As having exclusive information is no longer an advantage in sales, customers now have the opportunity to research before making a purchase. They are able to create unwavering views about your brand, even before they visit your website or look at your ad. That is why today the generation of potential customers is increasingly based on building trust and telling a unique story of your brand, and less on direct sales and direct marketing.
You might be ready to sell, but your client might not be ready to buy at the moment. However, the moment your customer is ready to buy, you need to be ready to sell. If you are not, you could lose them – they could have lost their interest or gone to your competition.
Nevertheless, you shouldn’t give up on cold leads. Sometimes, all a cold lead needs is a little warming up before they are ripe for conversion. With a custom marketing automation strategy, you will be able to offer them the right product at the right time.
What Is Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a set of techniques and tools that allows you to manage multiple processes, campaigns, and communication through different communication channels, sell on-demand at any time, increase profits and upgrade your brand, completely on autopilot.
Email automation is a part of marketing automation where we use email as the basic communication channel. It allows the interlocutors to manage the direction of communication with their actions and thus turn it towards their needs and the way that suits them best.
Although it seems as if our lead has control over communication, with skillful email automation we can anticipate potential branches in communication, write emails in advance that will lead communication to a clearly defined goal, and subtly offer our products or services as the next logical solution in the decision-making process.
Email Personalization
Everything is much more tempting when it carries a note of our personality. Personalized content is specifically tailored to each customer based on the information you collected about them. Thanks to content personalization, each user has a unique experience with your brand, which can be a huge factor in boosting your digital strategy and increasing sales.
When you create content that suits the personality of the customers, it tells them that you do not treat them as numbers but as people. Personalized content arouses more user interest, which contributes to improving the customer experience and increasing the conversion rate. Hubspot research has shown that personalized CTAs (Calls-to-Action) have a 202% better performance than regular CTAs.
There is a number of tools and resources for personalized email marketing campaigns, which can help you make sure that:
- your email list is high quality and your content reaches the right people,
- your content is relevant to your subscribers and they are interested in what you have to offer them,
- your subscribers consider you a trusted sender,
- the titles of your emails are effective since they play an important role in the email open rates.
Re-engagement Campaign
Research done by MarketingSherpa shows that email list decay costs about 22.5% of subscribers annually. On top of that, you lose about 10-20% of email subscribers not because they unsubscribe, but because they stop interacting with you. Sending a reminder email is an opportunity for your readers to get to know you better and start interacting again.
But this cannot always be done by only one email. Create a series of 5 to 10 personalized emails offering high-level content in form of free eBooks, newsletters, case studies, guides, free trials for products. As they give a human touch to a brand, try using videos in your email marketing to make your cold leads interested again.
This is also an opportunity to disqualify those that give no feedback and remove them from your database. This is an effective way to cleanse your email list, resulting in higher sender scores and better engagement metrics.
Create a Drip Campaign
A drip marketing campaign refers to sending a series of marketing messages to potential customers to stimulate sales. It focuses on achieving a long-term goal, such as increasing sales, turning potential customers into sales, and, most importantly, maintaining contact with customers. They are automatically sent according to a premade schedule.
In case you use segmentation in your email marketing, you can use different mailing lists for different types of subscribers – for example, one plan for blog subscribers, another for customers, and a third for potential customers who once have expressed interest in your product but then forgot about you.
These types of marketing email can lead potential customers through a sales funnel with product or service details, guides on making the most of your product or service, and finally an offer to encourage them to buy, but without flooding them.
Use FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
Fear is a reaction that effective psychology takes into account in the service of marketing. Fear serves as an emotional trigger, a mobilization mechanism, and a motivating factor. In sociology, psychology, and marketing, the notion of fear is known as a “fear appeal”.
Generating fear sells not only physical products, but also services and ideas. Of course, in advertising messages, intimidation is not used as an open threat, but it is rather masked in the form of subliminal messages.
The FOMO effect, also known as the YOLO effect (“You only live once”) is a tool that includes promotional sales “until the end of the week”, promotional prices and discounts, “sales until the stocks run out”, limiting the number of products… Black Friday is one of the forms of a culmination of the FOMO effect.
Lead Response Time
According to a report by Harvard Business Review, lead response time is a critical factor in converting leads. Your likelihood of getting a lead on the phone decreases 10x after the first minutes of a lead submitting a form. Unfortunately, not all sales teams are equipped to call their leads within such a short window of time. While it is ideal to call your leads in this time frame, the next best option is to leverage email automation to initiate the conversation and warm up your leads. Datis Mohsenipour, Director of Marketing & Partnerships, at Outback Team Building & Training, recommends the following:
“Is it better to get on the phone with your leads as quickly as humanly possible, yes. But, any communication is better than no communication. I highly recommend sending at least one soft email touch to your leads right after they’ve submitted your form. Let the prospect know that you’ll be in touch with them within X business hours, and take the opportunity to highlight the value of your products or services. You can do so by including recent testimonials, links to case studies, or a free resource.” says Datis.
He adds that “if your systems allow for it, you can kick things up a notch by sending the email on behalf of the sales rep, including their contact information, and even including a meeting booking link using a tool like Calendly.”
Datis wraps up by giving one final piece of advice: “Always be careful when setting up automated workflows. Especially if you have multiple emails assigned to the workflow. Your sales team needs to be aware of what comms are automatically going out to avoid the embarrassment of sending conflicting emails. You’ll also want to ensure that you have unenrollment triggers set up to prevent misaligned comms from going out after a sales rep has made contact with the lead.”
Conclusion
Warming up cold leads can be a thorough and wary work, but it can also be very well worth it. In addition to the tips listed above, discovering the reason for a lead losing interest in the first place could be a great starting point. A simple survey can lead you to the answer and help you fine-tune your marketing machine.
