After you’ve generated leads for new business, what do you do with them next? Here we talk about how to make the best first impression with prospective new customers and take the first step to developing a new relationship.

The first contact with your new lead is absolutely crucial as it is your opportunity to really sell your business and build credibility for your brand. It is good to imagine you have walk-in customers in real life and think about how you would approach them to eventually close a sale.

Design a Strategy to Welcome your Leads

Before you embark on an email marketing campaign or other data-skimming, make sure you have considered the welcome journey that will nurture them so that doing business with you would be a natural next step.

Obviously, the starting point in this exercise is to generate the leads themselves, and through our previous articles you will have discovered some excellent ways to do this. The bottom line is that you should include an online form somewhere on your website, your email campaigns, and throughout your marketing materials so that you can capture the data of interested parties.

The more information you glean from your sign-up form, the more you can target your efforts to capture them as potential clients. You want to increase and retain their engagement through the content you send them so that a relationship is developed, and to keep your business in the forefront of your prospects mind so that they are more inclined to do business with you when the time is right.

Keep your Online Forms Short and Sweet

While you want to capture as much data on your prospects as possible, this can also present a problem. The more fields there are for your leads to complete, the more likely it is that they will abandon the page without submitting the form. Remember, unless they click on SUBMIT, you haven’t generated a lead.

For that reason, it’s always best to keep your initial online form to a basic format on the basis that you can collect more data as the new lead goes through your sales funnel. When you have received the first enquiry from a new prospect on completing the first online form, you can send a second form direct to their email address, refining their requirements and finding out more about their circumstances.

That way you will be developing the relationship organically and your lead won’t feel bombarded by questions from the onset!  You can also present your questions in such a way that it makes it less cumbersome for your enquirers to complete. For example, if you’re technically-minded, you can provide sliders so that leads can indicate price range, income level or whatever you want.

If you’re not able to go for this quite sophisticated approach, you can use tick boxes or simple drop-down boxes instead. You’re trying to make it as easy as possible for your leads to give you the data you need to target your marketing efforts with more accuracy and relevance for your prospects. If you need help setting up these kind of forms, there are plenty of form builders available on the internet, many of which are offering free versions, such as Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, and Gravity Forms.

How to Write the Perfect Welcome Email

With all the new data you have, the first step is to send an email to those who have completed your first online form. The welcome email is an important tool in digital marketing, although its true value is often overlooked.

According to research, the welcome email gets one of the highest open rates of all emails and so it’s important to use the opportunity to the absolute maximum.  It’s an important opportunity to make an excellent first impression with a prospect who has already expressed an interest in what you have on offer.

Make your Welcome Email Work for You

You can set the tone for your business in the way you express yourself in your first email to a new prospect, so make sure you get your business tone of voice right to suit your ‘personality’. Think about what you would say to a new prospect if you were face-to-face with them. Perhaps you would want them to take a closer look at your product catalogue or portfolio for example. So you can make it available to new leads in your welcome email.

Gate all your contents offered in your welcome email and give readers a clear opportunity to click to find out more, which will be this email’s call to action (CTA). Then they will click-through to the landing page where your second online form is set-up, and then you can collect more data from each further enquiry to enhance your marketing operation even more. See – How Landing Pages can help grow your business.

Set up a Generic Welcome Email to Use Again and Again

It’s a good idea not to include any time-sensitive information in your welcome email so that you are not obliged to alter it in a short time. You want to write a welcome email that you will be able to have on auto-respond with your email provider, when a new lead completes your very first online form. You don’t want to include information that needs regular updating because your email may be sent out automatically with incorrect information.

It says a great deal about your business as to how promptly you respond to interest in your products or services after all. You want to ensure that you don’t make your welcome email too long or too cluttered with call to actions all over the place, and way too much information to keep your new prospect engaged.

Above all, it’s essential that you make sure your welcome email can be easily viewed on mobile phones and tablets as well as a desktop computer. Research shows that more than half of all emails are opened on mobile devices, another reason not to be too long-winded in your welcome email.

Conclusion

The first communication you have from a new lead should kick-start your welcome strategy that will nurture your prospect until they’re in a position to transact business with you. However, once you’ve completed these steps, you have to remain consistent in your communication so that you continue to engage your prospects. By setting the scene with potential customers through your warm welcome, and by feeding them information while finding out more about them, you’ll be well on your way to developing a relationship that will last the long-haul.

If you need further assistance on bespoke digital marketing strategies or require help on implementing the tips provided here, do contact us and one of our experts will be in contact.

This is where digital marketing comes in. In order to benefit from this large market, you would need to hire digital marketing experts so they can use their vast experience in creating awareness for your business with the best digital marketing strategies.

The major goal of digital marketing is to boost your business online and engage your target audience. Now you may ask “How do I achieve this goal?” This shouldn’t be the problem. Your major focus should be on how to choose the best digital marketing agency for your business. These agencies would lift the burden off your shoulders so you can focus on the core services you offer.

These digital marketing agencies analyze your business and device a digital marketing strategy that would catch the attention of your target audience and seek prospects out of them.

