It’s exciting when your brand acquires a new targeted lead. This person has the potential to go on and be a customer for many years to come “IF” you know how to nurture that person and offer them value that goes beyond what they pay for the products and services you offer.
I’ve talked to many ecom store owners over the years that have taken the plunge of starting their own businesses and I applaud them. The misconception I see with startups is the notion that once they have a lead, its consider a customer. Anyone who has been in business long enough knows that this doesn’t always turn out to be the case.
Acquiring the lead is only the start of the journey when transitioning from lead to customer. In this article I want to give you some pointers on what you should be doing after you’ve connected with a lead.
We’ve helped generate leads and customers for clients in various verticals over the years. One thing we try to teach businesses is how to follow up with the lead or customer after they have made the acquisition. Many businesses I have consulted one to one with don’t have a system in place to nurture their leads & customers. A follow up system is designed to convert from lead to customer and retain them for years to come.
This is unfortunate to hear, considering the fact that it may have cost money to acquire the lead and without continuing the conversation with them and offering more value before and after they have become a customer, the lead dies out and becomes obsolete! Or worse yet… your competitor has converted them into a customer.
So what should you do after you receive a lead?
Follow Up Right Away
The work starts now! You’ve acquired a lead in the form of an email optin from an online ad, but it’s no “done deal”. You need to begin the process of developing a relationship with them. You do this by emailing them to address concerns they have where you can help solve and offer value where possible. This is all about qualifying them further down the sales process.
I also advise to follow up with the lead as soon as you possibly can so that they don’t go cold on you. Ideally within the first hour of acquiring them. If they are in need of something you offer, you need to attend to that as quickly as possible.
Follow Up on The Channel You Acquired The Lead
Perhaps you’ve acquired the lead via an email submit or a Facebook chat bot. Whatever the channel you’ve acquired them on, follow up with them through that medium.
Every business will be different. Businesses have various demographics that they serve. Some channels of lead acquisition will work best for one demographic and other channels for another demographic. If the lead was acquired through email, then email is the focus of following up with that lead.
Over time as the relationship develops positively between your business and the lead, cross channel communication becomes a common thing. Phone calls, emails, text messages, etc are all used to communicate with your customer.
Follow Up Multiple Times
In the marketing world, it’s common to hear about needing to follow up with your lead multiple times. They say it takes seven touch points on average before you can convert an interested lead into a customer.
In this day and age, with smartphones and other communication channels like social media, messenger bots, email, text messaging apps etc etc, I feel that more touch points are needed before you convert your lead into a customer. This is simply because of all the distractions we have now and people getting sent marketing material much more than there has ever been before. In order to acquire a person’s attention, trust and business, you’ll need to nurture that lead with various touch points over a set period of time.
When To Follow Up?
When you first acquire the lead, as mentioned above you need to follow up within the first hour. Preferably sooner if you can. If you acquired the lead via email or messenger bot or even phone number, you can send a follow up message to say that you have acknowledged their interest in your offer. This first message begins to build the relationship.
You should also consider when your target customer actually has the ability to check your marketing messages. Think about what times of the day your ideal customer is likely to view your messages and aim to deliver those messages around that time. Maybe their commute to work is a good time as they check emails and scroll through their Facebook feed. Maybe after the school run in the morning is a good time to send your marketing messages (if you are targeting moms)
If you are in the B2C space and your target audience are working a 9-5, then it’s going to be hard to contact people via phone call during those working hours. But you can deliver a message via text, email or even messenger bot which will be easier for them to acknowledge. If you are B2B, then you might only get through to a decision maker during business hours.
Put Systems In Place & Automate
In this day and age, we have some fantastic technology we can incorporate as part of our lead generation and follow up process. I’ve talked about email, chat bots, messenger apps, phone calls etc as ways in which we can follow up with our prospects and move them closer to a customer.
These channels offer the entire process of continuous communication with our leads almost entirely as an automation process. Meaning we don’t have to manually email/chat bot each prospect with our message. These channels have software to automate that process for us. Allowing business owners to get on with other important areas of work, while the systems take care of the heavy lifting and market our messages on autopilot.
If a lead has opted in for more information about an offer you provide, you can have these systems follow up with the lead automatically. You can provide more value and help to educate the lead on your products & services. This automation is helping to build trust, answer questions, educate, show testimonials, tell your story and build authority. This in turn makes selling to the prospect much easier down the line as they have become more familiar with you as a brand and what you have to offer.
All these messages that provide value in the way I have mentioned are all part of the multiple touch points I have mentioned previously.
I hope you now have a better understanding of how to build a relationship with the leads you acquire for your shopping brand. No matter where you get your leads from be it running ads online or referrals from happy customers etc, the work doesn’t stop there. Now you have to earn trust, provide value in the form of education, proof of results, testimonials, FAQ’s etc.
As your prospects awareness of your brand becomes stronger, you’ll find closing your prospect much easier since that relationship has been nurtured. Begin to think about your lead to sales process and map out how you can continually follow up with your leads and help them down the sales funnel. Find out any objections they may have, and create content around those objections.
