7 Strategies to Help You Nurture Warm Leads in Sales
For every business owner, it’s an eye opener how many leads, even warm leads, never turn into customers. In fact, 80% of them don’t! However, if you do something to nurture your leads and build a strong relationship with them, you can get 50% more leads ready to buy from you.
So, you don’t need to promote further to get more leads. All you have to do is nurture the existing ones, build trust and anticipation, and eventually get sales from them.
We all act the same when we shop. We like an item but want to explore more. What if there’s a better price, color, model, or size range to choose from? Sometimes we return to make a purchase, and sometimes we choose another place.
Many of your leads are stuck at the beginning or the middle of your sales funnel. Nudge them to go deeper, and you’ll increase your revenue and get loyal customers.
This article explores how to nurture leads and encourage them to buy from you instead of a competitor.
How to Identify Warm Leads?
A warm lead is someone that’s been engaging with your business through the online store, social media, and other marketing channels. They are already interested in what you sell, making them more likely to purchase.
How to generate warm leads? Meet customers’ needs, offer solutions to their problems, provide incentives, target proper keywords, communicate with the audience, and include forms on your landing pages to gather information – the methods are plenty.
Then, you’ll have to nurture them.
Lead nurturing examples include various campaigns, like welcoming, promotional, educational, retargeting, and more. It could be anything that builds a relationship and encourages the visitor to find out more and choose you.
Not all warm leads are 100% ready to buy. Some have questions, and others are concerned about delivery, payment, quality, etc. By answering all potential questions beforehand, you help leads move from the awareness stage to the decision stage.
This is where you need ecommerce lead nurturing.
What Do You Need to Check Before Lead Nurturing?
Before you consider lead nurturing, you must ensure your website operates well. All buttons and links have to be working and loading quickly. You don’t want a sloppy redirect, broken URL, or payment issues to ruin all your nurturing efforts.
Here’s what to do to succeed:
- Adjust your technical SEO (search engine optimization). This means making your website mobile-friendly, has no broken links or 404 pages, and loads quickly.
To check all those parameters and more, use Website Audit by SE Ranking and get actionable recommendations on every issue. The tool checks how well your site is optimized for search engines and notices potential on- and off-page issues.
- Add the Search feature to your website for better navigation. If it’s an online shop, make it possible to filter search results, perform the category search, and offer suggestions for products and categories and other information on your website.
- Improve your product pages by adding engaging descriptions that tell your warm leads what problem the item will solve and why it’s worth buying. Also, add high-quality images and videos to help visitors see the quality of your products and how they look.
- Offer various payment options to cover a wider audience. Many people will leave the website if there’s no payment method they are familiar with. Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal are the basics, but try to find out what other services your target audience is using to improve customer experience.
- Allow guests to check out without creating a profile. It can be annoying when online shops make you add items to the cart and demand that you create an account before checkout. You can do that, but include a button like “Quick Buy” or “Buy with One Click” to enable guest purchases. This will help you close warm leads that have no intention of creating a new account somewhere (and there are many).
It is time to work on lead nurturing only after you check all the points on the list.
How to Nurture Warm Leads?
Here are the seven most effective ways to transform warm leads into sales.
#1: Create a seamless user experience in the online store
Make the user experience your priority. For warm leads to turn into buyers, you must first give them something of value. It could be a quick-loading website with interesting content that answers people’s questions and encourages them to check out your products.
More on the topic of content: make it easy to scan. Nobody reads the whole article to find out what’s in it. Visitors skim through the page, looking for something to grab their attention, like subheadings, images, and lists.
Also, it’s wise to create an internal linking system on the website. Thus, the user experience will be seamless, as your leads flow from one article to another and finally to a product page where they will make a purchase.
Adding external links is also fine, especially if they are from relevant, high-authority websites. But prioritize links from your website to help your target audience familiarize themselves with your brand and be nurtured.
Finally, make it easy for them to:
- Find information on the website
- Subscribe to your email list
- See the latest news, etc.
Easy navigation creates a smooth user experience.
For example, you can add suggestions to your search feature.
#2: Leverage valuable content
To nurture leads in ecommerce, you should post the right content. Articles, statistics, infographics, video reviews and tutorials, how-tos, etc., should nourish leads with knowledge and push them through the buyer’s journey by answering their questions.
Here are some recommendations that should help:
- Define buyer personas and understand each of them. Don’t stop on one type of target customer; explore all kinds of people that may want to buy from you.
