In today’s fast-paced digital marketplace, it’s alarming to discover that 74% of B2B companies have no strategy to recover lost leads.
This oversight translates into a significant loss of potential business, a gap that becomes even more pronounced when we consider the challenges of lead nurturing during uncertain times like the pandemic.
Despite the advancements in automated marketing and the ability to tailor content to specific audiences, a surprising 80% of business executives confess a lack of insight into best practices for re-engaging with lost leads. They find themselves navigating a complex landscape, unsure of how to effectively utilize diverse, targeted, and educational content.
This article aims to demystify these challenges by offering practical strategies and insights to help businesses not only reclaim lost leads, but also enhance overall customer engagement in an era where every lead counts more than ever.
What Is a Lost Lead?
Imagine a lead as someone curious about what you’re selling but not ready to buy just yet.
You might come across these potential customers through social media, events, advertisements, or phone calls. They could be the new people who join your email list, connect with you on LinkedIn, or like your posts on social media.
Ideally, these leads would buy from you after you’ve built a relationship with them during the lead nurturing process. However, sometimes, even after all your efforts, they don’t buy anything—this is when a lead is considered “lost.”
But this isn’t the end of the story. With a good marketing plan, you can recapture their interest and possibly turn these lost leads into actual customers. Want to know how to do that? Keep reading to find out.
Why Do You Lose Leads?
Think about how not every student finishes a free online course they signed up for. Similarly, businesses lose leads, or potential customers, for various reasons. Not everyone who shows interest in your product or service will necessarily buy it.
Sometimes, they might lose interest, or other factors come into play. However, you often have a chance to win these leads back.
Let’s look at why people might stop engaging with your business:
⚠️ They found a different option: Maybe they already bought a similar product from someone else.
⚠️ Worries about cost: They might think your product or service is too expensive.
⚠️ Too busy: They don’t have time to engage with your business.
⚠️ Communication style: They might not like the way you talk to them in your emails or on social media.
⚠️ Lost contact: They could have changed their job and email address, so they no longer see your messages.
⚠️ Wrong audience: Your marketing campaigns might be targeting people who aren’t interested in your offering.
Other issues to watch out for:
➡️ Irrelevant content: What you’re sharing isn’t interesting or useful to them.
➡️ Slow responses: You’re taking too long to reply to their questions or comments.
➡️ Mistakes in collecting information: Errors in how you gather and use leads’ data.
➡️ Inconsistent branding: Mixed messages about what your brand stands for.
➡️ Lack of personalization: Your website doesn’t feel tailored to their needs.
Marketing and sales teams can try a few strategies to find out why you’re losing leads. Ask lost leads their reasons directly through a survey or email. Ensure it doesn’t sound like you’re trying to sell something; you just want to know why things didn’t work out.
If someone changed their email or phone number, you might try reconnecting with them on LinkedIn. For example, if they’ve moved to a new place or job, you could congratulate them; this shows you care about them beyond just making a sale.
When Do You Need to Re-Engage Lost Leads?
Re-engaging lost leads is an important aspect of sales and marketing strategies. The best time to reengage lost leads depends on various factors. Here are some general guidelines to consider:
✅ After a specific period
Usually, waiting for a period of 3-6 months after the last contact is a good practice when trying to re-engage leads. This gives the lead time to potentially reconsider or for their situation to change.
✅ When you have something new to offer
If your company has launched a new product, service, or a significant update to an existing offering, it can be a good opportunity for sales and marketing teams to reach out.
✅ Seasonal or industry events
Aligning your re-engagement with industry events, seasonal needs, or financial year-ends can increase the relevance of your outreach.
✅ After analyzing lead behavior
If you have a system that tracks leads (like a CRM), and you notice a previously lost lead has shown new activity (like visiting your website), it might be a good time to reengage.
✅ During special promotions or sales
If your company is running a special promotion or sale that is relevant to the lead’s interests or past interactions, it can be an opportune time to reach out.
✅ Lifecycle events
If your CRM indicates a significant lifecycle event for a lead (like a job change or business expansion), it could be a good time to reconnect.
✅ Personalized check-ins
Sometimes, a personalized check-in after a significant period of time (like 6 months or a year)—just to see how they are doing or whether their needs have changed—can be effective.
Let Go of Dead Leads
It’s all good and well to engage lost leads but it’s also important to know when not to try again. If someone hasn’t interacted with your emails or products for a year or longer, they might not be interested anymore.
