The digital era has transformed the way we do business. As a business, it is a crucial exercise that Lead Generation be at the forefront of any digital marketing campaign. Gone are the days, where promoting your business means taking out massive newspaper, magazine, TV spots and advertisements or launching a flyer campaign and/or knocking door to door.
These days, marketers can focus on target audiences and research their habits using various analytics software. A great marketer would be able to zero in on who to hit, when and how. A superstar marketer possesses the ability and skills necessary to execute campaigns with extreme precision.
Social media, search engine, and email marketing are synonymous with lead generation. These play a vital role in getting brands noticed, heard, and set the stage for most marketing campaigns you see online today.
But what if a customer/s haven’t abandoned or unsubscribed, but is/are taking too long to decide to engage with you or hasn’t made a purchase yet? What you have is/are Fickle Lead/s or Cold Leads.
What is a Fickle Lead?
Fickle leads are people or organisations who do show an interest in your business but may need a bit more education about your offerings and convince them why they need to engage and do business with you.
They may also be people or businesses who have shown little to no interest in your products and/or services.
However, fickle, or cold leads usually don’t respond easily to all forms of outreach or cold emails, since they don’t know all that much about you or your business. Note that these prospects are not interested in what you are offering, well, not yet anyway.
As a marketer, it is your responsibility to turn the heat up and convert these cold leads into customers over time. You’ll have to start warming these leads up by employing various strategies to convert them into warm leads and continue nurturing them into hot leads that are ready to buy.
Why are Fickle Leads Important?
Fickle or cold leads are a harsh reality in any email list. If someone is on your list and never opened your email, the lead is cold, but not yet lost. You might think that your advertising budgets are best spent on leads that are likeliest to buy from your company. This isn’t usually a good strategy.
Cold or fickle leads are quite important due to the fact they may be a former hot lead. They might have been interacting with you for months and slowly or abruptly transitioned from hot to cold.
Any number of reasons could account for such occurrences, such as:
- You lost their business to a competitor.
- You couldn’t provide clear-cut outlines for your leads to follow during their customer journey.
- The prospect didn’t get the information they needed from you or your website.
It is still possible to rewarm these types of leads, but the best strategy in doing so, is in knowing what turned them cold in the first place.
Every business needs a steady stream of new leads coming in to keep your pipeline filled. If you only focus on and advertise to hot leads, you are essentially neglecting this potential mouth of your sales funnel.
There might come a time when your current batch of hot leads are exhausted, and there will be fewer ones to replace them. This means that gains you have made will eventually decline due to lack of hot new leads.
This is the reason why it is most logical and the best strategy to market or advertise to both cold and hot leads simultaneously. That way, you will not be neglecting any part of your sales funnel and not hurt your bottom line down the road.
How to market to Fickle Leads?
Fickle leads may be people you have already contacted thru cold calls or emails. They might have initially expressed a level of interest in signing up for your email list but have not engaged with you ever since.
So how do you market to fickle leads? Initial contact usually involves a phone call, a text, or an email. It may also be possible that some of your warmer leads may go cold. In cases like these, it is always a good idea to recapture these leads, re-engage with them, and warm them up by:
- Sending them a custom email tailored to your fickle leads. Mention that you noticed that they haven’t read any of your emails and indicate that you are still there to help address their pain points. You may also offer them to opt out of your email list if they do so like. This not only improve your reputation, but also eliminates real cold leads that are no longer worth pursuing.
- Offer your fickle leads something that will pique their interest. You can offer a variety of things such as a discount, free consultation, or information about a new feature that will help them. Highlight these offers in your email subject lines to entice them to open your email.
- Engage your fickle leads on social media. It is not uncommon for leads to respond well to emails. By encouraging them to follow you on social media such as Facebook or Twitter can help you re-engage with them in new ways. This is your opportunity to offer softer types of content, such as market stats and/or testimonials from satisfied clients.
- Focus on relationship building, not sales. Resist the temptation to do a hard sell right away. Most cold or fickle leads are not ready to commit and convert right away. So, your first goal is to forge a relationship and take a closer look and re-examine what it is your cold lead want.
- Upgrade your Call to Actions (CTAs). If you are having a tough time warming your cold leads up, it could be your CTAs need some work. It is also essential to test the performance of different CTAs over time.
Doing this on a consistent basis is the only precise way to know what works for you and what doesn’t. A/B tests can be performed for similar CTAs. Over time, this helps in zeroing in on the CTAs that are most effective for your audience.
Importance of Email Marketing to Fickle Leads.
By using email marketing to fickle leads, a successful email strategy is one where your email is not only read by your prospects, the best part is, you will also receive some replies as part of your campaign.
Even though, cold emailing is mostly used by sales teams to build relationships with prospects, there are many other reasons why you should use this strategy to achieve your goals.
Why, may you ask? Because in many cases, this type of outreach and relationship building works. You simply can’t close off any follow-ups. They are still interested, only that, they are not ready to commit.
What you can do is to put these cold leads into an email marketing contact list and reach out to them at least once a month with the latest value-added offer, typically a blog, that you have available.
How do you do this? You can implement an RSS feed which can easily be created in any email marketing platform, and with the help of automation can be automatically emailed out.
Wrapping up.
So, there you have it. Now you know what Fickle or Cold Leads are. Even though there are numerous templates you can use out there, a personal tone in your emails is still best. Simply put, if you don’t personalise or incentivise your emails, don’t expect to get replies.
Being a good marketer or sales representative is an art that can be taught and learned. And if you would want to learn this valuable skill and practice the art of selling, The Growth Manager has created our Sales Mastery Mentoring Program.
Our 6-session program will impart not just our tested Sales Strategies, but guide through your customer’s Sales Journey. If you are ready to take your lead generation to new heights, get in touch with us today.
