Ready to re-engage your leads? Let’s talk strategy. There are three steps: Collect leads, re-engage and drive them to an offer, and make it easier to purchase. David Bonney, Carey Ballard, and demand gen specialist Jared Kimball talk about ways to do those three things through low-entry point offers. Got a bunch of small offerings? You can create campaigns to warm your cold leads and close a sale. Have a service-based business with high price tags and find it hard to get people to commit? We have a fix for that.
And watch for episode 34 in two weeks, when we drill down even further into the specific tactics for re-engaging your leads.
Mentioned in this episode:
The Typical vs Perfect Customer Lifecycle
Transcript
Scott Martineau: Hey everybody, it’s Scott Martineau. I just want to introduce what we’re going to be doing in the next few episodes. We’ve had many listeners who have been asking for “hey, give us some more tactical advice, let us know how can we do better at finding leads, closing our sales, creating better relationships with our customer, using automation.” And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to focus on that over the next few episodes and we would love to have your feedback. Our goal is to help you be successful; we want this content to be valuable for you. So please email us at [email protected] and let us know if you like these. Let us know if you’ve got more and if you’ve got specific topics that you want us to cover. Again that is [email protected]. We look forward to hearing your feedback.
David Bonney: Hello, welcome to the Small Business Success podcast. I’m David Bonney.
[0:01:00]
Carey Ballard: And I’m Carey Ballard here today again with our friend Jared Kimball.
David Bonney: Oh, isn’t this a treat.
Carey Ballard: Isn’t it? Two in a row. I hear there’s another one coming after. This is exciting.
David Bonney: Did you hear that?
Carey Ballard: I did.
David Bonney: I heard something similar.
Carey Ballard: Jared’s here because he is our official senior Demand Generation specialist and we’re going to talk about some reengagement campaigns and who better to help with that than the expert in the building?
Jared Kimball: Sure, glad to help.
David Bonney: And just to reframe this guys, coming off the last episode we definitely encourage you to go listen to that so you can get kind of an overview of reengagement itself and why it’s so important in your business and the opportunity that actually exists for you when you execute this type of strategy.
And just to explain what we mean by a strategy; if we take your perfect customer lifecycle, we want to break it down into about eight different chunks. Those eight different chunks are what we consider strategies within your perfect customer lifecycle. And reengaging your unconverted leads is the strategy.
[0:02:00]
David Bonney: Now, underneath that strategy there are different tactics. There are different ways for you to execute on reengaging those unconverted leads and those tactics are going to be really based upon your business model and how you sell. Does that resonate Jared?
Jared Kimball: Yeah it totally makes sense.
Carey Ballard: It makes sense. I want to say quickly for our listeners who haven’t listened to all the podcasts before, can you go into a little bit of what would those eight chunks be for a small business owner. Like I want them to understand the trajectory of a perfect customer lifecycle consists of ideally at the end.
David Bonney: Yeah absolutely. So what we want to do first is we want to collect leads and we want to drive them to an offer. That’s number one. Then number two; and this is not the order of operations by the way, these are just kind of laying these eight out. Secondly, we want to reengage the unconverted leads and drive them to an offer. Third, we want to make it easier for people to purchase. So we reduce our card abandonment rate, increase our conversion after the point of offer, then we want to deliver and wow.
[0:03:00]
David Bonney: We want to make sure we deliver a powerful customer experience that builds trust and loyalty, increases your renewals if that’s your business model or just builds the brand loyalty there so you can more effectively get into the next one which is upsells.
Carey Ballard: Got it.
David Bonney: And then after that you want to be able to generate referrals especially if you’re targeting the right people and you’re brining in the right type of customer; birds of a feather. So for those customers, you want them to bring in more and they’re going to be better customers for you and they’re going to convert higher.
After that, then we get into your marketing calendar. That’s your typical long-term nurturer; that’s where you’re doing your newsletter, your marketing promotions, seasonal promotions.
And last, we talk about traffic; bringing more traffic to the website. One of the reasons why we talk about that last is as you referred to in the last episode Jared, that’s the furthest from the cash and it’s the most expensive and it’s the riskiest.
[0:04:00]
David Bonney: And if we do anything, if we invest there without optimizing every single area of our lifecycle, we’re not going to get the ROI that we need to.
Carey Ballard: Perfect.
