Not All Leads Are Equal – How To Find The Holy Grail

Rhonda Ridge of Ab Initio and creator of the AdminBase installation management system, talks about the importance of cost-effective lead generation in the current marketplace and explains why targeted e-mail campaigns are so powerful.  

Not all leads are equal – how to find the Holy Grail

Lead generation is always essential but tends to come under more scrutiny when the market is down. Filling the pipeline becomes more difficult and you have to work harder to convert the leads you have. Anyone who works in sales and marketing will know that not all leads are equal in the first place either, they can be cold, warm, or hot leads and it’s the hot leads that are the Holy Grail. Installation companies need hot leads to generate the revenue and profit they need to survive and thrive, because they are more likely to convert them sooner rather than later. Targeted e-mail campaigns are a fantastic way to progress and convert leads, and are hugely cost effective, but they have fallen to the wayside for many businesses that find them difficult to manage. However, there is a way to seamlessly integrate them into the rest of your business – with an integrated management system. 

When you start following up leads, you’ll probably have a range of prospects to target, each with a different likelihood of conversion. Installation companies might for example have a qualified list of homeowners in an area they have worked in before, but who don’t necessarily know who they are. These will be people who haven’t bought from them before, and possibly aren’t even aware they exist. These cold leads are the least likely to be converted. Warm leads meanwhile are the homeowners that are aware of a business and have possibly even considered purchasing something before but haven’t quite made the leap to buy. And then of course, hot leads might be people who have received a recommendation and who are looking for their own home improvements, or someone who has proactively contacted the installation company while researching their next project. 

Every lead is important, especially for installation businesses in the current market, but the more you understand about the lead you’re contacting, the more successful your campaign will be. Regardless of how you get in touch with these prospects, if you can be more specific with your messaging, your communication is more likely to be read. And it’s more likely to be read on an e-mail too. Advertising on social media has become a popular route but you might be surprised to learn that as e-mail usage continues to grow, a recent study by tech marketers Gartner, found that e-mail marketing has suddenly overtaken social media advertising as the most successful way to grow a customer base. 

The Benefits of Targeted E-mail

Improved engagement – When you send any piece of marketing out into the world, your ideal outcome is that someone will respond to it by getting in touch with you. You are more likely to achieve this engagement if you have sent something that directly offers a solution to a current problem or answers a specific question. The better the communication between you and your potential customers, the better your brand recognition, and the more likely they are to buy from you when they’re ready.

Better conversion rate – It stands to reason that the more valuable a piece of information is to someone, the more likely they are to act upon it, so more targeted e-mails will always generate a better response than generic campaigns. 

Increased sales – Of course, if you convert a lead into a customer, it becomes a sale, but how much that sale is worth matters too. It’s worth noting that the revenue generated from e-mail marketing worldwide last year was $10 billion.

Better relationships – If prospects feel like you understand them, they are more likely to be open to building a relationship with you. There is nothing worse than being made to feel like a number in a generic process, so keeping your messages specific helps prospective customers feel like they can trust you. 

What’s In A Message?

Installation companies with a segregated prospect list can contact them with any number of specific messages. Perhaps the most obvious tactic is to create a limited time offer on certain products, but with the right software in place, you can take this one step further and only send the offer to people that have previously shown an interest in those specific products – your hot leads. Other hot leads that installation businesses can target with their messaging might be previous customers. Again, with an easily segregated list, you could contact customers you know were impressed with your service and offer them a reward for recommending you to a friend. Or offer existing customers a discount if they order something else, perhaps a front door to go with their newly installed windows, or a new patio or bi-fold door to extend their home makeover. 

Making Targeted Marketing Easy

Although the benefits of targeted e-mail marketing are clear, a lot of companies still aren’t doing it because managing data can be tricky. Data often needs to be exported from existing databases in the business to an external e-mail marketing package, such as MailChimp, and I know first-hand the nightmare that this can be. There is almost always a snag with the data being imported or exported, unless you go down the time-consuming route of manually entering any updates that come back from the campaign. Luckily, there is an alternative and installation businesses can enjoy all the benefits of targeted e-mails without the hassle, with an all-encompassing installer management system. 

The AdminBase CRM system centralises data in an installation business so that any updates made by any department in the business go into one central database. The database holds customers and prospects, and any updates made to each lead or project is available to all relevant users. This means you can segregate leads by product of interest or by how hot the lead is, i.e. whether they are an existing customer, or have contacted you for more information. This information can then also be used in an add-on facility, AdminBase Campaigns. 

The AdminBase Campaigns feature can send bulk e-mails to contacts in the centralised database, so that there is no need to export and import data to a third-party piece of software. Installation businesses can add their own e-mail campaign designs into the system and send it to customers or prospects directly. And when responses come back in from the campaign, they can be immediately updated into the same system to ensure that all records are kept up to date. An existing customer of the AdminBase Campaigns feature said: “What we particularly love about the AdminBase e-mail marketing tool is that we can target selected customers based on the data recorded within AdminBase so that we can send them the offers for the products they have shown an interest in, meaning we get a great response rate.” 

ROI when it matters

When the market is slower, achieving a return on investment for your lead generation becomes even more important. You need more leads, but you can’t necessarily afford to spend big on expensive promotion tactics. E-mail marketing is a great option, and if you have the infrastructure in place to make it a more targeted programme, as well as the ability to create these campaigns more easily and efficiently and manage the responses that come in as a result, it quickly becomes the obvious choice for generating and converting hot leads.  

Get in contact with our team if you are interested in testing out our services.

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