“Lead nurturing” is staying in touch with leads long after they initially inquire/fill out a form on your website.

Lead nurturing is most often executed using email. A lead nurturing campaign via email consists of sending consumers valuable, informative information on a regular basis.

Why bother with all this work? Research from Gleanster shows that 50% of leads are not ready to buy when they first inquire (typically filling out a form on your website). These 50% of leads are generally lost from your revenue if you don’t nurture them/stay in touch. This makes lead nurturing one of the best local business marketing ideas out there.

If you keep in-touch with people over a long period of time something may change in their life that means they suddenly need your product. The key is to be top-of-mind when this change happens. This can only happen if you stay-in-touch.

What Lead Nurturing is NOT
Lead nurturing is not about constantly bombarding consumers with marketing offers via email. Consumers are sensitized to ignore this kind of “spamming” – as they see it. They will quickly ignore your emails or even unsubscribe.

Nurturing is also not having your sales people/telemarketers calling consumers over-and-over again to sell them something – this is a quick way to be put on the “Do Not Call” list.

Nurturing is about sending quality/valuable information. Something the consumer wants.

How You Can make Offers
So are we saying you can never email consumers with marketing offers? No. You can definitely send offers as well as educational/informative emails. It’s a question of mixing giving with receiving. A couple of things you can do:

• You should put Calls To Action (links or buttons) in the educational emails you send out. If the content you are sending out is of high quality, including a couple of offers is currently totally acceptable to most consumers.
• And every so often (about 20% of the time as a rule-of-thumb) you can send an outright offer email. Consumers will be OK with this if they are receiving quality content from you in the other emails they receive

You Need Content
Of course, you cannot carry out this kind of lead nurturing without content. This is a great reason to start a blog. Blog content once written is super-easy to turn into an e-newsletter that you can then use for lead nurturing. Once you’ve written a blog post you get to reuse it as a lead nurturing tool.

A Best Kept Secret of Online Marketing
Few local businesses have a lead nurturing program. It’s a great shame as they could greatly increase their business if they did.

Many companies make a big effort, and spend a lot of money, to acquire new leads. But once those consumers have become leads the same companies let those leads go stale. Lead nurturing is about changing this. The return on investment is huge.