There’s a lot that goes into making a business successful. And a big part of it is converting leads into “customers”. Yes, the journey of converting them has to be strategic. But it doesn’t have to be hard. In this blog post, we will see how we can nurture and retain leads through interactive content!
What Is Lead Nurturing and Retention?
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with prospects at every stage of the buyer’s journey. It aims to understand the needs of prospects and provides them with the information they need. It focuses on offering them relevant content and aiding them in decision-making. Statistics show that companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.
Lead retention on the other hand is the process of reactivating cold leads. You may generate tons of leads but you end up losing out on a lot of them. A lot of them do not show much interest in buying or learning about your product and soon expire. But that is a lot of unrealized potential right there.
So let’s hop ahead to see how you can nurture, as well as retain leads using interactive content.
How to Nurture and Retain Leads Using Interactive Content?
There are multiple objectives that you can fulfill by using different types of interactive content. After all, there isn’t just one right way to nurture and retain your leads.
1. Educate Your Customers
It is most important for a buyer to be informed so that they can make better decisions. Instead of just trying to push your product with marketing ploys, you must offer them genuine insight.
Educating your customers about your product and their needs is a great way of developing trust within them. Once you generate a lead, you can offer them a lot of relevant content, depending on the stage they’re in. This helps them engage with you more and increases their chances of conversion.
Here is an amazing instance of customer education by Canva. They aim to educate their customers about their product through a 23 second tutorial video.
Educational content is also a way of reactivating any cold leads that you may have. You can attract them with information on something that they might be interested in and then educate them about your product.
Now, how can you educate your customers with interactive content? Well, it is all about building a two-way communication. Then engage users and provide them valuable information.
Here’s an example of a calculator for “How Much Should You Spend on Paid Advertising?”. Now, a marketing firm can not just use this calculator to nurture their existing good leads but also to attract someone who has stopped interacting with their company. This calculator gives prospects answers to their pressing questions. Thus, adding real value. Moreover, the marketing firm gets the advantage of engaging with them again and also gets an idea of their needs and preferences!
The user can find out how much they should spend on paid advertising by taking into account their target ROI, lead to sales conversion rate, Customer Lifetime Value, etc.
2. Check Up on Leads – Follow Up
You can’t just generate a lead and expect them to convert into customers on their own, right? You need to follow up at every level. It makes the prospect feel important enough to take further interest in your product or service. Now let’s talk about follow up through interactive content. The best part about this is that you can customize the follow up depending upon the funnel stage your lead is in!
Suppose you are an education counsel organization. And one of your leads has shown a lot of interest in pursuing higher education. Now you can target them with a quiz for “What Major Should I Study In College?”. This will not only help a lead decide on a further step towards their education but also reignite the interest of a cold lead. You can also send them polls and surveys to ask about any resource (like an e-book) you sent them. You can create interactive content on the basis of their responses and personalize their experience even more.
3. Treat Them – Rewards and Incentives
You could say that you don’t like rewards and gifts and we can agree but then we’d both be lying!
Giving your potential customers rewards and incentives is a great way to develop the trust factor. It draws them to you and makes them want to take an interest in you. It can help in both – lead nurturing and retention. 58.7% of internet users believe earning rewards and loyalty points is one of the most valued aspects of the shopping experience.
Reaching out to leads using giveaways and contests is a great method of attracting attention. It gives you a chance to engage with them, gather user-generated content, develop a brand image, and increase social visibility. All at the same time. And this in turn helps facilitate a lead’s movement towards converting into a customer. Here’s an example of a giveaway held on Instagram by Upwork Inc.
4. Listen to Them – Take Feedback
It’s important to listen to the people you want to offer services to. Collecting feedback is a crucial part of any interaction with your (potential) customer.
In fact, 95% of customers tell others about a bad experience. If one factor can make such a big effect on your sales, it can’t be taken lightly. User feedback updates you on your leads’ satisfaction level. It helps you decide what works and what doesn’t. You don’t only get to improve upon the product but also recognize the pain points for your leads. And what’s most important is that your potential customers feel that they have a voice of opinion. They understand that they are being heard. The best and the easiest way to gather feedback from your leads is through interactive content like forms, polls, surveys, even chatbots!
You can create these content types for anything irrespective of the industry you’re in! After all, all buying decisions according to the need. This is why surveys or chatbots can allow you to discover your customer needs. You can ask questions like:
- What is the biggest challenge faced by you?
- What is your desired result from this approach?
- What is your budget?
These insights can then be used to create persona-targeted content, resources and offers.
Check out this example of a Website Feedback Bot. This also helps you in collecting user data and use it further to customize content for them.
5. Send Them Personalized and Relevant Content
Having a lead nurturing strategy helps align your sales and marketing teams. This helps you in avoiding sending any unnecessary content to your user. Depending on what their journey has been like and what stage of the funnel they’re in, you can target them with the necessary information. It also helps you avoid sending the same content to a user multiple times.
Suppose you’re a nutritionist and you’re looking to nurture your leads with interactive content. Now you can’t just communicate with all your leads using the same blog, e-book, infographic, quiz, calculator, etc. You need to gather some information to personalize their experience and you have just the solution for that – a calorie calculator.
Here is an example by Active.com for a calculator that takes in the preliminary information of any user. This page also has calculators for idea weight, BMI, heart rate, etc. Now depending upon results and input data, one can target different users with different dieting tips, exercises, tools, etc. This would help them aid their leads better. Consequently, it increases their chances of conversion.
6. Segment and Score
Now, what do we mean by lead segmentation and lead scoring? And how does it help you with lead nurturing and lead retention?
That’s a lot of ‘lead’ing questions but we’re here to help you out.
Lead segmentation is the process of categorizing your prospects on the basis of parameters such as demographics, location, budget, etc. And lead scoring is the process of assigning those leads a priority order on the basis of how much value they hold to a company. Both these processes help save the time and money of any organization. And once you have all of these divisions and categories, it helps you nurture these leads with the right content! A lead from a predominantly colder geographical location (like Canada) could be targeted with warm coats while someone in Florida could be targeted with summer dresses!
Now let’s talk about the man of the hour – interactive content. How can you use interactive content to segment and score leads? Well, by using anything and everything, basically!
You can use it to find out information on a user. Do you want to find out someone’s budget for a car? You could create a quiz that recommends the perfect model for those leads! Thereafter, you can target them with the relevant models. Have a look at this quiz created by Clean Charge Network to recommend the right car to their prospects.
Based on the information collected through these interactive content experiences, you can segment, score, and nurture your leads.
At the end of the day, it is all about adding value to your leads and customers.
But it is the most important of all. A business must never be just about selling a product. It must always be about creating an experience for someone. You cannot push your product and talk about yourself. It is important to show a lead that you actually care about adding value to their life, about solving a problem. And the content you offer needs to resonate with that school of thought. If they engage with your content, they get something out of it – it’s only a fair deal. Adding value is the best way to nurture your lead because it gives them the incentive to become your customer.
From mortgage calculators to giveaways, all kinds of interactive content aims to add value to a user. And you can leverage that not just to get lead information but also to treat them, nurture them, and finally convert them into loyal customers.
And thus we reach the end of it – the blog post, we mean, not lead nurturing!
We hope you gained something out of it all and we hope you can share something great with us too!
____________________________________
About the Author:
Antara Agarwal is a full-time marketing consultant at Outgrow. She can always be found packing her bags for her next trip, often to the mountains. And in one of those bags, you will always find a half-finished book she’s been struggling with for months.
