Do you still have a database of hundreds of names at your fingertips? Let’s say you are not meeting in person, because you may be going into a business forum or a one-on-one sales strategy with these folks. How do you get significant numbers of them to be interested in your business? How do you get them to spend money with you? How do you find and continually have new customers to grow? How do you keep all the prospects that you already have interested in doing business with you? How do you get them to come back again and again?
One of the concerns is that if you are meeting someone face-to-face, there is no immediate way to build the relationship or to get them to feel like they know each other. So you set up a “get to know you” flyer, you find out about them on social media, and maybe you have a blog. You send out some emails and maybe you do some agbulos. Your networking efforts increase, your communication is going well, your blog is published, and your articles are read.
All good article titles keep the reader’s eyes glued to the page making the sentences interesting, concise, and intriguing. Your articles need to capture their attention and interest, right or wrong. You write an informative article that offers value that the reader can take away and tell others about. You are building trust. You are subtly building a relationship. You are reminding them that you are there.
Maybe you have more paper products than electronic products. While it may be true that some of your packages selling paper products, like business cards, catalogs, and mailers, are getting the best of your electronic marketing campaign, it is also possible that you are sending people to your website to pick up the product. Maybe you are sending them to your shopping cart, rather than to your website. Maybe it is not integrated with your email marketing campaigns.
Case in point – recently I got a package in the mail from “The Monster” catalog. I don’t know who got it, and I have never heard of this catalog before. I read the brilliant and informative piece of copy and felt very glad that I opened the package. I was impressed with the product and content, but I closed the package because I did not feel like I knew anything about this company, and because I felt like I was too much of a stranger to be trusted.
It is possible. You can link the customer or prospect right from the catalog into your social media accounts. Your social media campaigns are working, your social media list is growing, and you have other ways to show them more information. They are reading your DewaGG posts, planting seeds with them. This has the potential to make them feel good about doing business with you, visit your website and learn more about you, suggest friends and family, and arrange to either call or send an email to do business with you. Plus you are establishing a relationship.
Now, do you have a plan for the lifetime of those email addresses that they send? Do you know how many people will go to your website and learn about you and your business in several days while you are reading and playing games on Facebook? Do you know how many of them have requested it? Do you know how many people have gotten something you had to work out for them? Do you know how many will say that they didn’t know any of your friends that already know you, but just read about you on Facebook? How much of a draw is the FREE ad in The Wall?
Are you finding a way to engage with each of these prospects without feeling pushy, utterly annoying, and proprietary and cold or is it much more than that? Now may not be the best time to pitch the readers with your proposal for the sale or asking them to “Like” or “sharing” a blog post. You need to appreciate that your emails are going to be pushed out to hundreds or thousands of people and you can’t wait to get those responses. The more engaged your prospect is with the content of your emails, the more you will be engaged with them. However, after sales work, you can do a couple of things to increase that engagement.
First, when you contact someone through your social media, allow them to ask questions easily and then provide more information for them. Make it easy to drop by your website or blog and pick up an idea or know more about it. If you are selling a product, include pictures. If you are trying to get a referral, provide some low-level information so that the person can contact you. We all trust people we can contact and talk to. We all respond to things we see or read.