David Bonney: So let’s try to get more out of what we’re already doing instead of spending more to get more. That doesn’t help the small business. So those are the eight overarching strategies in terms of how we look at the perfect customer lifecycle.
Carey Ballard: And in the note section, we’re going to include a document that shows what is a typical customer lifecycle and what we’re using as the prefect customer lifecycle for all these lessons that we’re going to be talking about in the next couple of weeks. Thank you for taking a minute to dig into that.
David Bonney: And that document we encourage you guys to go download that because when you look at the typical lifecycle and you match it up against your business, that’s where you’re going to see the holes. That’s where you’re going to see your hemorrhaging leads, your hemorrhaging opportunities. You’re hemorrhaging the opportunity to help more people with the great product or service that you’re bringing to your community. Again, we talk about math all the time when it comes to marketing automation and technology.
Carey Ballard: It’s very helpful when you want dollars right?
[0:05:00]
David Bonney: Yeah, and it’s all very logical if you just fill the holes in your customer lifecycle; if you get them shored up it is only logical that you’re going to get more leads, you’re going to make more money. And if you can do that with automation you’re going to save time doing it.
Carey Ballard: I love it. And make money which is what we’re going to talk about today.
David Bonney: Who doesn’t like to make money?
Carey Ballard: I like to make money and I want to talk about reengagement to make money.
David Bonney: Yes. So Jared, when we talk about reengagement as a strategy, that’s kind of general right? So we have small business owners that are listening to the podcast and they’re thinking okay, but how does this relate to me? How do I look at a reengagement campaign based on my business model, based on how I sell, based on how I do things? How do you think about that?
Jared Kimball: Yeah I’d say that when it comes to reengagement strategies it does depend on the business, right? If you are selling products, then you’re going to have a totally different reengagement strategy than a service based business. It’s just logical and you can even get more nitty-gritty than that if you wanted to.
[0:06:00]
Jared Kimball: But essentially, there are definitely different tactics that you can apply to a different type of business. And not that any business is better than the other or that there’s an extreme difference between the things that you’re offering; it’s a matter of how do you make the connection with those potential customers?
Carey Ballard: Got it, okay. So those are the two main categories. If you’re going to break it down into two segments you’re talking product and services are pretty simple ways to break up.
Jared Kimball: For the most part. There’s a lot of people out there that have different things that they offer and they’re going to feel like they do something differently than that possibly.
David Bonney: You referenced to before when we look at a service there’s also that wrinkle in there when we have that service of an event that we’re offering that might be a little bit different than opposed to a one on one service whether it be you’re a consultant or you’re an electrician or whatever that is, right? So there might be some wrinkles there. So let’s then start with the product.
Jared Kimball: Yeah, totally. Reengaging when it comes to products one of the things that you’re going to look at is what kind of products you are offering.
[0:07:00]
Jared Kimball: Now these products can range, for example, you could be an author, right? You could be a speaker and you have products that you offer. Versus somebody who’s running an ecommerce store so there’s a big difference in the way that you’re going to approach people and how you’re going to reengage them. So it’s a matter of how do you take your products and get them in front of your potential customers to become customers.
David Bonney: That’s interesting because you’re bringing up a model where also what comes to mind is the businesses that do both. Like I provide services but then I’ve also packaged those services into some type of course or a book or something like that and I’m really selling both ways. It’s interesting to think about if we do it both ways, which one do we choose?
Carey Ballard: That’s actually what I was going to ask is how do you choose? Because, we’ve talked about this many times but, the paralysis because there’s too many things to choose from is one of the biggest problem areas that small businesses have.
[0:08:00]
Carey Ballard: So when we’re talking about we chose reengagement because that’s the closest to the cash.
But now we’re deciding between what product to promote in reengagement. How do you solve for that? What would you recommend?
Jared Kimball: Yeah I’d say that it depends on the business but there’s different methodology and a different thought process behind it. Like a very common one is what’s called the essential model. So you start with something that’s low cost and then you slowly upsell. For example, for people to buy your $15.00 book, right? Great thing, but then how do you get them to come to one of your events? And then the next thing would be how do they join your mastermind group or enter your private coaching sessions?
Carey Ballard: So you think a lower bar of entry is probably a great opportunity for reengagement to start with?
