Category: Business

Recapture Inactive Customers

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Image: Reengaging Customers

A lot of focus in business goes to capturing new customers, but what about previous customers who you already know like your product. It’s common for companies to abandon previous customers when they stop buying or responding. But according to invesp it costs five times as much to attract a new customer, then to keep an existing one.

Recapturing inactive customers isn’t as hard as it would seem. Especially since your chances of selling to previous customers is much higher than capturing new ones.

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With recapturing being cheaper and having a higher success rate, it’s a no brainer that you should be targeting this market. Below you’ll learn some tips and tricks on how you can recapture your inactive customers.

Email Retargeting

What is it? A high-return marketing channel that tailors marketing messages to people who have either shown interest or previously purchased something from you online. Browser cookies keep track of individual visitor’s activity on your site, working to retarget those customers.

After finding and installing the best retargeting software, you’ll upload your inactive users into their own email list to start a campaign just for them. The program will then place ads across the webpages and/or social media sites your inactive customers visit.

You will also want to send emails tailored to inactive customer’s specific needs. Split these customers into categories based on similarities and retarget each group in ways specific to them. Abandoned carts and searches, products viewed, and ones they spent the longest looking at, are a great way to narrow down an email. These methods are more likely to capture the inactive customer’s attention.

As always, take time to go over the data and figure out what emails are getting inactive customer’s attention. Adjust your campaign and always continue to improve it.

Get Personal

Follow-ups are important in keeping your customers active and reenacting inactive customers. After customers make a purchase, follow up with personalized messages that reflect their desires and adds value to their experience. Send a thank you message, highlight uses for the product, suggest items that would go well with the product, etc. to add value while you try to plant yourself in their life.

Use the data you already have on your inactive customers to send them targeted messages. Remind customers of why they chose to buy or visit your site in the first place. Send them suggestions of the products they could repurchase or try for the first time with a discounted offer.

Using geo-targeting you can send specific messages to inactive customers when they are in a specific city, close to the store, on a certain IP address or device ID, through GPS signals, geo-fencing, and more. This strategy will help you deliver the right message at the right time. The location data also helps to define the who and what of your audience. This proves to be effective when targeting consumers who have purchased in the past.

Use customer’s names when sending them messages. The more personalized the message, the higher chances of a customer, past or present, opening and clicking through.

Deep-Linking

You always want to make sure you make it as easy as possible for a customer to take a desired action, especially when wanting a customer to reengage. Deep links are used to send users straight to specific in-app locations. This strategy saves users time and energy from locating a particular page themselves – significantly improving user experience.

Deep links provide a seamless user journey and increase the likelihood of an install and purchase. Creating campaigns using deep linking provides a better user experience, moving them onto your purchasing page in a single click. It drives inactive customers right where you want them to be.

With unresponsive customers, it’s even more important to remove all the obstacles and lead them directly to completing a purchase.

Direct Mail

As digital marketing seems to be the future, direct mail is still here to stay. Direct mail response rates outperform digital channels by a long shot, achieving a 4.7% response rate as compared to a 0.62% response rate for all digital channels combined.

Using targeting and segmentation send unresponsive customers something different. Receiving a gift in the mail is sure to spark inactive customer’s attention. This leads to not only gaining your past customers back but also building up better brand loyalty.

Prospecting Strategies – Infographic

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Many business owners and salespeople dread having to prospect. There are many ineffective and outdated prospecting techniques that people are still using. With the right techniques, your prospecting can guide you to better-qualified leads. Better-qualified leads means higher growth rates.

Hubspot found that in 2020 “the top priority for marketers [was] generating leads.” With an understanding of the strategies involved in prospecting, you can gather and turn high quality leads into clients.

Prospecting Infographic

How to Sell in a B2B Situation

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Business Agreement

B2B sales used to be a lot easier. Businesses would have to reach out and talk to a salesperson who’d pitch them the product or service. However, today’s buyers prefer to conduct research and select what to buy on their own, without any influence from a salesperson.

B2B sales success hinges on your approach. Businesses now do internal research for every buying decision they must make. The growth of the internet makes this task an easier one, one that doesn’t always require information from a salesperson.

Although buyers can easily find information, it isn’t always the right kind of information. Buyers still need salespeople. Because prospects won’t as easily come to salespeople as they use to, salespeople must take new approaches to sell.

Teaching is the new pitching

A big trend at the moment is teaching is the new pitching. Supplying the buyer with valuable information they can use in their business is a big plus for you.

