As a marketer, you understand the importance of generating a steady stream of prospects so your sales funnel doesn’t dry up. Finding resources to generate high quality leads is a never-ending challenge, so it’s important to keep those newly acquired prospects interested and engaged with your product or service, so they don’t leak out of the funnel. Every sales funnel leaks at some point or another. For example, it’s easy for trade show leads to leak out of the sales funnel simply because there are too many leads to follow up in a timely manner. Plugging leaks in your sales funnel can prevent you from losing leads to your competitors and significantly impact your bottom line.

Email marketing is still one of the most cost effective channels to nurture leads, since it engages the prospect in a two-way dialogue where conversion and interaction can be recorded and measured in real-time. Unfortunately, once companies acquire new leads they rely too heavily on a “batch-and-blast” approach, rather than targeted communications that address the prospects’ challenges and interests. All the effort and expense to generate new leads results too quickly in a non-responsive list, lost deals and potential negative impact for your brand. Rather than “batch-and blast,” create personalized email programs that evolve to match the prospects’ needs and increase the relevance and impact of your emails. By maintaining message relevance, you will see results in increased email deliverability in your marketing campaigns.

In my article, Are Your Leads Leaking Out of the Funnel?, I discuss how to plug the leakage in the middle of the funnel, by adding an automated lead nurturing campaign to engage with prospects through the middle of the funnel, and create more sales-ready leads.