By Spencer X. Smith, AmpliPhi
How many times have you gotten an email with one of these three subject lines?
- “Checking In”
- “Touching Base”
- “Following Up”
I’ve received dozens of emails like this and am guilty of sending a whole bunch of them too.
Think about it: Aren’t these just euphemisms for, “Wanna buy my stuff?”
“What else am I supposed to say?” you might be wondering. The last thing you want is to be forgotten by your prospect.
When we send emails to prospects, wouldn’t it be worth their while if we told them something that is important to them? Important things to prospective customers include cost of ownership, drawbacks to buying what you’re selling, stories of people like them, etc. Since you interact with customers specific to your business all the time, wouldn’t it benefit your potential customers to hear about those experiences?
If we adopt a mindset of sharing ideas instead of just selling things, then our potential customers will actually value the emails we’re sending. Can you see why they’d feel better about you – and more confident about the decision to do business with you – if you’re the one educating them?
Instead of emailing someone to remind them you would like to sell them something, take advantage of the opportunity to provide targeted education by assigning that prospective client to a simple workflow based on their interests. These Digital Assets – which can be articles, blog posts, or other educational material you already have – will allow you to maintain time-of-mind awareness with your prospective clients by sending them relevant educational messages from this asset repository on a regular basis. That’s when your role evolves from one who is pitching a product that helps you to offering a commodity to a valued partner that helps them.
To get started, consider this: What questions are your prospective clients asking you every single day that you’re manually answering via email or phone calls? Distill these frequently asked questions into concise and actionable articles, blog posts or videos. Start writing articles on your website that teach your customers. Use these articles as links to your site in emails you send so you can educate your prospects. Once these customers are on your website, use remarketing/retargeting (i.e. those “creepy” Facebook ads that work so well) technology to show them advertisements or sponsored content on social media and throughout the web.
By offering specific information assets geared at fixing specific problems, you can gauge your prospects’ interests immediately, and not be left guessing what issues they’re facing. Which asset do you create first? Don’t over think it – what question do you hear more than any other? Create that one first – now.
Have you produced education-based material for follow-up purposes? Can you see this working in your business development activities?