Lead Nurturing

Automatic Client Follow-up & Lead Nurturing

What’s the difference between your favourite aunt and the underwhelming uncle?

Uncle Ted forgets your name and was last seen passed out at your wedding. Aunt Katie was ecstatic to be at your graduation. She never misses a card for every birthday and Christmas. She calls you often just to see what is new. You like and trust Aunt Katie because it is obvious she cares about you. So you care about her.

Most businesses treat customer relationships like bumbling Uncle Ted, showing up and calling only when it’s expected. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could be Aunt Katie to your clients?

In a perfect world, you would deliver personalized letters to your clients on a regular basis. Your individualized attention would create a positive image for you and your company. Open communication would quickly establish a friendly rapport, keep your product front-of-mind and gain clients’ trust. This isn’t about teddy-bear hugs; people are inclined to buy from someone they remember, like and trust and to you that’s cash in the bank.

It’s not a perfect world – but you have two options to nurture client relationships. You can:

1. Hire all those punctual and personal aunts out there

2. Use Solve’s scheduled email feature to automate much of that personal interaction

Before you post job openings for “Communication-Savvy Aunts,” look at what Solve’s new Scheduled email feature can do for you.

A simple and automatic follow-up

Lets say you just made a sale or completed a project. While the ink is still wet, create a Scheduled email activity that will be delivered to your client exactly one month from now to thank your client for his or her business, confirm everything worked out and request a referral.

It really is that simple, it scales and it does make a difference.

Multi-step lead nurturing campaigns

Lets expand on the first example by using the Scheduled email activity to manage a company-wide personal lead nurturing campaign. Let’s say you’ve established an ideal ten-step process for handling each new lead:

Day 1

Send an email welcome message with your personal contact information

Day 3

Send an email with some tips on how to get started

Day 4

Schedule a phone call

Day 7

Send an email providing a list of tips on how to be successful with your service (benefits)

Day 11

Send an email on how you compare to the competition (they’re doing it anyway, so jump in with your answers)

Day 14

Send an email that answers the questions frequently asked by new clients and some quotes

Day 18

Send an email with a free report on how leveraging your service can help them blow away from their competitors

Day 19

Schedule a follow-up meeting

Day 22

Send an email with a case study

Day 28

Schedule a follow-up meeting asking for their business

Held

Send an email thanking them for their business!

A Month Later

Thank your client for their business, confirm everything worked out and request a referral!

That continuous “personal” follow-up would do an amazing job of converting leads to clients, but just before your keyboard-bound fingers fall off from fatigue, your head would explode from the stress. Solve will systematically type and send those eight personal emails at exactly the right time and set up the three events in your calendar. It’s simple to do:

1. On a new contact record, create a set of Scheduled email messages and events according to the sequence of your nurturing campaign. Insert fields such as “First Name,” “Last Name” and “Job Title” to personalize your Scheduled email messages. This simple step prevents you from using the over-used, generic “Dear Valued Customer” opening. Have you ever met Valued Customer? Imaginary friends are only OK when you’re a child.

2. Save this set of activities as a template with its own name so you can attach a copy of the same set of activities to each new lead with one, simple click.

Solve templates are blueprints of your work that you can reuse later. A template stores a set of scheduled email messages that can be applied to new prospects. When you follow the same steps repeatedly, templates save you a lot of time by simply plugging and chugging new information.

Combining the scheduled email’s field names with a template adds value to your sales and marketing efforts. Your emails will have personal appeal, provoking those fuzzy feelings with your prospects and clients, yet all you did was insert a template of pre-defined activities.

Continuous contact without the continuous labor. Solve gives you more time to spend doing… err… Facebooking counts as work these days, right?

Some background on effective lead nurturing campaigns

To create sustainable customer relationships, lead nurturing (aka CRM Drip Marketing and autoresponder) campaigns are your best friend. Why? They work. Consider this: 80 percent of all sales occur after the fourth interaction. Shocking, especially considering that 90 percent of all salespeople quit after four interactions. (They were so close!)

You don’t want to pester your prospects. Effective lead nurturing campaigns are always carefully planned. Some things to consider:

• Keep a consistent message throughout and point to benefits. The same theme should be present in all emails. Drive one point home instead of a bunch of pop flies that get you OUT.

• Provide value to your prospect by helping them understand the benefits of working with you through relevant examples, recent news about your company and industry, similar case study and answer frequently asked questions. Make your messages to-the-point and useful to the reader.

Lead nurturing campaigns must be carefully articulated to have maximum benefit. But, with Solve’s template and scheduled email features, you only have to perform the labor once! When you have a campaign that works, put it on autopilot by telling Solve when to send your messages. It’s like having your own communications assistant, typing away vigorously at the keyboard to boost your brand image and increase your sales through personal messages.

Show Uncle Ted the door and embrace modern business practices and systems to give your customers the attention they deserve.