Greetings Floor Dealers!
In my first installment of this series, I revealed a lead-capture strategy which compels your website visitors to leave their contact information. This is important because you can have hundreds of visitors to your site each month, but without a lead-capture strategy the vast majority will leave and you’ll never hear from them again. (After spending thousands of dollars on a website, pay-per-click, and SEO development, this is the kind of thing that can cause a floor dealer to weep openly and consider a career in organic chicken ranching.) However, by using lead capture, you now have the opportunity to do follow up marketing, which is the topic of this installment.
Okay, let’s assume you’re using the lead-capture strategy from my last column. You’ve got a steady-stream of highly-qualified prospects opting into your site, and you’re no longer crying or considering leaving the flooring industry. What do you do with those leads? Well, if you’re like many dealers, you turn them over to your sales team who proceeds to work diligently at doing what sales teams do best with leads: nothing. Okay, maybe that was a little harsh. Some sales people will do a single follow up call, but that’s usually the extent of it.
The problem with this is that flooring prospects have an incubation period that often lasts weeks or months as they slowly transform from “shoppers” into “buyers.” If you do a single follow up call or send a single email, you won’t be in front of them when they make the switch to “buyer.” In fact, many of them will have forgotten about you completely. The solution is to implement an automated drip-campaign for captured leads. As an example, here’s how a drip-campaign that I created for dealers in Flooring Success Systems works:
Step 1: The prospect opts in for the free report (bait piece), and they receive it via email or instant download.
Step 2: For 30 days they receive a series of sixteen emails; one about every other day. These contain 80% – 90% educational content, with only 10% – 20% of the message being a call to action.
Step 3: If the prospect still hasn’t purchased after 30 days, they get plugged into a long-term delayed-lead nurture campaign where they hear from the dealer about once a week. There they stay until they become buyers, or they opt out.
You can run this campaign manually, but it’s a lot of tedious work and it’s virtually guaranteed that things will start falling through the cracks, and you might feel an odd compulsion to drink more. Not good. The good news is that all of these steps can be fully automated using relatively inexpensive marketing software.
Here are just some of the benefits of this kind of campaign:
• It runs on auto-pilot. The messages go out on time, every time, seven days a week, 365 days a year, even if the dealer is on vacation, asleep, or fighting with their spouse.
• Nothing falls through the cracks.
• Since very few dealers do this (especially the box stores), it creates total differentiation from the competition.
• By using the right kind of educational messages, the dealer is positioned as a Trusted Advisor (and the obvious choice) rather than just another guy hocking floors.
• When the prospect finally makes the switch from “shopper” to “buyer,” the dealer has total top of mind awareness.
The most important thing is not to be boring in your messages. Being boring is the cardinal sin in marketing. Unfortunately, too many floor dealers commit this sin and their marketing efforts suffer. Eliminating “boring” from your marketing is the topic of my next installment.
To Tons Of Customers!
Jim Augustus Armstrong is The “Coach”
Jim Augustus Armstrong is the President of Flooring Success Systems, a program that equips dealers to double their profits, cut their work hours in half and beat the boxes! Many dealers have totally transformed their businesses and their lives for the better after joining Flooring Success Systems.
See what real, live dealers are saying!