Some people change email addresses or forget passwords. If someone hasn’t responded in over six months, even after you’ve tried different approaches, they might be what’s called a “ghost” in your email list.
More than half of an email list can be made up of inactive contacts like these, in which case it might be better to just remove them from your list.
As the Navajo proverb says, “You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.” It means if someone is not showing interest, they probably won’t, no matter how hard you try.
To sum up, the key to reengagement is to offer value and relevance, rather than just trying to make a sale. Tailoring your approach based on what you know about the lead and their past interactions with your company can significantly increase your chances of success.
How to Revive Cold and Old Leads? And How to Nurture Lost Leads?
Before building a lead recovery campaign, define the types of leads you’re losing. Were they hot, warm, or cold? A customer journey map like the one below helps outline each stage that a lead goes through in the sales funnel.
Cold leads are people or businesses who haven’t indicated their interest in your brand. Still, they might do so after a significant amount of effort from your side.
Warm leads are the ones who’ve shown some interest in your business. They are also known as prospects.
For example, they downloaded your guide from the website and left an email address. Nonetheless, they are not quite ready to make a purchase. They may be considering the offers of your competitors.
Hot leads are nurtured enough and ready to buy a particular product or service soon. They are frequently called qualified leads. And our mission is to warm all leads up.
1. Target your lost leads
Today, with all the data and tracking technology we have, old-fashioned random marketing isn’t very effective. We now have better ways to reach people, like behavioral targeting, which can lead to more people buying what you’re selling.
Think of behavioral targeting as a way to read your audience’s mind. It tracks how people interact with what you post on your website and social media. Then, it gives you this information.
With these insights, you can create marketing campaigns that are more tailored to what your audience likes and wants. This makes the buying experience feel more personal for them. Below, we’ll discuss three ways to target lost leads.
Lead segmentation
To target lost leads effectively, we first need to segment them. Choose a CRM system that will assist you quickly and correctly.
A CRM automatically divides leads that share similar characteristics into discrete groups. Those characteristics take into account:
➡️ Position in the sales funnel.
➡️ Demographics (age, family size, gender, education, occupation, income, and nationality).
➡️ Geographical locations (country, city, etc.).
➡️ Website behavior (pages the visitor clicked on/didn’t click on, survey results).
➡️ Email engagement (open rate and click-through rate).
➡️ Company size, industry, and functions.
You can evaluate lost leads based on the characteristics of your ideal buyer persona. It’s reasonable to connect with users whose profiles are marked as the highest priority. After you’ve done lead scoring, run a complex targeting campaign which includes email marketing and ads.
Targeted emails
When you know why a lead dropped out of your campaign, try to fix it via email. If the person didn’t purchase because of competition, send them a message that you’ve improved some products’ features and compare it to alternatives on the market.
If a prospect left your website with an abandoned cart, offer a discount for those items. Do not forget to add a compelling call to action (CTA).
Tailored ads
Lastly, we recommend creating personalized ads for each segment. Luckily, marketing automation software allows you to deliver ads based on your leads’ behavior. The 2021 Segment study revealed that 77% of consumers expect personalized promotions from companies. People are used to retargeting because it saves them time and helps remind them what they need.
Below are five creative ideas on how to reinvigorate leads via ads:
- Create personalized landing pages that would help them solve their problems.
- Show your product in a different light by highlighting features and benefits you haven’t covered yet.
- Make sure you have a specific personalized landing page for each Google PPC campaign and social media advertisement.
- If a lead visited your blog, find out what article he was attracted to. Find a similar post and promote it with LinkedIn’s retargeting.
- Organize online events that would cover leads’ unique pain points, such as webinars or masterclasses. It’s best if participation is free and the events don’t seem overly commercial.
2. Create lead-nurturing content
Creating content to nurture leads is about keeping in touch with potential customers through their entire buying journey. It’s more about building trust than making quick sales. Nurturing leads well can lead to more sales.
The basic idea is to keep giving your potential customers useful information about what you offer. Over time, this will help them decide to buy from you. It’s especially important for businesses that pitch new ideas because people might need time to understand and accept these ideas.
The best way to do this is through specific types of content, including:
📍 Webinars
📍 Email newsletters
📍 Sales calls
📍 Articles with expert opinions
📍 Blog posts
To get more people to click on your content, create a lead magnet—a free e-book, webinar, or case study. The content should be relevant, engaging, and fresh because you’re competing with terabytes of existing information on the Internet. And people always want the best.
