The success of each aspiration involves hard work, especially when it comes to sales. It is easy to set your focus on an initial contact and/or the first meeting. You made the effort to reach out to someone important and then feel good about yourself.
You’ve made a pitch, reached out, and you feel good about yourself. Furthermore, you might think that you have done your job and all you must do now is sit around and wait for them to respond.
Here lies a problem – many has no follow-up hustle.
We do get it. You don’t want to be a pain and avoid being annoying at the risk of getting rejected. Most people will make the initial contact and then simply wait around for that person to get back to them. However, this is a completely flawed approach.
The key to do a follow–up is to keep it short and sweet, and yet remain persistent, consistent, but not predictable.
You should introduce yourself, your team, and your company while showing them how you can support them like no one else can.
Follow-up emails will do the following:
- It Engages New Subscribers — And an engaged consumer is one that will keep coming back for more.
- Increases Brand Loyalty — The more loyal a consumer is, the more they will purchase from you and ‘market’ your business via word of mouth.
- Generates Conversions — When creating a successful onboarding sequence, you will be able to increase your deal closures and upsells.
What is a Sales Follow Up?
Obviously, the first point of contact is crucial. There are no second chances in making an excellent first impression.
However, a lot of salespeople and marketers make huge efforts in crafting perfect sales email pitches, hold promising meetings, perhaps even running a fantastic demo, and then make a huge mistake of sitting back and doing nothing.
If you or your team is guilty of this, you might need to perfect your sales follow-ups, be proactive and close that deal.
A sales follow-up is a process that you undertake after you have made your initial pitch, encouraging a prospective customer to act. You might probably think that if a prospect does not reply to your first email, they may simply be not interested in what it is you reached out to them about.
News Flash: It is NOT always true.
Your prospect might still be interested, but is currently in the process of:
- Doing some research about you. Unless they already heard about your company.
- Need further assistance and information during the consideration stage.
- Pitting your offering (products/services) against your competitors or companies similar in your industry.
Why Sales Follow-Ups are important?
Most follow-up emails sent to prospects during this awareness stage are not even ready to talk to a salesperson. Don’t lose heart.
At this stage, you now know how important Email Marketing is, and should be a vital component of your Digital Marketing Strategy. You have already set your foot on the door, so to speak. The purpose of a follow-up is to get the conversation going and keep your prospect excited and follow-up on this engagement.
Only by sending consistent follow-ups can you ensure that you stay on top of mind of potential customers when they are ready to commit and make a purchase or engage your services.
Do note, however, that this does not mean spamming your prospect three times a day with a reminder, but instead, consider sending timely messages that ask killer questions and provide value to them.
The ultimate importance of sales follow-ups is to be able to close the deal. Keeping a constant contact is also a learning experience for you to understand your customer’s desires, and then for you to come up with ways to help them achieve these desires.
A regular follow-up provides customers an avenue to be heard and keeping them engaged effectively. Keeping constant contact also helps your customers keep you in mind. Fact is, existing customers who receive follow-ups are more than likely to go for new offerings than those without.
What is included in sales follow-ups?
One of the biggest follow-up mistakes salespeople and marketers make is not clearly defining the next steps in the process with the prospect.
Let us list down these steps one by one.
Step 1: The first thing you must consider is knowing what kind of follow-up you are going to be sending out. They could be one of the following:
- Cold Sales Follow-Up
- Warm Sales Follow-Up
- Free Trial Follow-Up
- Lead Magnet Opt-In Follow Up
- Product Sale Follow-Up
- Contributor Outreach Follow-Up
- Promotional Outreach Follow-Up
Step 2: You must also identify and clarify the objective of this follow-up series before continuing any further.
You will be able to create a strong Call to Action by clearly stating the purpose of your follow-up series, which makes it easy for your recipient to complete.
Examples of these follow-up series can include:
- Meeting Request
- Additional Information Request
- Online Product/Service Purchase
- Engagement Letter Signed
- Invoice Payment Request
- Feedback Request
- Speaking Contribution Request, etc.
Importance of Email Marketing in Sales Follow-Ups
From the moment when you first begin discussions with a potential new consumer, they are at their most excited stage to get your emails. It is vital to keep this excitement up and take this opportunity to follow-up on this engagement.
To put it simply, a follow-up email is an email sent to someone you have already contacted. Essentially, you are sending this email to ‘FOLLOW UP’ on a conversation or email you sent earlier.
Without follow-up emails, leads may fall by the wayside, squandering time and resources spent on lead generation along with wasting the chance in making sales. A prompt follow-up is a crucial step for maintaining good communication throughout the sales process. Sending follow-up emails are important, simply because they work.
Step 3: Now that you know the type of email follow-up, you’re creating and your purpose (aka CTA); now you need to know how many times and how often you’re going to follow up.
We mentioned earlier that a consistent follow-up is important, but spamming your prospect is out of the question. So how often should you send follow-ups? On average, it takes new consumers from 8 up to 10 touchpoints before they make a purchase.
So how do you connect with someone for up to 10 times without being an annoyance? The sure-fire way is to create a follow-up frequency.
At most, three days in between is the sweet spot before sending out your next follow-up email. A week is way too long. And sending one on the same day, on the other hand, and you’ll appear desperate.
Step 4: Prepare and plan for what ifs.
Uncertainties do happen, and for that reason you need to plan ang have contingencies for what ifs and maybes that could happen. Before creating your emails, it’s time to first understand the process.
To help you through, you need to answer the following questions:
- How would you know if the CTA has been completed? What is your purpose again?
- What would be your next step in the event your CTA has been completed?
- What would be your next step if the CTA does not get completed?
Step 5: Follow-Up Context
These are applied to intents and work together to control conversation flow, so it’s time to delve deeper and plan out your follow-up context. You can do this by answering the following questions to explain what the point is for following up:
- What are you following up on?
- Why are you following it up?
Step 6: Create the Template
Now that you have performed and laid out the above, it’s time to create the layout for each of your email in the series.
- Remind the consumer who you are,
- Remind the consumer what you were last talking about together,
- Remind the consumer why you’re emailing them (your purpose),
- Remind the consumer how you can support them (your CTA),
- Plan for the next step.
Keep in mind that every email in your series should have the same CTA, but each one should serve a different purpose.
You should break each email template down into these 5 aspects and don’t forget to include an introduction, body, and conclusion. Also, don’t forget to include a signature for each email you send.
Step 7: Create the Subject Line
Back in school, we were taught to write our essay introduction after writing our school papers. The same practice must be applied to crafting your emails. It is best practice to write your subject line AFTER the email has been created.
After you have created the templates for your follow-up emails, you need to create the subject lines. Your subject line should be preceded by an opening line, body, closing, and signature, just like in an essay. Once you have done the above, it is time to write a strong and eye-catching subject line that will prompt and entice your customer to open the email
To be more effective, your subject line needs to do the following:
- Accurately describe what is in the email,
- Catch the reader’s eye,
- Leave them wanting more, and
- Create a sense of urgency
Now, take a few minutes to create the subject lines for your follow-up emails.
Find out how email marketing automation best practices benefit your Sales Follow-Up Process and marketing strategy by contacting us at The Growth Manager.
