BroadVision Marketing Blog

How often should you contact your leads in order to stay in touch with them? You don't want to either suffocate them with too much information or have them forget about you between long periods where you don’t even cross their minds.

In order to successfully ‘Stay in Touch’ with your leads you have to get the timing of your communications right. This is going to be different depending on your company, but as a general rule, you shouldn’t contact your leads more than once a week and less than once a month.



Here are some ideas to help you determine the best number of times to contact your leads:

First, consider the length of the buying process and the communications approaches used. How long does an average buyer take to make the decision to convert? What approaches do you use now for lead nurturing, such as email, direct mail, or phone? Direct mail and email are less intrusive than a phone call, especially if the information is more educational than sales-oriented.

Here is an example. Suppose your lead downloads a whitepaper from your website and the way you score this lead indicates that this individual is a lead nurturing candidate. The buying cycle for your product or service is three months.  Your lead nurturing path might look like this:

• Day 1 – Follow-up with an introductory email

• Day 10 Email offering new information related to the first download and telling about subsequent Web site activity

• Day 15 – Send a personal email from a sales rep

• Day 30 – Email a best practices whitepaper

• Day 45 – Call from the sales rep to ‘check in’

• Day 60 – Email promoting a webinar series

• Day 75 – Personal email from sales rep offering a product demo

• Day 85 – Call from sales rep to schedule in-person meeting

• Day 90 – Email sales proposal

You will notice that the communications become more frequent as the buying cycle progresses and that this is just one path a nurtured lead could take.

Second, test the effects of frequency with more than one campaign. Testing is often confined to email subject lines and content, but B2B marketers need to test more to optimize frequency and timing. Use the waiting period between triggers and actions as a test element to see how conversion rates are impacted by time period changes.

Third, ask your leads directly. If you ask them how often they would like to be contacted, by what method and with what information, you make them feel like an important part of the dialog. Remember that your lead nurturing campaign is more of an evolving conversation than a rigid process.

Related articles

• From Ripe to Ready: Nurturing Leads Increases Sales Conversion (businessinsider.com)

• Generate More B2B Sales With Lead Nurturing and the Human Touch (customerthink.com)