While listening to your prospect’s needs, you should be thinking of different ways to teach them how to solve their issue. Your goal should be to point them in the right direction leading them to tips and tricks within the industry. Show them the best solutions through your blog or social media sites or stats posted on your website. The more you help them out the more loyalty you’re building up for your company.

Teaching doesn’t just involve giving them outside information on how to improve their business, it also involves teaching the prospect about your product. The more the buyer knows about how your product or service can help them, the more likely they’ll be to buy.

Having a basic understanding of the ins and outs of how your product/service works before buying is a huge advantage for buyers. The more they learn from you the less they have to learn on their own. It helps drive investment of time and information in the buyer.

Social Selling is Effective

Social selling is effective in B2B selling. With the overabundant supply of sales and marketing messages buyers see, they are highly skeptical. This skepticism is carried over into their conversations with salespeople. Because of this skepticism, it’s important salespeople help prospects to the path of purchase rather than focusing all their energy on closing the deal.

Sales teams who incorporate social selling into their strategies tend to perform better than those that don’t. Social selling breaks through some of the skepticism. Your presence and interaction with the online community gives your business a better reputation, especially among the younger buyers.

Social selling also allows salespeople to lay out the path to purchase giving buyers a glimpse into how the process would work. The community can then engage, leaving comments, asking questions, and sharing your content. The more you engage online the better reputation you’ll build and the wider of an audience you’ll be able to reach.

Buyers today rely a lot on peer recommendations. Having a social presence that drives consumer comments and interaction is good. People will look to social media and other online channels to learn more about solving their problems and researching your company.

Don’t shy away from talking about the risks involved

Everyone wants to feel confident that they’ve made the right decision for themselves and their growth. It’s the same situation in business to business buying.

Talking about the risks a client perceives is an important step in the buying process. Salespeople should be open to discussing risks. The more a salesperson talks about the risks with their client, the more confidence they can instill in their decision to buy. Without ever talking about it you have no control over how they react to the doubts they have.

B2B buyers are increasingly seeking out ways to identify and reduce risk factors. In identifying the risks involved throughout the process, you can work with your client to reduce and erase risks driving them to a more confident decision to buy.

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Adapting your sales to fit 2021

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Adapting Sales

While we’ve been constantly moving towards a digital world, the pandemic has surely accelerated society’s transition to online buying. With more people working remotely and relying on online buying, it’s time to shift our selling practices towards the new age of online buying and selling.

With this adaption comes some new rules we should follow. Many practices that will be popular in 2021 we’ve already begun doing it’s just a matter of adapting completely to the change to maximize on the new sales age.

Create a Digital Customer Experience

Researching online before buying is becoming a popular thing to do. That means your website needs to be top-notch, supplying consumers with all the information they need to know to decide to buy.

With face-to-face interactions lessening during the pandemic, it’s even more important that your website is set up to give customers a great experience. Your website should be creatively designed to capture visitor’s attention with information that will convince them to engage and buy.

Customers want validation, and your website should be where they go to get it. Online buying is different than in-person buying. Users online want the information they’re seeking to be upfront. This is an advantage for you as you don’t have to use subliminal marketing online. You can be direct with your customers and not turn them away.

People respond to brands that understand their needs. So, you must give users an experience that’s relevant to them and your lifetime value. With comprehensive and compelling messaging, users can gather the information they need.

Most importantly for creating a compelling digital customer experience is being there. Listening to your customers and monitoring how they navigate your website will help you curate your digital customer experience. Try out different landing pages and calls to action to see how your potential and current customers react and direct your website towards that.

With the pandemic moving more people to online buying, it’s all about building connections digitally now.

Use technology to build curated experiences

With creating a digital customer experience it’s important you make it curated to your customers. We’ve already begun to understand the power of personalization to gain consumers’ attention and close more deals. What we need to capitalize on in 2021 is hitting that personalization hard. With digital customer experiences, it’s easy to make this goal a reality.

AI allows us to gain insight into our most valuable customer’s daily lives and understand what they want most. Data and analytics can tell us when and where to engage our customers and how. This technology gives salespeople the ability to use engagement tools that target the best day and time to call someone in each industry. By leaning more heavily on technology salespeople can learn about buyers to develop customer relationships that pay off.

