I love plants.
Unfortunately, they don’t always love me.
Plants are difficult. They know exactly what they like and exactly what they don’t. When they aren’t getting what they need, they let you know by starting to wilt.
It’s no different than a neglected lead in your pipeline. Maybe you nurtured them at first, but now they are starting to droop and look a little yellow – their leaves might even be falling off.
Withered leads need more from you to stay nourished.
These tips will help you perk up your wilting leads.
Ensure the Environment is Right
Ever buy a plant that looks healthy and strong, only to find it nearly dead a few days later?
These plants were clearly not suited to the environment you forced them into.
The same can be said about your leads.
If you begin to nurture top-of-funnel leads and they don’t engage with anything you send, you may have leads that are poorly suited for your brand.
To avoid this, be sure to learn about what your leads need. Maybe they want different content, much like some plants want different soil. Maybe it’s too sunny for your plants, like leads who aren’t receptive to the style of your marketing messages.
Regardless, you need to either change the environment for your leads or send them somewhere where they are better suited. Sometimes that will not be with your brand.
Water Them … But Not Too Much
Just like environment, plants have a specific amount of water that they need.
Give them too little, they start to shrivel and die. Give them too much, they still might shrivel and die.
Finding that balance with both your plants and your leads is critical.
Say that you’re sending out emails to everyone on your list. Those who engage every time with your emails might want more emails than a person that rarely engages. These are the leads that drink up your content every time. In response, you may send them more emails.
But if you send those emails too often, you run the risk of oversaturating them, and making them less interested in your brand.
Like plants, you must play with the frequency with which you water your leads. If you overwater them, they may put you on a spam list or start ignoring your emails. If you don’t water them enough they might forget your brand exists.
This is where segmenting comes into play. Figure out which leads to water more and which to water less. Not all leads will want the same amount of content delivered to their inbox. Pay attention and separate each buyer persona for the most successful lead generation.
Fertilize Them Often
Many people expect to have a plant, water it and it will be fine. But that’s not how it works in the long-term growing of plants and definitely not for the long-term nurture of leads.
Your content can be as entertaining and crafty as ever, but if it stops providing leads with value, it will fail to keep leads on the vine.
Make sure your content is valuable and it will keep your leads plump and healthy. This is accomplished by offering good stuff, that should cost money, for free.
Give them ebooks and free trials of your offering. Make sure that you give them stuff that will keep them coming back for more.
Watch for Pests/Disease
I have this one problem plant that I call Droopy Basil. Part of the reason that Droopy Basil is so consistently… droopy is because it’s perpetually infested with fungus gnats.
Pests and disease can infect your database if you let them. Say you haven’t kept your database up-to-date. That means that inactive addresses or spam traps could be lying in wait, hurting your sender reputation and making it harder to reach your list.
Make sure to nip these sorts of issues in the bud, before they spread to the rest of your database.
Don’t Expect Them to Bloom Too Soon
It takes some plants years to bloom. And it sometimes takes some leads months or years to buy, especially in B2B.
Sometimes they won’t have the budget or sometimes they won’t have the authority to make the decision.
That doesn’t mean that you should give up on them though. Continue to fertilize, water and pay attention to your leads and give them time. Only then will you reap the rewards of your labors. If you neglect your leads, they will do nothing for you, just like plants that wither and die after lengths of inattention.
How often do you water your leads? Do you segment them? What other ways do you prevent your leads from withering?
