Get Closer To Your Leads: 4 Simple Solutions That Work

If you promise that your products hold all of the secrets your customers ever wanted and that it will make them rich/famous/fabulous/ you name it, you’re doing it wrong.  If you keep telling them that they have to buy your product NOW! NOW! NOW! or else they’ll miss out; you’re doing it wrong.  In general, if you lie, you’re doing it wrong.

Think of about the email lists you’re are part of.  Do those emails engage you?  Do you pay attention to them?  Or are you like a lot of subscribers with regard to digital mailbox clutter – totally uninterested, buy not irritated enough to bother unsubscribing? 

Put yourself in the shoes of your subscribers.

You’re a consumer in addition to being a marketer, you’re the person who’s marketed to and also doing the marketing yourself.  That means you know exactly well what it’s like to be on the other side of the fence.

You probably dislike email marketers who are pushy and disingenuous and you probably don’t like (or are neutral about) the latter because they’re mind-numbingly bland and mean nothing to you as an individual.  So, when you find yourself on the other side of the email control panel, don’t create those kinds of emails.

Do unto others as you’d have them done unto you.

Here’s How You Do It Right

There are two ways to do email right.  One way to a successful email campaign should almost feel like common sense; the other may require you to fight a bit of internal programming.

Let’s deal with the hard one first.  As I mentioned earlier, you should put yourself in the shoes of your subscribers as a guide when you write emails of your own.  If you don’t like receiving emails of a certain kind, don’t send them.

Just be careful of your thought process when putting yourself in the shoes of your subscribers.  Don’t end up being timid when it comes to selling.  If the way most high-pressure folks sell feels bad, you might come to the conclusion that selling of any kind feels bad. 

But you shouldn’t make that the case, as you’ll need to learn the difference if you’re going to effectively use email to reach and engage your customers.

The people on your email list are your leads and customers, and they joined your list because they were interested in your offer.  You must not feel timid about selling to them, and sending them links they can use to buy what they already want to buy.

Don’t feel like you can’t remind them about products they may have missed.  If you fear or are timid about selling, you’re doing your email subscribers a disservice.  They wouldn’t be mad at you if you tell them about your products, but they might get mad at you if you don’t, since that’s exactly why they gave you their email address in the first place.

That’s the first part: You must not fear selling.

The second part is common sense.  If you want to truly connect with your email subscribers, be human.

That’s it.  Once you get the understanding that you need to add selling to the mix, the rest is writing emails like you would to a friend.  No magic.

The best emails are personal, funny, engaging, even vulnerable.  Don’t write your emails like a robot or like you’re writing a formal letter.

The best thing is to be honest, especially when you wonder if you shouldn’t be.  Level with your subscribers.  Shoot straight.  People can smell phony, and appreciate when someone finally delivers straight truth.

Try not to ramble on and on, but don’t be afraid to tell them about something amusing that happened in your life that has nothing to do with your business.  Feel free to be a bit informal.  Email is a very personal media and even if you’re sending the same email to thousands of subscribers, write as though you’re emailing a single person.

Remember the idea is for them to bond with you, not just your products.  Give them some of yourself.

Don’t Be A Stranger

There aren’t any hard or fast rules when it comes to how frequently you send your emails.  But If you rarely email your subscriber list, they’ll start to go “cold”. 

Your subscribers may have opted into your list but if they haven’t heard from you for a long time, they may forget who you are and maybe even mark your emails as SPAM.  Worse, the value of your key online marketing asset will start to decay.

So, it’s essential to keep the relationship warm by staying in touch with your email subscribers.  Since there aren’t any rules when it comes to your frequency of contacting them, you should at least stay in touch with them on a weekly basis.  A lot of marketers would email their list daily or even multiple times a day.

In everything you do when it comes to staying in touch, just ensure when you email, that it’s relevant and builds value.

Offer Them Value

Don’t make it a habit of emailing your list only when you want to sell them something.  Doing business this way will soon get old and they’ll either unsubscribe, ignore your emails or mark you as a spammer.

To keep the relationship healthy, give them value.  Ensure the majority of your emails aren’t sales pitches but something that rather creates value for them.  A good ratio to follow would be to send three value building emails for every sales offer email.

Brand Awareness and Trusted Relationships

Most legitimate prospects don’t lead to immediate purchases, but many will eventually buy.  Without lead nurturing in place to capture and cultivate early stage leads, your marketing funnel will miss valuable opportunities.  But with lead nurturing in place, it will stop viable leads from leaking out of your funnel.

Lead nurturing widens your reach and recaptures opportunities that would have otherwise been missed.

The expression “how you sell me is how you will serve me” is axiomatic wisdom that deserves to be top of your mind when shaping relationships with your customers.  By paying special attention and understanding a customer’s needs and wants during the courting and buying process, leads get to see firsthand how they will be treated later.

Lead nurturing sets the tone for how your leads can expect to be dealt with going forward, and they will conclude “this is the kind of business I want to do business with.”

Buyers make decisions based on emotions and justify it with logic.  Successful lead nurturing identifies buyers needs and provides them with relevant, ongoing information that meets those needs with lead nurturing processes that build an emotional connection throughout the entire sales process.

A crucial aspect of lead nurturing is the ability to provide valuable education and information to prospects up front, on the way to establishing the company as a trusted advisor.  When you enlighten your prospects on the many ways your business will fill their needs, you earn a distinction of being called an expert.  Provide insights and solutions, all within the realm of your expertise, and that’s the reason they will reach out to you first when a need arises.

When your marketing focuses on developing trust and confidence, time is freed up for more valuable pursuits.  And as a trusted advisor, you will discover that you have the upper hand with your customer.  No longer will you have to compete on price, the amount of selling to a customer that trusts you will reduce, you will win more business, and more new business referrals will come your way.