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How to Nurture Your Leads and Create the Right Customer Journey Create the right customer journey for your prospects from first impression to close.

By Jean Ginzburg

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Every user has their pain point, and they're looking for products or services that can help them address that pain point.

When they encounter your offer, it's a make-it-or-break-it opportunity for you to show them you have the solution. Make the right first impression, and you have a chance to convert your potential customer into an actual customer. But your efforts to build relationships with your leads don't stop there. That's how you begin to nurture your leads so they buy from you when they are ready.

You have to get the nurturing process right to convert prospects into customers. Get it wrong, and they will abandon you.

Here are six things you can do to build relationships with your leads so they convert into customers.

1. Provide users with educational materials

Your leads look to your products for possible solutions to their problems. Prove your expertise and provide educational materials such as how-to blogs, guides, comparisons, tips and life hacks they can use to address their pain points.

Demonstrate that you understand their problems and know how to solve them so your leads begin trusting you.

2. Be smarter about communicating with your customers

Most users get annoyed with tons of emails they receive from brands every day. But despite being controversial and considered invasive and even outdated, email remains a vital channel for brands to communicate with their customers.

Besides email, utilize other ways of staying connected with your customers while giving them relevant information. You can create blog posts, videos or guides and send out push notifications offering this content, coinciding with their buyer's journey or any actions they've taken on that journey.

3. Employ business intelligence in your user onboarding process

Marketing is constantly evolving. The traditional drip sequence you're sending to users might not be as effective as before. You need to employ business intelligence in your lead nurturing process to convert more people into customers.

Think of a smarter way to send your message to your customers. You can use many marketing automation tools to help you scale lead management and nurture customer relationships.

4. Send the right message at the right time

The goal of marketing is to generate relationships with your customers, so you must ensure you talk to your customers in their language. Identify their buyer's journey stage to determine which type of message you should send them. You want to keep them until they turn into customers — or even repeat customers — if they liked your product or service.

Personalize your marketing messages. Make your prospects feel you're actually listening to them and know their pain points. Your emails and other messages should consistently address their problems and offer solutions through your product or service.

5. Personalize your product or service according to the customers' needs

Determine why your customers visited your site or engaged with you. What do they need from you? Customize the entire user experience by discovering what they look for on your site. Is it a specific product or service? Did they come there to do invoicing?

Nurture them through personalized messages, and turn your website visitors into email subscribers and, finally, into customers.

6. Use your CRMs effectively

CRMs help you collect and manage customer information and interact with your customers better. Utilize this tool to personalize your messages to your customers so they can feel you understand their needs and want to help them meet those needs.

As your business grows, you need to keep track of your prospects so you can constantly think of ways of getting them to the sales funnel.

Conclusion

Leads become customers after you nurture them. That process starts the moment you show them your product or service. Don't waste that opportunity. Make the right first impression. That will allow you to continue nurturing your leads through the customer journey. Communicate with them in their language, address their pain points and customize your messaging to match their buyer's journey stage. If you do it right, you will increase your conversions.

Jean Ginzburg

Technology Digital Marketer

Jean Ginzburg is the founder and CEO of Alpenglo Digital and the gifting platform, Gipht. She is a digital marketing expert helping companies scale revenue and optimize marketing processes.

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