While using this technology to increase sales volume, you have to make sure your messaging is still personal enough to make the customer feel as though the message was made just for them. The sales experience needs to be individually curated for each market and segment of your target audience.

Build connections

With a pause on in-person selling, upping your connection building will be important in the new year. A great way to create value for your buyers is to build a connection with them. However, with online selling, this task becomes more difficult.

A sales rep must now build that connection solely online or over the phone. It’s important that you have the basic principle of doing your research but that you also apply a different approach and adapt for each contact you’re trying to build a connection with. With in person connecting, it’s easy to read a person’s reaction but in shifting to online you’re not as easily notified as to the other person’s reaction to your pitch. This means you need to do a lot more asking and listening. Listen to what they have to say in order to read how they’re taking your pitch. Phrasing your questions and comments better can also help give you the insight you need. Without those physical cues, it’s important to key in on the verbal ones.

In building connections with your customers, you’ll associate great customer experience with your product, something others will be hard-pressed to beat. In doing your research and understanding how you can connect with your client, salespeople can up their game.

Empathize and Understand

This goes for both sales leaders and sales reps. Sales leaders need to understand that sales reps’ jobs just got a heck of a lot harder in some areas. In certain markets, people are buying a lot less. Sales leaders need to embrace empathy and provide personalized, detailed coaching techniques to help get teams back on track and confident.

Once back on track and confident in their selling, sales reps need to empathize with their potential customers. With the pandemic hitting businesses and consumers hard, it’s important sales reps understand each client’s situation and take a different approach to sell.

Don’t be afraid to ask how the pandemic is affecting your customers. You can use this information to craft custom-tailored solutions to their specific challenges. Offering discounts, deals, and delays can help you win the client’s business this time around and even push them to continue to do business with you in the future.

When you help people at their lowest, it builds customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Integrate sales and marketing teams

A major trend for 2021 will be integrating your sales and marketing teams. COVID-19 has driven sales to distance selling forcing us to blur the line between the sales and marketing department. It’s critical in these new times that sales and marketing function as one to create a plan that works towards the overall business goal. You must almost fully integrate these two departments to succeed.

Intertwining every aspect of the two departments will be critical to its success. You must share not only people among that two but also data. Don’t keep sales data and marketing data separate, integrate it into one and even consider making it transparent to everyone on the marketing and sales teams.

Both sides must know the overall goal and the part they play in working together to achieve it by practicing consistent processes. Marketing brings in leads and sales converts and upsells those leads. The two go hand in hand which explains why integrating them into one can drive revenue for your business.

Bringing both departments together should be an easier task than you think. As long as your goals are clearly stated and the basics of how to get there are laid out the two departments won’t have much trouble working together to make selling online a success.

Important takeaway

COVID-19 sped up the shift towards a digital approach to buying and selling. Many haven’t even begun the shift, and therefore the new year is a great time to get started. It can be a whole new world for some, but nothing you can’t learn to tackle. There are many advantages not only for the customer but for you too in switching to or even just adding an online community. Digital transformations are becoming the new selling point.

Finding your niche to start a new business

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Finding what you’re good at is the first step in coming up with a new business idea. You have to understand your accomplishments, skills, vision, and passion before diving in headfirst. We’ve highlighted a few tips to help you discover what your niche is.

Identify your accomplishments

Looking at how you spend your free time and your professional career, write down the accomplishments that you’re most proud of and the activities you’ve enjoyed the most. Making a list of your accomplishments will help you understand what you’re good at, how hard to have to work to reach your specific goals, and where your passion lies.

Finding your skills

Pinpoint Your Skills

After finding your accomplishments, you need to find the skills that got you there. Identify your soft skills versus your hard skills.

    • Hard skills: Skills that are tangible – real or actionable (like being good at basketball)
    • Soft skills: Skills you can’t touch or see (like being a good communicator)

There are several ways to find out what we’re skilled at, such as taking an assessment or asking those around you. Having someone from the outside looking in is important. Where we might not put something on our list because of struggles and personal bias, someone else might add it knowing better than you that you are good at that skill.

Discovering what you already know is a helpful hint into what you’re skilled at. Maybe you already know how to use video software to create high-quality videos. Therefore, you can mark down video editing as a top skill.

Knowing your skills makes it easier to build a business and do meaningful work. The easiest business to start is one with skills we already know we’re good at. Building off your achievements and passions, you can build a solid foundation for a business.

Not having the perfect skills doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t dive into a topic we’ve never fully experienced before. If you have the dedication and the basic skills to accomplish your goals, you can start any business you want.

