When growing and expanding a business, most business owners need to have as many possible fishing poles in the water in order to grow their business quickly and effectively.
A big area of focus is usually around lead generation and customer acquisition. With the cost of lead generation increasing, and the quality of leads decreasing, it’s crucial for business owners to maximize their efforts in converting leads into customers.
For any business owner, the more proactive they are about leveraging possibilities the
Typically the breakdown within the process occurs within the follow up process for both online and offline companies. For example, a friend of mine recently posted to Facebook how astounded he was that home contractors he needed to hire wouldn’t return his calls. My husband has been trying to buy a new Lincoln Navigator or a Cadillac Escalade for months and can’t find a salesperson who stays in touch.
Online technology can put the follow up process on autopilot, and can work alone or in tandem with offline follow up strategies such as sales team initiatives. Here are five follow up strategies that can be extremely effective for increasing sales and conversions that are easy to automate.
- Follow Up Emails: In the internet marketing world, its often said, “the money is in the list.” Meaning, that once you have a list of qualified prospects, the money is there provided that there are consistent follow up measures. Depending on your market, this can be an excellent strategy.Content marketing can provide more information, share resources, request appointments, confirm appointments, promote special sales or offers, etc. Resources such as white papers, insight articles, and case studies are highly effective pieces of content as well. The trick is to develop content that your ideal clients will
find compelling and hopefully, irresistible.Additional automated follow up emails might be sent based on what action your reader takes, depending how advanced your email software is. Even a simple newsletter is an easy and powerful marketing strategy that can keep you in front of your customers that many small and mid-market companies miss the boat on.Consider that just one monthly email a mortgage company client of ours sends usually results in tens of
thousands of dollars in revenue from the influx of inquiries generated in response. - Targeted invitations: Considering that only 3% of your prospect pool are ready to buy, it’s imperative to be able to strike while the iron is hot. In his Chet Holmes best-selling book “The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies“, he reveals research that illustrate how only 3% of your customers are in the market to buy your products or services at any given time. These 3% need to be laser targeted by every sales and marketing campaign you can implement, because that small slice of pie is also being pummeled by offers from your competitors.Because business building relies upon relationship building, inviting your audience to attend online and offline events can speed up the process. I recently worked with a CFO consultant client, and we designed in-person workshops that significantly increased his sales and revenue. Workshops can easily be offered online and on demand as well for uncomplicated delivery.
- Custom Audience: For companies and business owners who have a list of prospects, regardless of whether it was created with automated or manual marketing methods, there are potential opportunities to use effective Facebook marketing strategies. Custom audience refers to uploading your database to Facebook and allowing their matching process to identify which of your prospects have Facebook accounts, which in turn enables you to serve “customized” ads to your audience. Read to the end for an example case study that brings many of these strategies together.
- Retargeting: Not every prospect is going to sign up for your free offers, attend your events or buy your products and services at the present moment. However, they might be ready to do so a few hours, days or weeks from now which is what makes retargeting so powerful. Retargeting is when customized ads follow you around the internet, and the pair of shoes you just looked at on Nordstrom start popping up in your Facebook feed or on websites. Retargeting isn’t just for shoes anymore, and if the pump fits, you probably should try it on for size.Retargeting can be used to increase customer action taken for the strategies mentioned in this article, such as increasing list building, sharing content, event invitations and sales initiatives.
- Sales Funnel Development: Your customers will vary from person to person. Some people will buy quickly, while others will look for opportunities to dip their toe into the water and get more familiar before diving in. Most companies have opportunities to create free content, as well as low risk introductory offers that offers value to your customers and provides low risk ways to build the relationship. The sooner prospects invest in products and services that have a positive outcome, the more opportunities you have to create additional sales from that customer.The biggest opportunities lie in combining these methods. A client we recently worked with had doubled his lead generation with initiatives we helped execute, and then needed to convert his prospects more quickly. We came up with an online training webinar to invite his community to, and automated a series of invitations and reminder emails. We coupled the emails with customized reminders using Facebook ads. The reminders ranged from attending the webinar, listening to the replay and taking advantage of the special promotional offer. This campaign doubled my clients sales opportunities for the month within only a week’s time.
Practically every business has the opportunity to supplement the follow up process with any or all of these initiatives. If you’re interested in learning how these strategies might apply to your business, let’s schedule a call and explore possibilities.