In my last article I wrote about how to generate leads online. This month, I want to cover what comes next: the all-important follow-up.
Follow-up is what marketers call the process of communicating with a prospective client in order to qualify whether that person is the right fit to buy what you’re selling. Through your follow-up process you can also prepare your leads to make a purchase by answering their questions, overcoming their objections and telling them everything they need to know to make a decision.
If you’re following a traditional sales model, you would call each lead by phone and attempt to convert that lead into a client by generating a sale. If you were unable to reach any of the leads you called, you would set a reminder in your CRM or calendar and call them again at a later time. You would likely continue to call them for a pre-determined time period or number of times until you chose to give up and consider the lead to be “cold.”
Following a basic model like this you can typically expect to convert 1-2% of your leads into sales in the short term. What a great many companies do is follow up with only those leads who appear most likely to buy immediately. If a lead cannot be reached or cannot be closed in a short period of time, they move on, never to communicate with the prospective client again.
If on the other hand, you want to maximize the value of your leads and stretch your advertising dollars further, you need to go beyond this basic form of follow-up. You need to implement an automated follow-up system that uses media to communicate with your leads via a sequence of messages. You also need to follow up with your leads for far longer than you have in the past.
Here’s how:
First, create an email sequence and deliver it to each lead automatically. Using an email marketing system, it’s possible to create a pre-written series of emails (called an auto-responder) and have those emails delivered to your leads over time. Depending on the software you use to deliver your sequence you can do things such as: include links to further information on your website, track who opens your emails and who clicks on each link, trigger secondary email sequences about specific topics your leads are interested in and so on. A few systems I recommend you look at include InfusionSoft.com, Constant Contact, Aweber and MailChimp.
Second, use direct mail. If you sell a product or service that has a price tag in the hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, then you can likely afford to spend more on following up with each lead than you think. One of the many benefits of using direct mail is that you’re no longer fighting for your lead’s attention through their already overflowing email in box. Some people prefer reading things the good old fashioned way and today our physical mailboxes are less clogged than they’ve ever been so you’re less likely to be competing for people’s attention with mail. (An intermediate tip is to integrate your use of direct mail by driving people back to your website to a special page where they can get more information.)
Third, use multiple media. Video, various forms of audio, social media, webinars and other kinds of media call all be used, as long as your prospective clients use them and are familiar with them. The point is to communicate with your prospects in as many different ways that make sense as you can find.
Now that we’ve covered the media to use, let’s talk about your message. The message you communicate in your follow-up sequence is the most crucial part of the entire process. Even if you only use a few emails and perhaps a phone call or two as your entire follow-up sequence, you’ll experience far greater success with the right message.
Building the right message is a complex process. There may in fact be many things you need to tell your leads before they’ll be ready to make a purchase. That means you have an overall message or perhaps several big-picture messages you want to convey to them, and then you have a single message you’ll cover in every piece of media you send them.
A big-picture message every company should want to communicate is that they are likeable and trustworthy. People do business with people and companies they like and trust. You need to prove to your leads that you’re ideally suited to satisfy their needs, wants, and desires and that you can be trusted to deliver on your promises.
A great exercise would be to sit down and come up with a list of big-picture messages you would like to convey to your prospective clients and then think about how you can get those messages across in all of your marketing, not just your follow-up efforts.
With the big-picture messaging figured out, you now need to give thought to specific things you can tell your leads in each follow-up piece you send them, whether it be an email, video, direct mail piece or other form of media.
Your goals at this stage are:
- to keep your leads interest;
- to get them to like you;
- to get them to trust you; and
- to get them to buy from you.
You can do this by:
- telling them more about how your products and services will satisfy their needs, wants and desires
- telling stories of happy clients;
- letting them get to know you and your staff by telling personal interest stories;
- telling them stories that help them visualize your product being put to use in their own lives;
- explaining the most common objections prospective clients have and your answers to those objections;
- explaining the most common misperceptions about your company, your industry and your products and what the truth is;
- telling them things related to your products and services and industry that will also improve their lives when added to your products and services; and
- sharing information with them that they are unlikely to know, based on your experience.
And so on…
There really is an endless number of things you can do in your follow-up with prospects that will build a relationship with them, get them to like you, get them to trust you and in time get them to buy.
A final point I want to leave you with is that one of the most important reasons for following up, and for following up far longer than you may be used to, is that people are ready to buy when they’re ready to buy, not when you’re ready to sell to them. That means you need to stay in touch with your leads for six months, 12 months and possibly longer – not just a week or two.
People are busy, they’re bombarded with media and they’re short on time. They will also invest time researching a big purchase decision online, in some cases long before they make a purchase. And they will often request information far in advance of making a purchase. That’s why following up with multiple messages, using multiple media, and over a long period of time is crucial to you being able to convert the most leads possible.
Follow my advice and you’ll go far beyond the typical 1-2% of leads converted into sales. Your sales, the number of clients you have, and your revenue will all climb as a result.
Adam Killam is a Vancouver-based Internet marketing consultant and a regular conference speaker and blogger on the topic. Visit adamkillam.com
