Each visitor to your website is important. Consider that 96% of first-time visitors are not yet ready to make a purchase.
This pinpoints the need to strategize for the long term by ensuring leads are nurtured along the entirety of their journey, and re-engaged along the way in order to guide them towards conversion.
Old leads also fall into this category, which means failing to re-engage leaves the vast majority of your leads on the table.
Long cycle nurturing, the long term method that includes re-engaging, is used by 48% of businesses for their leads. This is because no matter how great a lead might be, most of them require complex sales processes to close over a long period of time. Clearly effort has to be put in regularly to nurture each lead. Rest assured, if you don’t do it, your competitors will.
That said, as a sales manager, you need to train your teams to re-target old leads, and do so effectively. But what should they focus on?
Using the strategies below, your team can re-engage old leads effectively, regardless of what stage of the sales funnel they are in.
5 Tips for Re-Engaging Old Sales Leads
1. Keep Note of Old Conversations & Make Them Feel Important
First and foremost, your team needs to acknowledge that they have spoken with the leads before, and they should focus their current conversations on anything important from past interactions. If they are able, your team should review notes and find something to make the initial form of re-engagement more personable. This will go a long way toward making the old leads feel important.
Being able to pinpoint something such as “When last we spoke you were interested in X, and investigated a few of our solutions, but what are you interested in now?” will show that your team was listening before, but they are now interested in the old lead as a person, not just a statistic.
This translates over to CRM systems and automated email drip campaigns as well. You want to design email threads that address and understand your previous interactions with people in your funnel. This helps to build trust, awareness, and keep them interested until it is time to make a purchase.
2. Send Them Something of Value
When re-engaging, don’t waste time. Get straight to the point and give people value. If old leads see something of value, they might engage more whereas if they see nothing new, nothing of interest, they won’t - and they may even unsubscribe from feeling annoyed or bothered.
It has proven to be beneficial to send old leads some form of high-value content such as a free ebook, webinar, case study, something that displays the value of your offering. By sending them some sort of free value, you accomplish a few very important things in the sales funnel:
- You provide them with proof of the value you can provide
- You can measure their interaction in order to frame the next interaction
- You build trust and brand awareness
- You continue to keep them interested and engaged
3. Get to the Point Quickly
Getting straight to the point goes a long way toward establishing an initial sense of urgency your sales staff has about helping old leads solve their problems. This urgency gets them to act quickly. Re-engagement takes effort, so don’t bore the old leads or turn them off of what you are offering by taking too long to make your point.
Short, quick, witty emails with effective subject lines get the trick done the best. There is a reason that brands spend so much time and money focusing on email marketing - it works! In fact, most companies average about 400% ROI on email marketing over time.
4. Ask Questions & Make Conversation
If old leads do engage, train your staff to ask them questions about what has changed since the last time you spoke, what problems that they are facing, etc… This type of engagement is crucial.
Your team has worked hard to get the lead, to re-engage, but those efforts will be wasted if they don’t gain insight into the problems, pain points, objectives, or demographics of the old leads so that future outreach can be personalized.
5. Experiment With Timing, Delivery, Mediums, Etc…
Timing is everything. In many cases, people simply don’t respond to outreach efforts because they are not on the platform you used, or perhaps that medium did not resonate with them, or the timing of the outreach was off.
You can test these things with some trial and error, changing around the times that you post to specific platforms. Sundays might be a better day than Wednesdays because your leads are at home, relaxing, not overwhelmed in the middle of their workday.
Concurrently, you can test various platforms. Perhaps they did not respond well to outreach on Facebook because they use Facebook for social, not work-related, purposes. Another platform might be all it takes to re-engage effectively.
These are things to interchange in order to be sure that you give your sales team the best chance to get a response, so have them work with platform variety followed by timing followed by platform and timing once more. Test things until a better response is garnered.
Overall, your staff invests a great deal of time and money in acquiring each and every lead. Don’t let those efforts go to waste by allowing old leads to simply fall by the wayside. Re-engage each one using the methods above and watch your sales figures improve.
Want to Get Leads that Are Already Nurtured & Ready to Buy?
At Digital Market Media, we are proud to call ourselves one of the best lead generation services on the market. We provide our clients with high-quality, qualified, scrubbed, compliant, and exclusive leads that are delivered in a highly effective way.
Our mission is to help clients spend more time engaging existing clients and closing new ones, while spending less time and effort in the lead generation process to get even better results. Essentially, we are your scaling medium.
We have agents who focus on re-engaging leads consistently until they are ready to convert, and then delivering them to your agents in real time. This helps improve closing rates, revenue, and give your agents more time to spend doing what they do best - closing.
If you are interested in learning more about how we can help your business improve your lead generation process, give us a call to speak with one of our dedicated agents.
As always, thank you for reading from the entire DMM team! We hope to see you next week :) .
