Getting The Most Out of Your Sites “True” Output
Let’s be honest here, what is it that your website really spits out for you at the end of the day?
Contacts, plain and simple.
Doesn’t matter if your visitors bought a product from you, left a message on a form, or called your phone number. The value your website brings is its contacts.
A contact represents someone who is interested in what you do. These people, and their needs, are the first step towards a sale for you and your business.
If you’ve been in business for a while you probably have a couple of sources set up for getting leads for yourself. Such as…
- Chamber Events
- Referrals
- Cold Calling
These sources are great, but what if you could add one more to that list?
- Email Marketing
In my last article, we discussed the importance of a CRM to keep track of your contacts. While having the contacts in your CRM is fantastic, it’s not always entirely efficient to email them one at a time.
This is where email marketing comes into play.
Keeping People Who Are Interested, Interested
Not everybody is ready to buy immediately, regardless it’s really important to keep in contact with them until they are ready to buy.
But wait you might say, “I’ve got so much going on it’s just impossible for me to keep track of all that”.
Understandable.
However, what if with one little habit, you can keep track of these people and keep them engaged with not nearly as much effort as you might think?
The best part is that the effort is the same with 10 contacts as it is with 1000.
Within your CRM, connected to your email marketing platform, you can what’s called “segment” your contact lists.
Everyone who has bought already? That’s a list.
Everyone who has shown interest in what you do, but for now is waiting for the right time? That’s a list too.
Create a little content and after a couple of clicks, you send out an email to everyone who is interested but isn’t ready to buy just yet.
But why email these people who are only interested?
Your Brake Light Goes Out
You know it’s a problem, but it’s not exactly a “priority”.
- Flu season – kids are sick
- Work is driving you really hard right now
- You’ve got a weekly event you spend a lot of your free time planning
Three months pass, and the issue is still not addressed.
You get pulled over and ticketed for your broken brake light. Ouch! Then you pay for it to get fixed.
We all fall into these situations. We know we need something. We intend to get it, but everything else in our lives is pulling us in different directions, too. This delays us from making a decision to take care of it.
This is where TOMA, or top of mind awareness, comes into play.
Let’s rewind time. Imagine that you were subscribed to your local garage’s blog. They regularly post useful tips and send them to you weekly. Do you think you’d be more likely to get any car issues taken care of sooner?
According to the fundamentals of TOMA, yes. With the regular, but HELPFUL (not spammy) content that is sent to you the local garage keeps itself top of mind for you.
This is why you keep engaged with people who are interested. They want it, they just need help keeping you a priority.
A Reminder, With Value
Always give something valuable to your customers with each email. In doing this, you have an honest, welcoming way to keep yourself in the minds of your market.
How do you even get started, you might ask?
There are a couple of solutions out there, such as MailChimp and Constant Contact. MailChimp has a free forever plan, limited only by the number of contacts and emails you can send per month (2,000 and 12,000, respectively), and is a great place to get started.
If you integrate this with your CRM, things, then get REALLY powerful.
In conclusion, leverage your website! Send out a newsletter regularly. For those leads who get away a good fallback is always to get them to sign up for your blog. At the very least if they never buy it keeps you top of mind for a referral.