Jared Kimball: That is one way to do it. And I say it’s definitely one of the key things when it comes to reengaging a list is how can you get them to get started? But I also know of people that will stick to their guns and have certain goals that they’re trying to hit when it comes to selling products.
[0:09:00]
Jared Kimball: And one of the things they want to focus on is “I’m not going to discount my product, what I’m going to do is I’m going to figure out how to position my product or add more value to it to make it into a much more attractable offer.” And there’s other ways you can do that too.
David Bonney: Yeah and I think that’s one of the things that comes in closest to the cash, right? If you do have a couple of different products but one is maybe newer and it hasn’t been proven to really generate cash for the business right now, you might not want to go to that one. You might want to stick with one of the offerings that you already have; maybe beef it up a little bit. But go with something that’s going to be more proven. Reduce the risk, right? That’s that we’re trying to do here; reduce risk, increase results, probability, actually get the results for the business in a way that you can start to see what’s happening. Like we talked about in a previous episode, we want to start to engage in this so that we can test these offerings and then optimize and start to improve the results.
Carey Ballard: Test being one of the optimal words there. And that’s one of the differences in the way that we look at these strategies.
[0:10:00]
David Bonney: Yeah, so you’ve always got that. And we’ve run tests in the stuff that we’ve done in some of our testing around well, let’s reengage them to an unproven product versus a proven product and time and time again the proven product typically wins. That’s where the brand recognition usually is around, you have more testimonials there, you have more confidence in what you’re selling and the pain points that it solves and the copy is better, right? So you’re already closer there in terms of understanding and being able to create a marketing copy that will convert for that so it’s a great place to start.
And again, with reengagement, we’re talking about low hanging fruit that we’re going to be able to execute on that’s going to start building the momentum; that’s going to start to get this train going.Carey Ballard: So let’s back it up a little bit. I’m a product based business, I realize I’ve got a ton of people coming to my website, I’ve captured a bunch of leads, I’ve closed the leads that I’ve gotten. This campaign is going to be targeted at those who’ve come into my world, given me their information –
[0:11:00]
Carey Ballard: And my strategy is going to be to take a proven product and sell that to that group. Correct?
Jared Kimball: Yeah, that’s basically it.
Carey Ballard: So tell me some of the tactics to make something like that happen?
Jared Kimball: It depends on how you want to position it. So for example, one of the things that you can focus on is you can run some sort of discounted offering so it can have a limited timeframe. So for example, you can take your product, put it on sale which is one way you can position it. Or you can add additional things to it to make it more appealing. And typically that’s something that is timed. Because one of the things that business owners are afraid of is well, if I discount my products then that’s going to cheapen my brand, or it’s going to cheapen the way people come into my funnel. Instead what you can do is say hey, I’ve teamed up with this company or I created this additional offering that you’re going to get as a bonus, limited time, whenever you buy this product during this set timeframe.
[0:12:00]
Carey Ballard: And limited time is a big one actually. That’s a huge driver for people to act on; it’s a huge one. There’s a book by Robert Cialdini who talks about some of the ways to yes and that’s one of the things he talks about quite a bit is having a limited time of engagement is a huge driver for people.
Jared Kimball: It is. Another way to get people reengaged is you can figure out what kind of things can I offer to them? For example, how do I get them on a webinar? Or how do I create some sort of educational piece of content that gets them interested in this product that I’m trying to sell?
Carey Ballard: So this is a step before purchase; you’re trying to reengage their interest in order to drive them to the next step which is purchase.
Jared Kimball: Yeah and it’s kind of a way to get their interest again and you can kind of educate them to where they get to a place of oh, yes, that’s exactly what I wanted. That’s one thing to do.
[0:13:00]
Jared Kimball: I think that if you look at things that are difficult and things that are easy, that’s the thing you want to focus on. Like, what is the easiest thing that I can do to reengage my audience? The time-bound one is probably one of the quickest ways to do it; having some sort of special time-bound offering is quick, it’s easy and normally it doesn’t take a lot of creativity or advanced technology. You just need to be able to send emails essentially.
Carey Ballard: And we like to dig into here’s the tactic we want to go after, here are all the materials that we’re actually going to need to accomplish this. So what are the materials that you think for that low entry point offer you’re going to need to consider to put a program like that together?
