Lead Follow-Up Objective #3 - Demonstrate Solutions

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The objective of your marketing communications strategy is to generate leads that will become new business. Sometimes that happens quickly, but not often. How do you get the most out of the leads that don’t buy immediately?

In our first post on this subject, we suggested initiating a follow-up communications program to share your knowledge with potential customers. This gives them a no-obligation way to evaluate your thinking and approach. Then in our second post we recommended a methodical plan to highlight your advantages over time.

This time we’ll consider a third objective.

Demonstrating solutions

The fact is, the only reason a prospect considers their vendor options and ultimately makes a change in their product of service choices is because they are trying to find a better solution to an issue they want to solve. So give them some examples of solutions you've developed. Define a problem you were asked to solve. Explain the main development decisions and the resulting strategy. And highlight some of the results. The whole idea here is to eventually demonstrate a range of successful applications of your ideas and skills. Demonstrating solutions gives the prospect more ways to see you as the answer to the challenge they have an urgency to solve today.

Finally, while we don't have a lot of detail about the time-to-conversion or percentage of secondary leads who become hot leads in a particular program, we do have solid evidence to show that a lead that has responded once is much more likely to continue to accept communication and therefore influence than a first-time prospect. And respond at a higher rate as well.

In a program we developed to maintain communications with architects who classified themselves as having "a future interest" in our client's product, we documented initial electronic communications click-through rates ranging from half of one percent to just over one percent. Follow-up communications to those same responses, however, generated click-through rates from 22-39% depending on the content.

That's the whole point right there. To keep a once-responsive secondary prospect interested until something in their situation or your communication raises their urgency of action to a higher level.

Read more about the other two lead follow-up program objectives now.

If you want to talk to someone about a brand follow-up program for your leads, contact us today by e-mail or phone 903-534-5220.