How do we engage and have more personal conversations with prospects and clients without overspending, or burning trust with impersonal messaging?
With more competition for attention than ever before, consumers have become really good at screening and ignoring messages. Traditional follow-up that promotes your business and services doesn’t connect anymore. You have to target your messaging to the specific problems and issues that caused leads to identify themselves to you.
Another important factor is the Communication Channel you follow-up with. People’s preferences vary widely — we rarely know the best way to reach someone. And the best way to reach someone may not be the best way to have a conversation. The easier you make communication for a prospect, the more likely they will respond.
A good way to conquer this problem is to provide multiple channels for your lead generation. Email forms can still work, but also running ads with Text Message Marketing or online chat via Facebook Messenger will reach people who find those channels easier.
When you’ve got multiple contact channels, you should try to stay with each lead’s preferred channel as much as possible (i.e. reply to any message using the same channel). While it’s possible to ask to move the conversation to an easier channel for you (like getting on the phone), meeting them where they’re at is more natural for them. It may be easier to move them to a phone call once you’ve built up some trust.
Of course, having all these channels available presents a new challenge — monitoring multiple inboxes. If you’ve got several team members working through different conversations, keeping track of everything can be even more complex. A robust CRM is essential for this, to record conversation history and notify you of new messages.
In our next segment, we’ll talk about technology and automation and how they can help you manage conversations across multiple channels with more consistency and less work.
Our team of digital marketing experts has 23+ years of experience designing effective follow-up strategies, plus technology you can leverage to get more conversations with less effort. To learn more, click the green button below to get started with a free marketing assessment.
