Lead Nurturing has been called different names. Some of you may have already heard these terms before: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders. In a nutshell, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to a captured lead in the early stages, in order to filter out the best prospects before handing them over to your sales team.

In the highly competitive world of online marketing, it is no longer enough to set up lead capture campaigns and forget about them hoping that captured leads will turn to paying customers. It still holds true that building a relationship with your leads will yield far better results than it would if one were to simply cross their fingers and hope that a lead will make the decision to pay for a product or service.

A recent study shows just how important it is to take the extra time to nurture your leads. Take a look at these figures: 

• Of all leads captured, only 25% of are legitimate. The trick is in filtering out which leads are legitimate and which ones aren’t.
• 50% of legitimate leads are qualified but may not be ready to make a purchase. It’s important to provide more reasons for these leads to take that next step to becoming a paying client/customer.
• The response rate of lead nurturing emails is 4-10 times higher than that of standalone email blasts.
• 25-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. In other words, if you’re not following up on your leads, there’s a big chance that potential clients may be snapped up by a competitor who takes the time to respond to queries and inquiries.

It is definitely important to capture as much lead information for as many people as you can on your site or your clients’ sites. The thing to realize, however is, that not everyone is ready to talk to sales. There are different studies out there that document the numbers, but based on the figures, it’s safe to say that a mere 5% – 25% of the traffic on your site are prepared to talk business; the rest are still doing their research and comparing your service to similar ones they have found online.

If you call these leads up and push them into making a decision right away, chances are high that you will end up losing your leads instead of turning them into paying customers. Consider your existing sales funnel. How long after initial inquiries does it typically take a lead to make a decision to purchase? Do different types of purchases affect the sales cycle you employ? Answering these questions will help you to structure effective lead nurturing campaigns. For instance, if the turnaround time is usually a month for a lead to make a purchasing decision, then you have to ensure that you keep your leads engaged throughout the month.

What Are the Benefits of Lead Nurturing?

You Can Set Up a Campaign to be Well-Timed

One of the difficulties with email marketing is that it is often hard to connect with leads as soon as they subscribe. Numerous studies have shown that email response rates decline over the age of the lead. Start thinking about how you can utilize your lead nurturing campaigns to exploit this to your advantage.

Automation Saves Time

Assuming you’ve set up your lead nurturing campaign to take advantage of the timing appropriate for your campaign, you can automate the emails to be sent out over a predetermined period of time. This will save you a lot of time in the long run, and is a good way to get a high return for a low investment.

Targeting is More Precise

Studies have shown that targeted and segmented emails perform better than mass email communications. Careful crafting of your lead nurturing communications to coincide with actions that users take on your site will help to further personalize the user experience, and help to pinpoint what these users may or may not be interested in.

Tracking Click-through and Unsubscribe Rates

Studies have also documented that lead nurturing emails have a significantly higher CTR (click-through rate) than more generic email blasts. Interestingly enough, lead nurturing emails have a slightly higher unsubscribe rate than individual emails. At first glance, this may seem like an indicator of negative performance however, this is actually a sign that a lead nurturing campaign is working well to filter out qualified leads by eliminating people who will probably not make a purchase. Only the most engaged leads will move down the sales funnel, and this is where great customers come from.

In an attempt to make the user experience more secure, Facebook has started testing on a new tool called Trusted Friends. It allows a user to designate between three to five friends on his contact list who they can count on to pass along a special code in the event that the user may get locked out of their own account.

It’s basically another way to access to your Facebook account if you forget your password. Over the next few weeks, the option to specify your Trusted Friends will appear under the settings page for some of Facebook’s users as the feature does a gradual roll-out the way its new features have been introduced in the past.

When someone who has enabled the feature is unable to login, they can click “forgot my password” and request that codes be sent to their specified friends via Facebook message. The user must then retrieve all the codes and enter them into fields on Facebook’s password-recovery page to log back in. This makes the process rather lengthy, but will likely be a deterrent to anyone wanting to access someone else’s Facebook account.

This is a great move for Facebook, and good news for marketers who may handle from a few, to dozens of client pages on the social network. Knowing that your clients’ data is more secure is a big thing, and you’ll be able to assure your clients of this fact as well. With so many new online threats, it’s good to know that this is one less you’ll have to worry about. Facebook has clearly been rethinking security measures for users and marketers alike.

The Trusted Friends feature will not be mandatory, but may be useful for those who wish to further secure their accounts and the data contained within. In line with this, Facebook has also begun testing another security feature that will allow users to set different passwords for each third-party site that uses your Facebook account to login or register.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. It can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Integrated with AdWords, users can review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file. These can also be monetized. By using Analytics, marketers can determine which ads are performing, and which are not, providing the information to optimize or cull campaigns.

That’s a lot of powerful tracking right at your fingertips, but sometimes the data presented can become overwhelming, especially to new users. That’s why we’re pleased to tell all you website owners and marketers out there about the good news regarding Google Analytics. If you’re already using Google Analytics to track your website stats, you’re going to love the new enhancements coming your way soon. And if you aren’t using it yet, here are a few reasons why you should consider making use of this free tool.

Google Analytics is about to get a lot more visual. Through the new interface that Google is calling the Flow Visualization, webmasters and marketers will be able to view visitors grouped together based on browser, location and so on. The new graphical representation will enable website owners to get detailed information on how particular groups of users go through the site, without the hassle of having to follow them one by one.

For now, Google is launching with two types of Flow Visualizations, the Visitors Flow and the Goal Flow. There are plans to launch more types in the short term future. Watch out for the new Flow Visualization coming to your Analytics dashboard, very soon.

Many of the new features that Facebook is set to roll out (the new Timeline and the newly overhauled Open Graph) have users in a tizzy. Many are all for these new changes, and an equal number seem to be clamoring for the world’s largest social network to remain the same. But above and beyond all this, not much has been said about how these changes may alter the way people interact with rest of the web and how websites and businesses can utilize these new features to their advantage. If your business still doesn’t have a social media strategy, here are a few solid reasons why you should rethink that decision.

The Open Graph Protocol and Sharing

According to Facebook, “The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user. Your page will appear in the “Likes and Interests” section of the user’s profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in the same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.”

In a nutshell, marketers may add the Open Graph Protocol to their client’s website/s as a way to engage existing and potential customers to share their content on Facebook itself. Shared content will be visible to friends and contacts of the user, and may reach an even wider audience as the content is shared over and over again. The trick here is to develop content for your site that Facebook users will want to recommend to friends and acquaintances; but truly, the possibilities for greater visibility are staggering.

Timelines, and How Your Business Could Benefit

Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a complete re-design of the Facebook Profile page. This new profile will be called the Timeline. And while many users are resistant to the idea of a new GUI (Graphical User Interface), this redesign could be big for not only big brand names, but for small and medium enterprises that currently utilize Facebook Fan Pages.

The Timeline will feature a large horizontal banner at the top of the page. Facebook is calling this the profile Cover. Users will be able to upload their own graphics to this space. So, why is this a big deal? Think of the possibilities. For businesses, there’s more control over online branding. Marketers and companies will be able to customize the look of their Pages and even change out their Cover graphics to coincide with promos, events, and much more.

One thing is certain, Facebook is a force to be reckoned with, and those who ignore its far-reaching grasp on the web may be doomed to internet failure. Social media is the future of online marketing, and Facebook plays that game ever so well.