Managing Your Leads
Over the course of running your business you will have leads convert to buying customers. Typically, we see about 1%-3% of all leads covert to buying customers at the point of being introduced to a business. Unfortunately, this means 97%-99% of all leads just are not ready yet. These leads are in fact looking to educate themselves before making the commitment. Many businesses have captured the lead's information and may even have one outreach to the lead, but do not have a process to educate the lead until they are ready to purchase. In fact, most people will need to be exposed to a brand five to twenty times before the decide to act on a purchase with that brand.
Do you have a process that exposes your brand to your lead?
Will your business be the business that educates the leads about your products or services offered?
If your leads see your business as the one who helped them get educated, what kind of advantage will that give your business when the buyer is finished with their journey and ready to make their purchase.
What I can tell you, is it will give you a great advantage. Now, the question is, how do we do this without creating an administrative nightmare for you or your team. Heck, you have a business to run and products or services to sell.
Educate Your Customers
The key is to begin building out series of communications for your leads that will help them better understand the problem they have, but do not want; and the solution they want, but do not have. I know, this sounds like an overwhelming amount of work, but if we do incremental improvements each day, a lot will be accomplished by the end of the month, quarter, and year.
First, close your door, turn off your phone, silence your emails, and get a paper and pen. It is important to have no distractions for this exercise. Begin writing down things that are important for your lead to know. What problems are solved with your product or service. What makes your product or service different than your competitors. How will your product or service make their life easier or better than it is if they did not move forward. Do you have customer testimonials?
With all these ideas now on paper, we begin to look for the top 20 message headlines and testimonials.
If your website has a blog page, you can place the communication as a blog post so anyone who visits your website is able to learn from your hard work. Over the next couple days, write the first three or four communications.
Next, determine how many days you want between messages. Example once a week for these messages. This way, you may also send other messages out without feeling like you are sending too many messages.
Next, we will use an email marketing automation tool like Zoho Campaigns to put a portion of the communication in an autoresponder series to be delivered to your leads with a link back to the blog post on your website to read the full article. After you have scheduled these communications, schedule time to write the next communication and then add it to the end of your autoresponder series. Continue this until you have these 20 messages built out. Now, the contacts in the list connected to the autoresponder will begin receiving their series. You will be able to monitor the series performance as people receive, open, click, or event unsubscribe to your messages.
As you continue to increase your leads through your lead campaigns and place your non-buyers into the list of leads to receive the autoresponder, you will have an automated process in place that will work on the education process, so no one slips through the follow-up cracks. Then your sales team can react to leads who take take action.
If this has sparked some questions and you will like to learn more about how Zoho Campaigns and/or autoresponders would help your business grow, we would love to schedule a brief call to walk you through the benefits of automating this task.
To your future success!
Robert