Re-engage those quiet but qualified leads and win more deals through email marketing

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The path to purchase for our potential customers is long, choppy and unpredictable.

Have you ever bought something more important than a car? If so, you probably appreciated the opportunity to be methodical in your planning, research, and execution, taking things in stages that weren’t necessarily one after the other. You may have spent some time brainstorming what you might need a car for, thinking about your financial means to limit your options (though dreaming of a Ferrari never hurt anyone). Perhaps soon after, over the course of a few days or even weeks, you shopped around, talked to different dealerships, tested alternatives, and negotiated prices. After all, buying a car is a big commitment, and while it may be appealing to show off your shiny new wheels while passing the crowds on taiwanese phone number your way to work, the scale and cost of the decision can impact every step forward. By the way, this is a tedious process and can lead to a very choppy process with frequent switches between “I’ll buy a Toyota,” “I definitely want a BMW,” and “I’ll definitely get a Subaru.”

Salespeople often focus only on the customers in front of them, viewing unengaged qualified customers as losers.

While the buyer's state of mind changes dramatically throughout this process (they are, after all, constantly reacting to new information), every dealer's goals are much shorter and more decisive. The dealer's job is to get your attention by satisfying your desires while you are in his presence, and he uses a variety of well-planned strategies and tactics to achieve this goal. All of these tactics are very effective in the presence of the dealer kingdom, the dealership, but once the prospect walks out the palace doors, especially after several days of no contact, the once-coveted prospect quickly becomes a stranger. This is because dealers are often ill-equipped to move the sale beyond this point, and rarely have a well-established model for extracting value from someone when they do not have immediate and direct control over the prospect's purchase and mood (after all, they have a lot of prospects in their dealerships to work on right now). The new car smell, the sound of the exhaust, the allure of cutting-edge technology, and the lure of potential ownership fade into memory as the buyer's attention moves on to the next sensory experience, which is likely to be the next car on the test list. Competing with more recent memories and with deeper internal reflections about whether these trade-offs are really worth it at all makes this a tough sell.

The potential that lies within your list of unengaged (or otherwise useless) leads is truly enormous.

It turns out that many dealers and many businesses abandon prospects just a few days after they leave the business's immediate presence. After all, a sales team's time is valuable, and the buyers in front of you have much more predictable short-term results. What these businesses don't realize is that they've completely abandoned a truly vast segment of highly qualified prospects who are still in the decision-making process and to whom all options are freely available. This segment represents leads across the spectrum with an inherently uncertain signal-to-noise ratio, from those who never intend to buy, to those who definitely will, to countless others on the fence who could use a nudge. Without any engagement, those "on the fence" can veer in any direction, but with the right messaging, you can turn this uncertain, previously low-value customer segment into a high-value, predictable stream of buyers. Countless companies have had great success in this area with email marketing.

Email marketing is all about re-engaging those qualified but silent leads so that you are always top of mind so that when they are ready to buy, they will look for you.

While it takes some strategic planning, time, and creativity to actually plan and create an email, engaging in email marketing where it hasn’t been before can re-engage a broad segment of your company’s most qualified leads who would otherwise be considered lost. As each of these prospects approaches the end of their typically personal discovery journey, a well-placed reminder can evoke the feelings needed to sway them in the right direction. Re-engage them, rebuild trust, remind them of the value you provide, and captivate them with a relevant experience. For those sitting on the fence, this can mean the difference between defeat and victory. Take a moment to consider how many people have walked through your door in the past (that’s the number of people you can reach) and the absurdly low cost of composing and sending an email, and it’s easy to see why so many organizations have crowned their email marketing programs the king of marketing ROI.

Our ability to motivate and influence what’s important to us is paramount to our success in business. To do this, we must be as relevant, engaging, and most importantly, memorable as often as possible. Whether it’s a newsletter to keep our prospects and customers up to date on what’s happening in our business, an email offer to encourage immediate action, or a targeted campaign to introduce a new relevant product or service, we can be sure that if we do what it takes to stay at the top of their minds when it’s time to buy, that previously lost group of prospects will remember why you deserve their business.