In This Article
– The Dos and Don’ts of Prospect Conversion: Introduction
– Prospect Conversion: The Dos
– Identify Their Pains
– Find Their Interests
– Target and Personalise
– Prospect Conversion: The Don’ts
– Don’t Overload Your Prospects
– Don’t Ignore Them, Either
– Don’t Get Blinded By Vanity Metrics
– The Dos and Don’ts of Prospect Conversion: Conclusion
The Dos and Don’ts of Prospect Conversion: Introduction
Businesses need to build good relationships with prospects in order to turn prospects into buying customers. Therefore, prospect conversion is a strategy that you and your business need to get right. It’s so important to know what helps you to convert your prospects—and what to avoid. With these in mind, you can feel assured that your marketing strategy will appeal to your prospects, increasing your prospect conversion rate.
Prospect Conversion: The Dos
Identify Their Pains
Your most successful marketing gets to the essence of why you’re selling: your prospect has a problem, and you can be the solution. Your whole selling strategy needs to take on this angle—so make sure you have the right information to hand. Give yourself the opportunity to discover the prospect’s pain, for example:
- Interactive instructions, such as polls and quizzes
- Social listening (finding their pains through keywords on social media)
- Verbal questions in sales calls or conversations
- Store their responses in a CRM to build up the bigger picture
The benefit of understanding your prospects in this way is that it’s not just about that final sale; it can inform you on how and why you need to communicate with them. Using a CRM (such as popcorn), you can tag and segment your prospects based on the information you have on them, so you can add them to targeted campaigns. This includes any messaging that might solve your prospect’s pain, positioning you as the solution.
Find Their Interests
What your prospects interact with won’t just tell you what their pain points are; it’ll also tell you what they’re interested in. Following the PRM NOW approach, information about who the prospect is as a person is helpful to you as a business as it allows you to invest in the prospect, and the prospect will appreciate the time and attention. This means your relationship is likely to be deeper and easier to build, meaning you spend less time trying to find the right prospects and more time selling successfully.
To find what their interests are, monitor what topics they’re interacting with, including the examples given in the section above. But also take note of how they’re engaging with your other content too, and note down the parts of your conversation that make them a human as well as another customer acquisition.
Target and Personalise
As mentioned previously, being able to refine your marketing based on what your prospect needs from you can make your marketing strategy hugely effective. Segmentation makes firms 60% more likely to understand customers’ challenges and concerns and 130% more likely to know their intentions. This is also true of applying personalisation to your marketing—for example using their first name in your email marketing: 80% of audiences tend to do business with a brand that personalises their experience with it. (Source: NotifyVisitors) Your prospects appreciate a much more specific experience.
If you have a CRM connected to an email marketing tool, like popcorn’s built-in tool, you’ll easily see the bigger prospecting picture. This is achieved by being able to bring in your contact information segment and target them based on their activity, scoring them as a lead so you can progress them through your sales pipeline all the way to the sale.
Prospect Conversion: The Dos
Don't Overload Your Prospects
You’ll damage your reputation and decrease your chances of a sale if you bombard them with unwanted, irrelevant or even just too frequent marketing. Whether that comes as making too many posts on social media, sending too many emails, or making too many calls; all of these will push away your prospect. To make sure you avoid these mistakes, remember to:
- Regulate your posting; research the best times and frequencies to post on social media and for email marketing
- Give your prospects the opportunity to unsubscribe to your email marketing; you have to do this under GDPR
- Let your prospect tell you how much they want to be contacted—and honour this agreement
- Monitor your unsubscribe rates to see if you’re sending too many emails
Don't Ignore Them, Either
Qualifying a lead as a prospect—especially, those that only want to be contacted in a few months’ time—doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about them anymore. You should still give them the opportunity to interact with your content, whether personalised or not. Not interacting is the #1 way to forget about a prospect and therefore miss out on a potential sale. Here’s what you can do to prevent this:
- Monitor any engagement with your brand
- Encourage engagement with Calls to Action (CTAs)
- Keep in regular contact
- Ask for feedback in a personalised email
If they want to engage, they’ll make an effort. All of this should be plain to see as, by having a CRM, you’ll have eyes on the bigger picture of their activity. Remember, prospects that are interested will engage with you; prospects that are ready to buy will be very visible to your business.
Don't Get Blindside by Vanity Metrics
Your prospect might be opening your emails, and liking your social media posts. That’s always nice. But is that actually a conversation? What do either of you get out of it?
Vanity metrics are indicators of engagement you’ll find in your analyses that look pretty, but don’t actually progress the relationship between you and your prospect. This includes the number of opens you get. Again, having a strong open rate always looks nice. But if no one’s clicking onto where you want them to go, then what’s the point of the email in the first place? Your marketing—and therefore your marketing tools—are awash with these, but what you actually need to keep an eye on is what your prospect’s behaviours are, so you can understand them when they’re ready to buy. Instead of getting taken in by vanity metrics, pay attention to the prospects that:
- Ask questions
- Click on your CTAs
- Undertake a full journey on your website—especially those that go on your pricing pages
The Dos and Don’ts of Prospect Conversion: Conclusion
The best way to understand what your prospects need is to listen to what they’re telling you through their behaviours. Even better, recording these observations every day in a place like a CRM will ensure that you don’t forget them, and you’ll be able to see the bigger picture of how your prospect conversions are going. By making sure your interactions are as informative and as positive as possible, you put yourself in good stead when your prospect becomes ready to buy. Then, you can use all the information you’ve collected previously to deliver a convincing pitch that is personal to them, so you can deliver a sale well earned.
How does popcorn’s email marketing give you insights and reporting that actually matter? You can find out more by clicking here.
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