Jared Kimball: Basically you’re going to need a couple of emails, so you’ll have to write emails. You’re going to need some sort of either a product page to drive them to or even a landing page or some sort of order form page.
Carey Ballard: Okay.
Jared Kimball: And that’s basically it.
Carey Ballard: So that’s a low entry point?
Jared Kimball: And then you just have to fulfill on it and that’s all you’ve got.
David Bonney: And that planning process is critical, right? So who’s had the seven trip to Home Depot Saturday?
[0:14:00]
Carey Ballard: This last weekend? Yeah.
David Bonney: You want to get that weekend project done, you go to Home Depot at 7:00 AM all charged up, I’ve got the rest of the day and you get home and you forgot something. And then you forget something, right? And so what we’ll do is we actually have a project planning framework document; we’ll put that in the notes so you can download that and utilize it. And what Jared just laid out, that will give you guys the opportunity to really outline what every single thing is that you need across the different assets, across the different content. What tools do you need to consider to really make sure that you have everything flushed out so you’re not going back and forth; you’re not forgetting something. We’re not all great project managers; I’m terrible at it, let’s just be honest and I think everybody in this room knows that. Especially you Carey Ballard.
Carey Ballard: I may or may not. I turn into a project manager every time I work with David.
[Laughing]
David Bonney: Yes, absolutely. And how quickly you –
[0:15:00]
David Bonney: Laughed and confirmed that actually does show the actual terrible level that I’m at as far as that goes. But, I think that’s just kind of natural for a lot of people especially entrepreneurs where we want to move fast, we want to get stuff done. The corporate culture that kind of binds us in processes and rules and we don’t really like that.
Carey Ballard: That’s right.
David Bonney: But if we can use a framework every single time that can kind of force us into a way that can me more empowered there, that can be great. So that will be there for you guys.
Now Jared, you mentioned something before; what if you’re going to reengage your existing list but let’s say the list is six months old. Let’s they they’re older; I think you were talking a little bit about to warm those leads up. What are some specific things that we can do to try to warm those leads up before we drive them into an offer?[0:16:00]
Jared Kimball: So one of the things you can do is you can send an email out and with the email figure out what’s something of high value. High value, I know that’s a convoluted word, right? So you sit down and just break down what are some of the top questions that get? What are some frequently asked questions that I get all the time and how can I take these questions and answer them really in depth and make it to where people feel like wow, you have thoroughly answered that question for me.
David Bonney: Kind of like a tip series. They give you the best tips for the industry.
Jared Kimball: Yeah you can totally do that. Best tips for the industry is one way to do it. That’s a great way to start reengaging a cold list because you’re going to see exactly who’s responding and who’s not. And right then and there you say, okay, whoever is not responding now I’ve got to figure out maybe a different approach.
Carey Ballard: Right, you can try something different and test a new message or something. But those other people you can pull into your second campaign that’s pushing them to an offer. That’s great. So for those who are hot or who have engaged with you recently, go straight to offer.
[0:17:00]
Carey Ballard: Those who are a little bit hanging out on your list for a while, you forgot maybe you had those names around, start with a reengagement education program and then accelerate them to offer after.
Jared Kimball: Yeah that’s definitely one way to do it. If you just sit back and look at your business and say okay, when did they engage with me and what did they engage with? Then based on that information how can I follow that up that just is connected to at least that same type of content.
So for example, if you’re selling, I don’t know, let’s say software and people sign up for a demo or say a free trial and they didn’t convert on the free trial well you can easily follow up with those ones on some sort of special offering that you can give them to convert back into another free trial or extend the free trial. There’s different things you can offer them.
David Bonney: Let’s talk about service businesses. We’ve got a lot of those, right?
[0:18:00]
David Bonney: So we’re not doing a heavy discount on a product, we’re not doing a value out on a product, no limited time seats for an event or webinar. We’ve got a service. How do you look at reengaging a list and driving them towards a consultation or an estimate or a quote or something like that?
Jared Kimball: Yeah, totally. One of the things that if you’re in the service industry and you’re offering some sort of service packaging, you need to look at what is your big service offering? So it’s hard to narrow this down into exactly what your business is because I’m on this podcast and I can’t exactly have a direct conversation with you, but one of the things you can analyze is what are the big packages? Like if you’re a mechanic, right? A big thing is an engine rebuild or a transmission rebuild. What can you do to offer something smaller than that?