- Create several sets of targeted content to address the concerns, interests, and characteristics of each of your buyer personas. Make sure every one of your warm leads finds what they are looking for.
- Use digital tools such as BuzzSumo or Google Keyword Planner to research current topics worth highlighting. This allows you to create on-point content that sparks the curiosity of any lead surfing your website.
- Create a content calendar to know when and what to write and publish. This will make content planning less chaotic and more effective.
Clear, scannable, engaging content is what Internet users are looking for now.
#3: Use strategic retargeting
Retargeting will help your brand and ecommerce website build a reputation, generate more warm leads, and transform existing leads into buyers. Every time a person sees your USP (unique selling proposition), product offers, logo, name, etc., they remember you more, become more familiar, get “warmer,” and are encouraged to make a purchase.
You can use:
- Social media retargeting – people spend 147 minutes daily on social media, and that’s only the average amount of time. Retargeting your warm leads there is effective, but only if you choose the right platform. Analyze your target audience and find out where they spend the most time.
- Display retargeting.
Display retargeting shows your leads ads based on the stage of the buyer’s journey they are at. By carefully researching this journey and each step a person takes, you can nurture leads to buying from you.
Use digital helpers like TargetBay AdRoll Integration to show your target audience the ads they need to jump to the next stage and bring them closer to making a purchase. The app drops a cookie on visitors’ browsers and shows them retargeted ads from your online shop even when they look at other websites.
#4: Offer incentives
To nurture your leads even further, offer an incentive. Here are some examples of what you can do:
- Offer free shipping or a discount in exchange for joining your email list. Once leads join, it’ll be easier for you to influence their choices.
- Upsell premium items while your warm leads are exploring the website. Offer combinations of products, show “best-selling items” or “people also buy” lists, etc.
- Create urgency for the items your leads become interested in. You can place a “several left”, “1 left”, or even “out-of-stock” status. Providing a discount for an instant purchase can also work.
- Offer free stuff for VIP customers.
Make the leads or the products seem special. Or both.
#5: Send personalized emails
Personalized emails that “coincidentally” arrive just at the right time often make the purchase quicker and smoother. Here’s what to do:
- When a user abandons a cart or a wishlist or becomes less engaged with the online shop, send trigger emails with reminders. Use catchy titles like “Something is waiting for you here” or “Special prices for your wishlist.”
- Send follow-ups regularly if no action is taken.
- Launch automated email marketing campaigns that personalize recipients’ experiences based on the stage of their buyer’s journey and location.
- Personalize the letters with changing content mentioning a certain location, cart, name if available, etc. But be careful – too much personalization can be harmful, as some users may feel stalked.
- Don’t forget about smart, attention-hooking calls to action.
Remember to create a sense of urgency in your CTAs and throughout your emails to engage your warm leads.
#6: Engage online visitors with personalized offers
This will work with leads that have agreed to share their data with you. Based on their IPs, you can see the region they live in. Once you have their name and email, you can find out even more.
Gather the data and make personalized offers. These will build trust and make it more comfortable for people to buy from you. Even something small, like showing the price in their country’s currency, helps a lot.
Also, based on the info you have, strike up a conversation with your leads about their interests and concerns to cover all the pain points faster and speed up the purchase.
#7: Interact with warm leads on social media
Social media is the place to be nowadays. Utilize Facebook Ads and target a lookalike audience. These are people who have similar interests to your followers. You can also target your following with special offers there.
Facebook Ads have rather low CPC (cost per click), so you won’t strain your budget too much. And Instagram, where users can see your FB ads, can benefit both from the aesthetics of your brand and the offers.
Collect customer information to nurture leads and create even more precise campaigns in the future.
You can also benefit from user-generated content (UGC). Warm leads of younger age groups may be more inclined to buy from you if they see a possibility of being featured on your page.
Summary
Nurturing warm leads may help you increase sales and gain more loyal customers. These people are already interested in your brand and products, so it’s easier to charm them. You can do it through:
- Buyer persona research
- On-page and off-page SEO of your ecommerce website
- Targeted content for each persona
- Personalized emails
- Incentives
- Social media interactions
- Retargeting, etc.
You achieve several goals by being there for your leads and reminding them about those great products they were interested in, including boosting brand awareness, increasing sales, building reputation, etc.
Author bio: Alina Tytarenko is part of the marketing team at SE Ranking and has worked in the SEO sphere for four years. She likes to share her experience in trending marketing techniques and search engine optimization. When she’s not working, Alina watches new documentaries on Netflix.