Because it takes an average of seven or eight contacts to turn a raw inquiry into a customer (and sometimes many more contacts), you should put a lot ...
Because it takes an average of seven or eight contacts to turn a raw inquiry into a customer (and sometimes many more contacts), you should put a lot of emphasis on nurturing every inquiry in your database. Many companies make a huge mistake by discarding or ignoring leads if they fail to buy or engage with you after two or three attempts. Do not be one of these companies. As a Fusion Marketer, focused on optimizing and synchronizing resources to optimize results, you need to aggressively market to your database of prospects until each person or company in the database takes some positive action, or until you disqualify them as a legitimate prospect.
Never Put All Your Marketing Resources Into One or Two Expensive Programs
Marketers who use their budgets on one major effort to attract leads or sales tend to be enamored of their own products and offers, and believe others will be equally interested in hearing all the juicy details. Instead of one-time, high-risk efforts, successful marketers boost their results (and spread their risk) over several smaller campaigns. They know it is usually better to spend a little less on each promotion, but to go to the market with more frequent promotions.
Start by developing a promotional schedule that allows you to create a lasting, positive image in the minds of your prospects and, equally important, catch them at the precise moment they are in a buying or consideration cycle. Most often, you will need to communicate more, not less, frequently. You may not want to do this because you believe frequent communications may offend prospects and make them less likely to buy. If what you promote is unwanted and targeted at the wrong prospects, you deserve to wear the unwanted label.
To avoid being portrayed as this type of marketer, start practicing the art of friendly persistence. Once you identify a prospect as a legitimate prospect, that person/business should hear from you on as regular a basis as your budget allows. This is particularly important if you have already qualified them as having the money, authority, need, and desire for your products or services.
Drive Results with Friendly Persistence
The key is the friendly half of the friendly persistence formula, because it relates to how you make contact with your prospect base. For instance, while you should make compelling offers and market aggressively, you should be careful about practicing hard-sell techniques, particularly early in the sales cycle. While such tactics may win occasional short-term increases in business, they will scuttle your primary mission of building long-term customer relationships.
Another way to keep it friendly is to blend in informational communications with your other promotions, to show your prospects that you are an expert in your industry and enjoy sharing this expertise to help others. Newsletter mailings (print or email) and a blog can also help establish the right climate, so that when you do make contact by phone, or with a sales-oriented promotion, your prospects perceive it as a friendly communication, not as an annoyance or threat.
Here is an example of one of my lead nurturing campaigns:
Day 1: Postcard with white paper offer
Day 4: Email with same white paper offer
Day 6: Phone call with same white paper offer and notification
of upcoming Web seminar
Day 8: Postcard regarding Web seminar
Day 12: Phone call about Web seminar
Day 14: Email regarding Web seminar
Day 22: Phone call after the Web seminar offering a link
to the recording
Day 24: Email after the Web seminar offering a link to the
recording and the white paper
As you can see, this campaign consisted of eight communications over 24 days, but note that no single media was used more than three times. Also, the offers were soft (Web seminar and white paper), not a hard sales pitch. This use of friendly persistence helped us achieve a 5.4 percent overall response rate and generated dozens of highly qualified leads.
By using conversion ratios and friendly persistence you can create a powerful lead engine to feed your marketing and sales machine.
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