The leads you collect today aren’t necessarily ready to buy immediately.  Some of them are, of course, but others may still be researching potential products or solutions and are not ready to make a purchase decision. Your existing customers may also be leads for other products you sell, or be interested in buying more of the products or services they already buy.

By leveraging your own qualified list of customers and prospects, you have the ability to shorten the sales cycle and generate additional revenue.  The lead you collect today is a lead that may need to be gently and strategically nurtured to become a customer.

In order to build a strong program to nurture leads, you need to take the following steps:

1. Decide which segments you would like to focus on for the lead nurture program
2. Identify the buying cycle for each segment
3. Create email messaging and offers specific to the buying cycle of each segment
4. Think through the Touch Points, Triggers and Timing for the email campaign
5. Design the email creative and produce all of the content
6. Implement the lead nurture strategy using a marketing automation or email tool
7. Develop a personalization and testing strategy

By carefully implementing each step in the process, you can create a lead nurture program that effectively turns contacts into sales-ready leads.

For more insight to help you build a complete Lead Nurture program, download the entire white paper here.