Follow-ups are vital to the growth of any business interest. Effective follow-up strategies provide much-needed support to build a healthy sales cycle for sales teams. However, the most successful salespeople do not rely on repetitive calls, and auto email dumps to attract prospects.
You must engage the best ways to follow up with customers to attract significant returns and grow your brand. That’s why this post looks at how to engage innovative steps to attract more prospects to your company. Leveraging what this article provides will make generating leads and converting prospects more comfortable.
Four Effective Methods to Engage Customer Follow-Ups
1. Build Customer Confidence Through Freebies
Who doesn’t love freebies? Offering free, valuable items to customers can help build enough confidence to make follow-ups seamless. Providing added advice to make prospect’s issues easy to resolve can be a massive confidence builder. Also, you can decide to offer solutions that offer prompt support for prospects’ short or long-term needs.
The key to a good lead magnet is a high perceived value, meaning that it needs to look highly relevant to the kind of audience you want to capture for your email list. The great advantage is that once you’ve created a resource, they’re essentially free to deliver and so earn you leads at minimal cost.
You can also make free items like eBooks, research reports, and other valued links available to prospects. Ensure what you offer to customers can add value to their business or interests. Engaging follow-ups become much easier after that.
2. Schedule Appropriate Follow-Up Times
No one wants to be bothered with a sales-oriented email at the wrong time. Scheduling follow-ups with your prospects could be the best way to engage sales leads.
Consider sending an email that requests a perfect time when you can get in touch. Potential customers tend to value relationships with sales teams that take their time into account.
3. Maximize Potential Triggers
Email triggers are standard tools sales teams use, but many salespeople might underutilize or overlook this tool entirely. Lead nurturing is easier when triggers are included, primarily if these sequences address your prospects’ preferences. For example, most businesses choose to apply ‘Thank You’ emails after the first contact (sales meeting or email).
Other sales teams might decide to send a follow-up online text message or an email 24 hrs after. Putting a confirmation call through might also work. All these depend on the preference of your potential customer to become effective. After using triggers, it doesn’t make sense to spam your prospect.
4. Use the Right Social Media Platforms
Marketing on several social media sites could have its benefits. But when it comes to follow-ups, particularly for business-to-business (B2B) sales leads, Twitter and LinkedIn are perfect options. Around 80% of all B2B leads on social media stem from these platforms. And these platforms can be combined to support effective follow-up strategies for your business.
While LinkedIn is stronger with sales leads, Twitter offers ample information to tailor strategies around prospects’ interests. Connect with your prospects on these platforms, and it will be easier to win over clients after few engagements.
Crafting a Great Follow-Up
Putting a fantastic follow-up together could be challenging without a solid framework for content creation and management. Your prospects will be more inclined to turn down your offers when you’re not offering what they can identify with. Good emails, social media posts, and other linkup media are essential to make your content valuable to prospects.
Most prospects are likely to respond to content that’s easy to comprehend and direct. One of the most potent aspects of lead generation involves sustaining a working content creation and management strategy. That’s why we must look at vital steps marketers must adopt for powerful, productive follow-ups:
1. Center Your Follow-Up on the Prospect
Adding value to a follow-up email is indispensable, as prospects won’t rate your posts if they can’t benefit from them. Personalization of follow-ups can be quite tasking, especially when you have many prospects to cover. When you create follow-ups, be sure to strike a balance between promoting products and what prospects need. Follow-ups must center on how your product or service can provide benefits for prospects.
Engage in research, gather data, and look through exciting content for great ideas to frame your follow-up. Most potential customers will respond to effective follow-up strategies crafted to elicit emotion or logic. So, make sure your follow-ups remain focused on what your prospects want or need. Other elements will likely fall in place without much effort.
2. Use Resources Wisely
There is no one-size-fits-all design when it comes to follow-up templates for businesses. Some marketers could have a diverse subscriber base to contact, making it nearly impossible for one formula to work. Several factors influence how prospects respond to your follow-up attempts, and you must find a perfect fit for your campaign. Smartly using your resources could prove pivotal in boosting lead generation figures and conversion rates.
Adopt strategies that border around tweaking subject lines, using better headers and other items in subsequent follow-ups. Let’s say you adopt a cold email strategy to follow-up prospects. Using tools like A/B testing comes in handy to segment your emails with different subject lines and other items.
If you can analyze all segments and compare results, it becomes easy to pinpoint which strategy works best. Clever use of tools at your disposal makes the difference when you plan to cast a working follow-up strategy.
3. Your Follow-Up Should Be Professional (Not Flat-Out Sales-y)
Salespeople must adopt a follow-up strategy that doesn’t come off as desperate. Customers might see through a desperate sales strategy and avoid what you’re offering altogether. So, if a desperate sales-y follow-up doesn’t cut it, what works then? Salespersons do not need to panic when creating follow-ups for clients, especially in the early stages.
Before engaging your product, marketers must understand that prospects must go through two vital steps – awareness and consideration. Customers will usually take longer to respond to emails, mainly when your company isn’t famous. Sending the wrong email during these stages could ruin the entire lead, limiting the chances of any sale.
The awareness stage in such a potential sale might delay. Prospects will spend time gathering information about your product(s) before choosing to engage. Follow a strict timeline before sending succeeding messages to prospects. Spamming should never be in the equation; go for timely contacts that add value and are concise to the bone.
Many professional follow-up campaigns leverage conversion attempts 2 – 3 times per week. Adopt a timetable that’s not desperate and works best to get the word out to your prospects quickly.
4. Engage Consistency (While You Keep Clients Guessing)
Everyone hates reruns, and you can’t expect customers to appreciate predictable follow-ups either. And with prospect pools getting more diverse every day, it’s a smart move to adopt an intelligent follow-up strategy. Being consistent is crucial to the success of your follow-up, but it doesn’t stop you from being creative. Clients will more likely yawn at a predictable email than engage it. So, it goes a long way to become imaginative with your content without getting way out of line.
For example, let’s say you’ve got to send in an email template to an audience that engages visual content more. Adding personalized videos, graphics, and catchy content can transform a bland email into a mega-converter. It’s an intelligent move to balance your content, stay true to your basic sales strategy while offering a helpful range. There’s a greater chance of prospects engaging your mails when you adopt a consistent but unpredictable approach to follow-ups.
5. Wait
Some diehard salespeople believe striking while the iron is hot is an efficient strategy to get more leads. But in today’s dynamic, hyper-competitive market space, such an approach could lose you more than it brings in. Buyers may not want to engage with your products or services when you want them to. So, what can you do in such a situation? Well, it’s simple – be patient.
While several leads may want to buy in immediately, other customers might need many weeks to decide. Even if these customers seem to take too long, there’s a high chance they’ll engage at some point. Some customers will return to purchase, even after several months when you do your follow-ups properly.
Tailor your follow-up template to meet the requests of your customers. Whenever a potential customer requests time, it’s a smart move to let them decide without being pushy. Such an approach boosts the chances of conversions, no matter how long you’ve had to wait.
Conclusion
Effective follow-up strategies are crucial to ensure you make the most of connecting with prospective customers. Leveraging the best ways to follow up with customers will increase lead generation rates and boost conversions.
Taking cues from the ways to follow-up customers will be incomplete without other valuable advice. That’s why the information on steps to craft a fantastic follow-up also comes in handy. Use all the information above to your benefit. It’s easier to get more attention to your business for profit with innovative follow-up strategies.
