If you want more leads to engage with your brand, you have to adopt a conversational marketing approach. The best way to do this is with email campaigns and targeted messaging. Rather than relying on one-way advertisements, ask your leads questions — or respond to what they’re telling or asking you. This maintains their interest far better than sales promotions, prompting them to learn about who you are, and ultimately closing more deals. Here are a few factors to keep in mind about why this strategy works.
People Already Get “Told” a Lot of Stuff
The Internet is full of ads that are ready to bombard people with reasons about why their companies are the best at what they do because of x, y, and z. That one-way, promotional interaction is often very generic, which makes ads easier to ignore or forget as others continue to replace them. However, if you ask your leads questions with the intent of starting conversations, they’re more likely to be engaged. After all, people love to talk about themselves, so why not give them an outlet to do so with your brand?
Emails Are the Best Ways To Start Conversations
While SmartBrief touches on how social media and chatbots are powerful tools to drive conversational marketing, we’ve seen how email consistently gets through to the right decision-makers. This is especially true when using these types of emails in the following order:
Email 1, Navigational. Ask who the best person is to speak with about a certain topic.
Email 2, Invitational. Once you find the right person, ask them for a phone call.
Email 3, Educational. If that decision-maker isn’t ready to talk, continue to educate them on why you’re relevant to their industry.
As you’ll notice, each step focuses attention on your leads by either asking them questions or offering them information to benefit their operations. This style of marketing breaks the ice and gets through to people without having to deal with traditional gatekeepers and screened phone calls.
Automation Measures Engagement and Lets You Focus on Your Best Leads
Email wouldn’t be nearly as effective as it is today without the ability to automate who’s receiving it, and when it’s being sent. Imagine having to do that process manually by creating and sending the same message to a thousand people… You wouldn’t have time to do much else if that were the case. Plus, you wouldn’t be able to measure the electronic engagement of those leads to know whether a healthy percentage of them were at least opening your emails and clicking on links to your website, even if they weren’t responding.
Don’t be discouraged if a lot of leads don’t respond to your first automated email. That usually takes a few additional email touchpoints. In the meantime, use lead scoring to identify your most engaged leads to contact outside of that automation, either through social media (LinkedIn) or by phone.
Disclaimer: Email Isn’t an Order-Taking Service
One mistake that we’ve seen others make over the years is to look at email as an order-taking service. In other words, they think that if they send out a single campaign, leads will immediately want to buy from them. That’s pretty unlikely for a couple of reasons: a) new leads likely haven’t heard of you, so they need time to trust that you’re a legitimate business; and b) recent concerns with cyber fraud should make them wary of signing any deal over email before speaking with you directly.
Making the Switch
If your team would like guidance on how to adopt a conversational marketing model with its own outreach, let us know. Click the link below to schedule an introductory call.