Mathew Sweezey, author of Marketing Automation for Dummies, divides content that leads want to engage with into two categories:
❤️ Casual reading: Tips or news focused on a specific area; people read this kind of content every day.
❤️ Research: Detailed information to help make decisions; people look for this when they have a problem to solve.
By covering both types, you can improve how often people click on your content.
3. Deliver your content effectively
Even authentic and valuable content won’t work if you deliver it in the wrong way. Build your re-engagement campaign by setting up relevant messages at the right time.
Right time
As you can see in the graphic above, there are two important things to note: First, Salesforce says that 83% of customers want to talk to a salesperson right away when they contact a company. But, Hubspot found that only 37% of companies actually talk to their leads within an hour.
The average first response time of B2B businesses to their leads is 42 hours. The bottom line here is that you need to
Create a timing schedule for other types of email and phone calls. Define what timelines work best for your audience. If you call your prospect in the morning hours and your calls never get answered, it might not be the right time.
Emailing someone every day is also not a good idea. If your lead is cold, send them no more than five emails at the start of your outreach to them. You can add more later to avoid looking as if you’re spamming them.
Relevancy
Get the conversation started by writing a captivating subject line—a product update or a limited-time offer would fit perfectly. You could also describe the features of your new product.
The message should be clear, personalized, and fun. Add a CTA and pay attention to your website optimization. Place targeted pop-ups and banners to attract more attention.
Right message
A sales team that wants to win leads back, sends personalized emails, not generic ones.
Salesforce found that 83% of B2B buyers want a tailored experience when making a purchase.
They want others to appeal to their emotional side by generating excitement, stress relief, security, and potential for growth.
If your sales leads are getting lost due to the lack of a close personal connection with your brand, it’s time to fix it. Start by adding personalized content to your emails, social outreach, and website. Underline your client’s name, company name, job title, email, etc.
If you need to personalize hundreds of messages, it’s better to use automation tools. Manually personalizing each email is a daunting challenge (and you have so much to do!) With Hyperise, you can personalize your website’s text, images, videos, and CTAs for your visitors— without having to write a single line of code.
Below are some great examples of personalization in outreach. You can find more on the website.
Relevant channels
While email lists are crucial in your direct communication with targeted customers, you can explore more marketing channels. Social media platforms provide unlimited resources for finding new leads. Reach out to users with posts on the platforms you know they’re most likely to use.
Do not forget about blogging opportunities—it not only provides leads with news and opinions, but also improves your website visibility in Google.
The latest trend in content marketing is omnichannel coverage. Consumers want their user experience to be seamless, no matter what gadget they are using.
4. Measure, learn, and improve
The last step is to analyze your lead generation process.. If you use an irrelevant magnet or channels that rarely reach your target audience, it’s better to solve this problem at the root. Instead of rebuilding relationships with people who are unlikely to buy something from you, rethink your marketing campaigns and create new magnets that will attract the right audience.
Open rate and click-through rate (CTR)
Open and click rates accentuate how your lead recovery campaigns resonate with your audience. The email open rate for all industries that Mailchimp analyzed, is 21%. A low open rate indicates one of these things:
❗ Your subject line is not relevant for some readers.
❗ Your lead database is outdated, and you send messages to “ghosts.”
❗ You may be running too few campaigns. And vice versa, you are overdoing it with emails, and users mark them as spam.
The average click rate for all industries that Mailchimp studied, is 2.62%. If your numbers are lower, change your keywords policy.
Closing
In conclusion, successfully reengaging lost leads is a critical and rewarding business strategy.
This process hinges on understanding the root causes of disengagement, employing customized communication tactics, and using personalized content to reignite interest.
Every lost lead presents a unique opportunity; with a thoughtful approach, these potential customers can become part of your loyal client base.
Looking to rekindle the spark with your cold leads? Warm up cold leads with personalization.
With our personalized image integration, you can add a unique touch to your outreach efforts, making your messages stand out.
Say goodbye to generic interactions and hello to dynamic, attention-grabbing communications that resonate with your audience.
Don’t let potential opportunities slip away—warm up those cold leads with Hyperise today and see the difference personalization can make. Start your free trial now and begin your journey to more effective lead engagement!
Author bio
Kristina Shkriabina is a Content Marketing Manager at Synebo, a company focused on building сomprehensive Salesforce solutions. Kristina has over six years of experience in broadcasting journalism and British parliamentary debate. In her free time, she loves skateboarding and reading books.