How much follow-up is too much follow-up? Should I integrate email marketing into my lead follow-up strategy?
Well, for one of our clients in the home construction business, a simple email automation proved to be quite advantageous.
Allow me to explain…
Our client came to us because they needed more leads. More specifically, they needed more in-person appointments. They were pretty confident with their sales pitch, but they were struggling with getting their pitch in front of enough people.
Their problem was our opportunity.
Out of the gate, we created a nice landing page that included a lead form which would capture a user’s basic contact info. Along with this, we put together a digital ad campaign that would drive traffic to the landing page. These two things alone ended up increasing our client’s lead capture rate by 275% (from 12 leads per month to 45).
Awesome sauce, right?
On the surface, we were producing great results. And, as you can imagine, the client was ecstatic! The increase in lead volume was amazing, however, it alone did not guarantee that these leads would convert to in-person appointments. For us to consider our efforts a “win” we would need to ensure that the leads we were procuring were, in fact, good leads and that they would convert to appointments.
This is where the use of strategic email marketing comes in.
By default, our lead forms would automatically email the office staff when a web lead was captured. That’s great for triggering the office, but it doesn’t do much to engage the lead, so we set up a confirmation email to also send to the user whenever the lead form was completed. This email would contain a basic “thank you for your inquiry” message and provide the lead with additional information about the company and their products, as well as let them know that someone from the office would be reaching out to them soon by phone.
At this point in the process, our efforts (landing page + digital ad campaign + email confirmation) resulted in a 50% increase in leads converting to in-person appointments. Once again, the client was very happy with these results. Who wouldn’t be? However, we still were not convinced that we were maximizing all of the potential that was at our fingertips.
We decided to go a step further and implement an automation workflow that would send a follow-up email 1 week after the user’s initial inquiry. We then scheduled a second follow-up email to send 1 week after that. Finally, we scheduled a third follow-up email to send 1 week after the second email, for a grand total of 3 follow-up emails spanning 3 weeks from the time of inquiry.
After this automation was in place, we discovered that the first follow-up email contributed to an additional 33% increase in lead conversions! The second follow-up email also contributed to another 6% increase. And then, interestingly enough, the third follow-up email, it… well…. it resulted in absolutely nothing. Turns out, in regard to the question of “How much follow-up is too much follow-up?”, I guess in this case, 3 follow-up emails is 1 too many.
Nevertheless, what we learned was that email marketing definitely WORKED at achieving what our client needed – more appointments! Imagine if we had not implemented the first 2 follow-up emails? Our client would have potentially missed out on a 42% increase in lead conversions. In dollar terms, this would have amounted to approximately $25,000+ per month!
That’s a lot of pocket change.
That’s also the power of email marketing.
Would this type of email follow-up work in your sales flow? We realize that how you might use email marketing for your business could be different than the example we’ve given. The results may also be different for you. Regardless, the key is to figure out ways to either funnel your audience to you or, in the case of our client, deepen the level of engagement within the sales process. Without taking the time to consider the impact of something like email marketing, you could be leaving opportunities (aka. money!) on the table.
If you’re wondering if you might be shortchanging your marketing efforts, we’d love to help you explore all your options and possibilities. Give us a call or click the button below to schedule a free consultation!
