Lead nurturing is simply helping people rather than trying to sell them something. It is identifying their needs and interests and feeding them information and content they want rather than interrupting their lives with impersonal ads.  The way you provide the information and content can come in many different forms, including monthly e-newsletters, guides, e-books, blog posts, webinars, videos, and other forms of content marketing.

The Value of Lead Nurturing

According to inbound marketing firm HubSpot, 96% of first-time visitors to a website are not ready to buy. However, up to 70% of those visitors are likely to become clients sometime in the future. How you get them from visitor to buyer is through lead nurturing.

Research also shows that companies with effective lead nurturing programs generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost. In addition, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. And companies that use marketing automation software to nurture leads experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.

Marketing automation software automates, streamlines and measures your marketing tasks. It makes you smarter, faster and more efficient. Among many things, marketing automation allows you to:

• Identify, track and engage prospects online

• Segment your prospects for targeted messaging

• Nurture leads through drip email campaigns with no human intervention necessary

• Create and manage lead-generating landing pages

• Measure the revenue contribution of every email, e-newsletter or other marketing effort

Email marketing is one of the most effective uses of marketing automation and a key component of your lead nurturing program. Consider these statistics:

• Companies that automate emails are 133% more likely to send messages that coincide with the purchase cycle of their customers.

• Relevant emails drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails.

• Personalized emails generate up to 6x higher revenue than non-personalized emails.

• The #1 reported benefit of email marketing automation is the creation of more and better leads.

• Automated emails get 119% higher click rates than broadcast emails.

Most attorneys have a finite amount of time to dedicate to legal marketing, so having a process in place that nurtures a lead along the path to becoming a client and having data that demonstrates the most effective lead nurturing tools for your law firm is a great benefit.

In part two of this post tomorrow, I’ll talk about developing a lead nurturing program.