So for example, if you are in SEO one of the things I know with some SEO guys that I’ve met in the past, they have packages where they are charging $2,000.00 - $3,000.00 a month –
[0:19:00]
Jared Kimball: And they are trying to get leads into their funnel but a lot of people are like, whoa, $2,000.00 - $3,000.00, that’s a lot of money.
So one of the guys I know what he does is he has a $25.00 package and this $25.00 package is basically he can do a quick promotion and say “hey, I’m going to help you get out on all of the social networks out there, help you set up domain registrations, give you all your logins and passwords. $25.00 and we can help you get that started because that’s just a great way to get a bunch of natural inbound links right to your website.” And then what he does is he says “hey, I’ve finished it, I’ve got the full report and the document I’d like to send it to you and just walk over it with you and just talk to you about it and help you answer any questions you have.” And he uses that as his time to enter into a conversation about his $2,000.00 - $3,000.00 service.
Carey Ballard: That’s a beautiful, comfortable, consultative invite right there. I love that.
[0:20:00]
Jared Kimball: And that’s the thing as a small business owner you’ve got to figure out how can I break a piece off of my big service package and make it into something that’s really valuable and I can easily like, hey, I know I charge this much but you can get this one cool little piece for a much smaller fraction of the price.
David Bonney: And I think there’s something critical that we’ve got to make sure we narrow in on that is when we’re talking about taking our existing thing and splintering something off of it, there shouldn’t be a lot of work with that is what Jared is saying. He’s not saying go spend a bunch of time creating this new product that you can position at a lower – it’s splinter off something that you’re already doing. And with that you can fulfill on it in person so you don’t have to go create anything as well, maybe just a checklist or something. But again, low effort right? Because it’s all about getting it done and the harder it is, the less likely it is that we’re actually going to get it done given all of the hats that we have to wear, given all the things that are going on in your small business.
Carey Ballard: It’s low effort but it’s also high value for the person getting it and that’s where I think is really important about the SEO example is at the end of the day I’m always an advocate for you give them something and it was valuable to them and it made them hungry for more you win. If you miss one of those two sections –
[0:21:00]
David Bonney: They’re super qualified too though right? They like it and they buy your bigger package, they’re going to be a way better customer.
Carey Ballard: But if you leave them hungry for one or the other you’re going to have a problem. So when you evaluate your offer it’s got to be comfortable for them to put that skin on the line, right? Whoever your customer is that they can give you that money, that time, that attention, whatever that is and that they get value for it they’re going to come back. But if you miss one of those a little bit; and that’s where the testing comes, right? That’s where you’ve got to keep testing these types of things. That’s a great example.
David Bonney: And within the testing one of the things that we want to talk about a lot is essential versus enhancing. We talk about that all the time and as we’re driving towards getting towards something created so that we can launch it within a test, right? Let’s say we’ve got a list of 3,000 people and we want to reengage them, let’s run a test to 300.
Carey Ballard: And make that test simple. It doesn’t have to be a video and a podcast and all these other things. Run a simple campaign.
[0:22:00]
David Bonney: What are the essential things that you have to do. There are so many times even I’ve experienced that you record videos, you go through all this painstaking activity to try to create this enhancing feel to what you’re doing because you think it’s going to create better results and then you don’t get anywhere. And you look at the results and you’ve invested a ton of time and energy there so what are the essential things that you need to do within that to get the message out and start to create a few opportunities. It’s not about maximizing your opportunities right off the bat, it’s about getting something in place that starts to generate those opportunities.
Carey Ballard: And some learnings at the time. And funny enough, essentialism and building some of those pieces are what the next podcast is about.
David Bonney: Really?
Carey Ballard: Yes, you teed that up perfectly.
David Bonney: Oh, funny.
Carey Ballard: You might be a project manager at heart after all.
David Bonney: Oh, stop it.
[Laughing]
David Bonney: That does not leave this room.
Carey Ballard: No it doesn’t. Alright well that’s enough for this Small Business Success podcast. Thanks to Jared for joining us as we talk about reengagement and don’t forget to subscribe, rate and share with all your friends.
[0:23:00]
Carey Ballard: And tune in for the next week’s podcast where we talk a little bit more about reengagement, some of the details of these strategies and what the copy and content should consist of for these programs.
[End of Audio]