List Building
With the growth of social media, as well as mobile telephony, email list building is easier than ever. There are many ways to build an email list. The tried and tested methods are content marketing, off-line events, and your website. Creating high quality content marketing publications that include opt-in/opt-out options is a must. The emails derived from this setting are also of high quality since the signees what to stay engaged with the offerings/brand. Another way to get signees is through off-line events. At such events you can have a booth at which you provide people with the option to sign up for upcoming promotions/newsletters etc. Last but not least sign up option is through your web site. When potential customers visit your website, having email signup options and/or offerings is an effective way to build email list.
Lead Nurturing.
Keeping constant contact, through content marketing/newsletters and/or offerings, with the individuals in the email list will enable them to become educated about your products, build trust and eventually, turn them into customers. In addition, customers are informed and the connection to the customers with regards to brand awareness is kept alive. Common lead nurturing strategies are the 3-2-1 drip program, stage-specific drip, Event-specific drip and Straight drip. How effective is lead nurturing? A study by the Annuitas group revealed that 47% of larger purchases are made by nurtured leads, relative to non-nurtured leads. |source
Sales
Involving a sales team, and a sales process makes converting these nurtured leads easy, especially when you have an effective CRM tool. According to the Forrester Research, of marketers with lead management processes, 46% of them employ a sales team that follow up on 75% of marketing leads. | source
Retention
A key component of customer retention is the post-sale follow up. An awesome CRM will help you in customer retention by keeping track of their orders, the challenges they had (if any), and their level of satisfaction with your services and products. With a CRM, all the notes relative to the customer are integrated for easy access by the “key” team in one “room”, and makes the follow up process fully informed and effective. Remember, a happy customer is easy to retain. Just keep them engaged well past the sale closure stage with continued engagement.