One effective way to boost your business online is by building strong social media presence and sharing regular links to the company’s website and its new products, features and news.

A digital marketing expert knows how to create captivating contents and how to keep your customer base committed to you. It is not enough to have quality contents as these contents need to penetrate the digital world and attract more customers. A good digital marketing agency knows the right strategy to use in marketing your contents to your target audience, and how to generate new leads using contents.

Your social media pages also have to be engaging and not left to die off. When contracting a digital marketing agency, make sure they have the ability to engage existing and prospective customers. They should also build active interaction between people and the company through these social media pages. This will boost your business and help you understand your customers and what they look forward to from your company.

You can also use digital marketing to boost your return on investment (ROI), drive sales and further improve the revenue of your business. Instead of investing millions of naira on TV, radio and print adverts, investing in digital marketing helps you work within budget and save your company a whole lot of money. Running an email marketing campaign would also help your business reach more prospects which could translate to sales, awarenes and engagement.

The success of each campaign can be monitored and this would help you know what you are doing right and what you are wrong. You can take note of these observations and make changes where necessary so as to reach more people with future campaigns and improve sales.

In summary, digital marketing is one of the most effective ways to boost your business online and engage your target audience. As I mentioned earlier, the digital space is the largest market you can think of and there are so many things to benefit from digital marketing. So a business should hire the best digital marketing agencies so as to realize its goals with ease. Doing all of these without the help of digital marketing experts might lead to the loss of prospects that would have been so easy to gain in the first place. So make sure you choose only the best digital marketing agency that you can fully depend on for the growth and success of your business.

These days, you can use content to attract a wider audience to your products, goods or services and catalyse growth which will ultimately improve your profit margins significantly.

However, there’s good content and bad content and there are also different kinds of content serving specific purposes, depending on the platform you’re publishing them on. Here, we will take a look at how you can maximise your marketing return on investment (ROI) through smart use of high-quality content to achieve measurable results.

Know your Target Audience

This is the most important step before implementing any kind of content marketing strategy. It’s worth taking the time to compile a profile of your client demographic with as much detail as possible, including lifestyle choices, hobbies and any other random fact you may have noted about the individuals or companies you do business with.

This allows you to generate content that will appeal directly to the demographic most likely to buy into your product or service. The objective here is to create a community among your existing and prospective clients or customers, where you become the go-to source for whatever you have on offer.

Use ‘Gated’ Content to Grow your Prospect Database

Once you’ve established what kind of content is going to be of genuine interest to your clients and prospects, be it a special promotion or an offer or a new development in your sector, you can start to ‘gate’ certain pieces so that you can collect data.

Most people who have worked in sales and marketing know that the secretary of a prospect is referred to as the ‘gatekeeper’. They are the ones who determine who will or will not be passed through to speak directly to the person the caller is trying to reach. In other words, they ‘qualify’ every caller by taking contact details and finding out the reason for the call.

With content you can do something very similar, particularly if you have written a juicy white paper or industry report. You have to ensure your content serves a purpose to your prospects. Make it interesting, engaging and compelling enough for them to want to read what you’re producing.

Then you can host your document on your website or landing page and let everyone know it’s there by emailing the download link to your database, tweeting or posting links on your social channels or running a small AdWords campaign.

Before a download is permitted, the visitor is encouraged to complete a form with whatever information you want to record, like email address and phone number. Try not to ask too many questions and most importantly, make the document something that’s really worth your prospects’ effort.

Using Links in your Blog Articles is Essential for Good SEO

Creating good backlinks to your website is good SEO practice and it encourages more traction among your visitors who will stay longer to find out more, thereby increasing the possibility of turning a prospect into a sale.

You can also link to other non-competing businesses in your sector to increase your profile in the search engine results, particularly if it’s an organisation or company you refer to in your blog pieces or news articles.

It’s important to make all your links relevant so that Google doesn’t flag your pieces for bad SEO. If you’ve written a blog about a certain aspect of your business, that’s a great opportunity to link to another piece on your website along similar lines.

It’s always a good thing to quote and link to industry or government sources in your pieces and write about any current and relevant consumer or manufacturer surveys for your field, as Google looks favourably upon those types of links, boosting your position in its rankings.

Create a Regular Newsletter for your Existing and Prospective Clients

The best way to grow a community among your client database is with regular communication with a newsletter. It’s also the perfect opportunity to summarise and link to any articles you’ve written that month to generate more traffic.

This way you can reach out to those prospects that have shown an interest in your content and encourage them to read more. Whilst engaging your prospect’ interests directly with your blogs, articles and white papers, you will also be establishing yourself as an authority in your field and they’re going to be even more likely to do business with you.

You can publicise your newsletter through your social channels too, as with all your other content, by posting an enticing sentence that fits the character limit, together with a download link. You can choose to gate your newsletter and encourage subscribers and followers too.

Make sure you are consistent if you decide to produce a regular newsletter. Repetition is key when it comes to delivering your marketing message.

Always have a Call to Action (CTA)

Whatever you write and publish for your clients and prospects, make sure you end with a specific call to action. If you want to promote a special offer for example, include information on how readers can take up your offer in the conclusion, and also encourage them to act immediately.

