The Best Marketing Systems for Your Business Needs
In the US, it used to take about 5-7 "touches" with a potential customer to close a sale. However, NOW most businesses find it takes between 9 to 11 "touches"! Wow. (We'll talk more about what the heck a touch is and how to do them. I promise.)
So what's a small product business to do? Follow up.
"Touches" include face-to-face interaction, email reminders, phone calls and promotional material exposure where you express your brand. What you do or say during these times will directly impact your customer relations and sales rates.
So, what does that mean? A "touch" is anytime someone becomes aware of your product or service and understands how they can buy it. Some examples include an outgoing voice message, an email or a company video. Keep in contact with your leads and keep them informed. You can plan and organize every new lead's experience by guiding them through a sales pipeline
Your sales pipeline is the funnel that you guide your leads through from the very first contact where they express interest all the way to becoming a customer and eventually giving you referrals. Within this pipeline, you define where you want them to go and what actions you want them to take. With increasing business and traffic, it is really important to have a way to streamline your sales pipeline. It will make it easier on yourself and your team.
Automation
The best way to streamline this process is to let automation come into play. Automating your sales pipeline will benefit your business by saving you a ton of time and it will also help provide consistency in serving your customers. For every month you are out of contact with a lead or customer, you lose 10% of influence. Simply put, using an automated system keeps you focused on achieving your sales goals in a structured, timely manner.
In today's technologically savvy business world, there are plenty of marketing systems to choose from. You can create and host a variety of video content on the web on sites such as Wistia, YouTube or Animoto. Visual images and video content is very effective in capturing your audience's attention because you can convey your message just by showing a person something about you or your business.
Another option is to take advantage of the many email marketing systems out there. Some of our favorites are AWeber, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact and BombBomb. The interesting thing about BombBomb is that it lets you easily shoot and embed a video right into an email. Automated email sequences or campaigns can be used to deliver newsletters, sales letters, proposals, testimonials, reviews and requests.
Customer Relations Management (CRM)
To take it one step further, you can utilize segmentation of your email list through a customer relations management (CRM) system. CRM systems are neat because they give you the ability to monitor your entire contacts list. These systems can run reports on how often you are in contact with a specific group of people, how you contacted them, what their interests may be and how you met. Differentiate your contacts by splitting them into consumers, retailers, sales representatives, crowdfunding backers and business groups. Infusionsoft, VIPorbit, Ontraport and Insightly are some pretty neat CRM systems that will help you manage segmentation easily.
From my past experience, I find that email marketing along with having a CRM system has allowed us to reach a wide audience easily and effectively. Our clients and customers tend to respond very well to this.
Through integration of a CRM and email system, we were able to better identify unique groups within our contacts list and better serve their needs. Remember to customize and write your emails to resonate with your target audience the best you can. Give them some value and show them how they can continue to interact and do business with you. Enter the conversation and make it your own. Doing so will increase your email open rates and replies whilst decreasing your spam rating.
There is very little progress made if you send out a ton of emails but receive very few responses. Once you have taken the time to properly set up and implement your system, you will be flying through your follow ups!
Our friends over at Zapier wrote a wonderful software comparison article.
Listen in below as we answer questions about follow up systems for product businesses:
I invite you to explore the many marketing systems out there and see which ones are the best for your business. Most of these systems are completely free or have complimentary trial periods and support teams to help you out.
Check out these useful marketing tools below:
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