Are you calling your target audience to action?

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.