the basic gear: your bicycle and your eager learner.

In lead nurturing, your preparation includes researching your potential leads and where they are in the buying cycle, building webpages for them to visit, choosing an email service that you can use to send automated emails from, and creating the emails.

Step 2: Start With the Basics

Most bicycle riders will tell you that they learned to ride by starting on a smaller model (a tricycle or small two wheeler with training wheels) and learned to steer, pedal and brake.

With Lead nurturing, the basics are: Timely, Relevant, Simple, Focused. 

  • Be prompt.  Set your campaigns to start as soon as you get an interaction.  People want information when they go looking for it.
  • Stay on the topic that your lead is interested in, don't divert and try to tell them about everything else that you do.

Step 3: A Little at a Time

The reason why emails are sent spaced out is so you continue to teach your lead, but you aren't overloading them with information all at once.

If you tried to teach your child to ride a bicycle and you expected him to be riding perfectly by the end of the first session, both of you would get pretty frustrated because he would have information overload and you had set your sights too high.

By providing information over time, you stay constant in your leads mind, but you also give him time to learn the information that you have given him already.

Step 4: Practice and Patience

The only way to get good at something is to practice! practice! practice!  Try out a few campaigns, note what worked and didn't work, change things in the next campaign, keep trying.  Before long, you will be an an accomplished lead nurturer and you will be converting leads and closing sales.  Remember, it took Lance Armstrong a lot of practice to win the Tour de France.

We'll help you learn how to ride

Lead Nurturing is just one place to start. Let us show you how to optimize all your marketing efforts to improve customer experience with our 12-week virtual internet marketing training course.

Topics: lead nurturing