Just Browsing: Listening While Lead Nurturing
How often have you overheard the following exchange in a retail setting?
“May I help you?”
“No thanks, I’m just browsing.”
The customer has made the effort to present herself in the store yet declines to engage with the sales clerk.
In the online B2B world, “Just Browsing” is an apt description of the activity of researching potential purchases before engaging the vendor. Any online marketing effort must take into account the situation where a prospect is genuinely interested in a particular product or service but are in the early stages of their investigation. Some studies show that up to 85 percent of all B2B purchases follow this pattern. So we know leads must be nurtured because the timing is not right for involvement from the sales team.
Ideally the lead nurturing system is interactive. We’ve all seen systems that divert these shoppers into unobtrusive auto-drip email campaigns meant to cultivate interest. While useful, they are effectively a one-way conversation unless the email is acted on. To complete the progression a versatile lead nurturing system “listens” for feedback from the prospect. It must then process this feedback to determine if attention from the sales team is warranted.
Moreover, leads may exhibit “ready to buy” behavior that are unrelated to an auto-drip email nurturing campaign. A typical example is a return visit to your website. Your lead nurturing system must pay attention to these and similar behaviors as well.
An interactive lead nurturing system adds the human touch at just the right time.
Lynn,
You make a great point in this article, and I definitely agree. I think that when marketing puts the effort in to truly understand the buyer, and where they are in their buying cycle, marketing will begin to lose their reputation for overcommunicating.
I wrote a related piece on scoring the stages of a buying process to understand where a buyer is. Those who are in the early, education phases are, as you say, “just browsing” and we as marketers need to facilitate their browsing rather than try the hard sell.
Thanks for the post, a great read.
Steven Woods
9 Mar 09 at 6:43 am