Know your vision

What are you hoping to accomplish?

    • Champion a cause
    • Transform your hobby, passion, or interest into a business
    • Pursue an opportunity you’ve come across
    • Create something no one has seen before

Have an understanding of what you’re hoping to accomplish. Understanding your vision will not only help you pick the direction of your newfound business, it will also drive the strategies you need to make it happen.

Acknowledge why you’re starting a new business

Acknowledging why you want to start a new business can lead you in the direction you should take. What’s driving you more than anything else?

    • Freedom: Financial freedom, time freedom, freedom to travel and choose
    • Impact: It’s more than making money – it’s more about making an impact and leaving the world in a better place
    • Legacy: Making my mark on the world

The type of business you choose to create is driven by your choice of freedom, impact, or legacy. With freedom, you’re more likely to go with your best skill creating a business off of your already found knowledge that makes you independent as fast as you can. With impact, you’ll choose what you’re most passionate about, even if you haven’t developed all the skills necessary quite yet. Lastly, with legacy, you’ll choose your best accomplishment and start your business based on this. If you’ve already accomplished something great, it’ll be much easier to build off of to leave your mark on the world.

Understanding yourself and your motivations to want to start a new business is key to finding your niche. You can’t build a business based on nothing. Your drive and passion have to lie somewhere. Understanding your personal drive is key.

B2B Strategy – Holiday Style

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Graphic: b2b holiday season

Here comes the Santa Clause of your business sector with goodies for your prospects, customers and business associates. While reaching out to your business prospects during this holiday season, there is more than just sending a Merry Christmas card. In fact, this holiday season, your team should utilize a B2B marketing campaign which cuts across multiple channels.

Rejuvenate Social Media

The canvas of social media platforms is flooded this holiday season but there is always a way to be innovative. Bring out all the raving reviews and video testimonials from your customers and business associates and share them proudly. Over the past year, whatever you have accumulated, splurge on your social media pages of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. Remember that B2B marketing strategies have faired well with prospects trusting recommendations from peers and other businesses.

Tradition Wins

During the holiday, there is always an underlying current of traditions; your team must play along. In your holiday marketing strategy, make sure to have a theme associated with your business sector and stress the application of traditional values in the festive environment. In all your physical and virtual decorations, engagements and reach-outs, local, geographical and social traditions help reach out to fellow businesses.

Reinvent Traditional Ways

In addition to reaching out through the internet, traditional methods are essential in a B2B marketing strategy as well. Your team needs to have a list of business prospects and current contact persons ready and should reach out in a traditional way such as, calling, visiting (although harder in our current times), or even just sending a postcard. Remember, a miss can cost you money in the coming year through unhappy clients who feel as though you don’t value them.

Personalize Your Approach

There is nothing better than developing personal relations over the festive season. Including business prospects while cementing the already made bonds with customers and business associates. It is a proven fact that there develops an emotional and familiar undercurrent of recognition which subconsciously affects your business deals and business relations.

Dive Into Communities

This festive season your team should break the barriers and share on all relevant platforms. Check out all virtual world sites where you can tap into a wide audience of relevant prospects. With your high values content and a commanding leadership tone, your experts can attract all the prospects who frequent such B2B information hubs, which serve their industry and provide solutions to their problem.

Wishes With Gifts

Your Festive Wishes, when sugarcoated with an offer or two will hit the mark. Your team can churn out different goodies you have been offering over the year and repackage them. Offer them as this limited time offer. Anything like an e-book, an expert advise time slot, a free sample or just an upgrade – all work wonders – depending on your business sector. If your business sector is facing a particular crisis or a hiccup, and you have a product or solution to offer, a very limited time offer of it can do wonders to spread the word.

Activate CRM & Funnel

With a year behind you, the time is right to top the funnel and activate a CRM tool (provided free with an Infofree.com subscription). The CRM will definitely play a major role as you move forward and utilize optimized details from your curated prospect lists. Need more prospects to get your CRM and sales funnel started? Check out FreeSalesLeads (free to use) or Salesflower.com (cheap monthly subscription), where business databases have 95% accuracy.

From Foes to Friends

Overall, just relax and take everything in a holiday spirit. If there was any misunderstanding with any customer this is the time of the year to rebuild a stronger relationship. During this festive season, all is forgotten and forgiven, so take advantage and mend any broken bridges.