A study by MIT (and other studies) drives home the point of how important it is to follow up with leads immediately. The quicker you can follow up with a lead the better chance you have of turning that lead into a paying customer. A many times over better chance!
When someone calls your business you can answer the phone or quickly call back. But what about inquires from the internet? The same principle applies to your online leads and prospects – the quicker the follow up the better chance you have of turning them into customer. This urgency must be accounted for in your lead generation and SEO strategy.
So what’s the solution? Automated follow up systems. You must have your follow up system already in place with messages pre-written and set up to automatically get sent out to your website leads. The first message should be immediate. People want instant gratification and confirmation that their request was received by your company. The easiest way to do this is with an autoresponder set up on your website. An autoresponder is a service that can send out your pre-written email messages on a schedule that you choose all on autopilot. This guarantees you will follow up with every lead, every time and it will happen quickly – which is so crucial for converting a website lead into a prospect and then into a paying customer.
Automatic follow up systems are no longer restricted to your website. You can have website addresses, QR Codes and text in options printed on all of your marketing material and advertising. This allows you to integrate your offline marketing efforts into your online follow up systems through multi-channel marketing. Imagine having someone opt-in to your automated follow up system from a flyer you handed out at a trade show. Pretty cool.
Having these automated follow up systems in place also allows you to foster trust and good will with your prospects (also called lead nurturing). A well thought out follow up system will also keep you top of mind in your prospects mind. This way when the “not ready to buy now” leads are ready, they will buy from your company and not from your competitors. But they can’t if they don’t remember you! Make sure they do.
Champion Online Marketing, from Folsom, CA helps companies with their Internet marketing and lead generation and SEO in the Sacramento area and nationwide. They help businesses get more traffic to their websites, capture more leads from the internet and then connect and convert those leads into customers. If you’d like to get more information on Champion’s lead generation and done-for-your systems call today.