Don’t go overboard and have several CTAs littered through everything you write and publish – just have one and make it simple, direct and compelling enough to encourage a click-through.

If you aren’t the Best Writer, find someone who is!

Google is continually updating its algorithm to favour well-written, informative and current information over keyword-stuffed, meaningless text walls. If you want to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you have to keep your content fresh, engaging and relevant.

A good writer is a specialist in the content marketing arena and knows how to navigate algorithm updates and approved SEO practices to ensure you get the highest rankings. If you don’t feel up to the challenge, hiring someone with the knowledge makes enormous business sense.

The content your business produces represents you and indicates your level of professionalism (and success) in your chosen field. Whereas in the past, it was the tech-heads that commanded the highest salaries, these days you’ll find out that it’s in fact the writers that are at the top of the food chain – and with very good reason too.

However, most people don’t have the time, energy or understanding to run successful email campaigns. Here, we take a look at the basics of email marketing campaigns and how to build a strategy that works, with measurable results.

Emails hit the ‘Doormat’- Think about the Subject Line

There’s something special about sending an email to someone’s inbox and almost akin to being invited around for dinner. That’s why it’s best to use the opportunity to announce your presence in the best way to encourage further interest from your prospect.

Rather than having a subject line that contains all the relevant offer information in it, hoping that you will get someone to read your email after being tempted in, make it concise and to the point, and most of all, make a statement that refers directly to your customers’ pain points.

For example, ‘Are you Bored with your Kitchen?’, ‘Are you Considering Buying a New Car?’ etc.

Don’t Arrive Uninvited

As you’re ‘in the home’ of your prospect or customer, make sure you have been invited. In other words, only email those addresses that have been given to you specifically by the recipient. Perhaps they downloaded a price list or brochure and left their details.

Don’t send an unsolicited email or you will almost certainly end up in the spam folder.

To build your database of opted-in email recipients, gate your content as shown in our previous article detailing how to use content for lead generation. Always have an aim behind your prospects leaving their data and you won’t go wrong. The kind of content people are most likely to download after leaving their personal information is:

• An email series like ‘How to become a Millionaire Property Developer’
• Free downloads of either software, apps or documents
• Industry white papers and specialist eBooks
• Product updates and new releases

Make sure you get Whitelisted

While most reputable email service providers work very hard to make sure your emails are not blocked by major ISP’s, they have no control over whether your emails hit the inbox or the spam folder. Getting whitelisted is the most effective way to ensure that your emails get delivered properly.

Being whitelisted is essentially the same as being identified as a friend of the recipient, and the best way to achieve this is to have your email address on your prospects address book. With every email you send out, provide instructions as to how the recipient can do this or offer them a chance to subscribe to your newsletter or blog.

Manage your Expectations and Follow-Up on your Efforts

Email marketing is all about managing expectations and it’s up to you to set out what they are. If your call to action is strong enough and you consistently follow-up on any responses, then you’re more likely to have a positive campaign.

Remember to fulfil any promises made in your initial email campaign. If you have set an expectation for weekly or monthly updates and fail to deliver, it speaks volumes about the quality of service you would potentially provide to that prospective customer.

A follow-up email is crucial to the success of your email marketing campaign and almost all email providers allow for an auto-respond message which presents you professionally to those on the receiving end.

To Pitch or not to Pitch?

It’s important to avoid pitching for business as much as possible in your email marketing. That’s because the principal aim is to open a dialogue with your prospects that will ensure not only a likely sale, but also goes a long way to developing a long-term and valuable relationship with them.

If you bombard prospects with offers and deals via your emails, you will quickly alienate your audience and they will be more likely to withdraw their permission for you to contact them. You could also find your emails being directed straight to the junk folder and then you’ll be wasting your efforts.

Use your email campaign as a tool for finding out more about your target market and what their buying habits are. Send consistent messages that don’t read like sales pitches and have a strong and concise call to action and you’ll almost certainly garner more engagement that will lead to converting your prospects into customers.

Get into Segmentation

Firstly, what is segmentation?

It’s basically the practice of splitting your email list into different categories or groups. You can keep your newsletter subscribers separate from your price list downloaders, for example. That way you can be more targeted with your email marketing and you can also use the opportunity for a little A/B testing to see how your campaign is being received.

You can do that by sending one group one email and another group another version of the same email, with the same call to action. You can use your analytics to check out the responses in terms of click-throughs for each segment of your email list. This is a great way to find out quickly what works, and what doesn’t with email marketing.

Don’t lose sight of the Value of your Email List

Finally, it’s crucial that you remember that your email list is one of your most valuable resources when it comes to growing your business. Learn how to nurture your customers and prospects with your regular, informative and relevant emails and you’ll find that the cost of your efforts will pay for itself.

As you become more familiar with the demographic of your target market through regularly checking your analytics, you can become more targeted in your approach. When email marketing is managed methodically and consistently, it goes some way to garnering successful relationships with those you currently do business with and those you would very much like to have on board.