Our prospects’ journey toward a purchase is long, punctuated, and unpredictable
Ever purchased anything as important as a car? If you have, you probably appreciated the opportunity to be methodical in your planning, research, and execution, doing things in phases that necessarily didn’t happen back to back. You may have spent some time brainstorming about what you might need the car for, while thinking about your financial capacities to help limit your options (although daydreaming about the Ferrari never hurt anybody). Maybe a short while afterward, over the course of several days or possibly even weeks, you searched for deals, spoke to various dealerships, test drove alternatives, and negotiated prices. Purchasing a car is a serious commitment, after all, and despite the allure of being able to show off your shiny new set of wheels as you pass the crowds on the way to work, the magnitude and cost of the decision can make each step along the way an exhausting affair, and can lead to a very punctuated process with frequent pivots between “I’ll buy the Toyota”, “I definitely want the BMW”, and “I’m surely getting the Subaru”.
Sellers oftentimes focus only on the buyers in front of them, treating unengaged qualified prospects as duds
While the shopper’s state of mind varies greatly throughout this process (they are, after all, constantly reacting to new information), each dealer’s goals are much shorter termed and more resolute. A dealer’s job is to captivate your attention by wooing your desires while you’re in his presence, and he employs a myriad of well-planned strategies and tactics in pursuit of that goal. These tactics are all very effective in the presence of the dealer’s kingdom, the dealership, but once a potential buyer has exited the palace doors, and especially after a few days of no contact, the once coveted potential buyer rapidly transforms into a stranger. This is because dealer are often ill equipped to drive a sale beyond this point, and seldom have a well-established model for extracting value from someone when they aren’t in immediate and direct control of the purchasing journey and prospect’s state of mind (after all, they have plenty of potential customers in their dealership to work on right now). The smell of new car, sound of exhaust, appeal of advanced technology, and the allure of potential ownership fade into memory as the buyer’s attention moves on to the next sensory experience – very likely associated with the next car on the test list. Competing with fresher memories, and with deeper inner reflections about whether these tradeoffs are really even worth it making selling to this group very difficult.
The potential that lies in your list of unengaged (otherwise dud) leads is truly vast
A lot of dealers, and many businesses, it turns out, give up on potential buyers just a few days after they’ve left the immediate presence of the establishment. Sales team time is, after all, valuable, and the buyers in front of you have much more predictable short term outcomes. What these businesses fail to recognize, is that they have completely abandoned a truly vast segment of highly qualified leads that are still traversing the decision-making process, and to whom all options are freely available. This segment represents leads across an entire spectrum with an initially undeterminable signal to noise ratio, from those who never intended to make a purchase, to those who definitely will, to countless others on the fence that could use a push. Without any engagement, those “on the fence” could tip in any direction, but with the right messages, you can turn this uncertain, previously low value segment of customers into a high value, predictable stream of buyers. Countless businesses have found great success executing in this area through email marketing.
Email marketing is about re-engaging these qualified, but quiet leads, keeping you at the tops of their minds, so that when they’re ready to buy, it’s you that they come looking for
While it takes some strategic planning, time, and creativity to actually plan and craft an email, engaging in email marketing where none previously existed can reengage a vast segment of your company’s most qualified leads that would otherwise have been considered lost. As each of these leads approaches the end of their typically personal journey of discovery, a well-positioned reminder can evoke the feelings needed to sway them in your direction. Re-engage, rebuild trust, remind them of the values that that you deliver, and enamor them with a relevant experience. For those fence sitters, it can very well mean the difference between a loss and a win. Take a minute to think about how many people have walked through your door in the past (this is the number of people you can reach), and the absurdly low cost of composing and sending an email, and it becomes immediately apparent why so many organizations crown their email marketing programs as the king of marketing ROI.
Our ability to motivate, and influence that which is important to us, is paramount to our success as a business. To do this, we have to be as relevant, engaging, and most importantly, memorable as often as possible. Whether through a newsletter to keep our leads and customers up to date on the happenings in our business, an email offer to prompt immediacy of action, or a targeted campaign to introduce a new relevant product or service, we can be sure that if we do what it takes to stay at the tops of their minds, when it comes time to make a purchase this previously lost group of leads will remember why you deserve to win their business.
