Warm up your incoming leads through automatic emails depending on what they clicked on or downloaded. Send your warm leads to salespeople when it's time to follow up manually.
Why warm up leads before a salesperson calls?
It is important to call leads at the right time. If you call too often and too early (e.g. as soon as they download something from your website), you risk annoying them. But if you call too late, you may lose the customer to a competitor.
By following up with automatic warm-up emails and measuring what leads are doing, you can notify your salespeople as soon as a contact shows that it is in a state where it is open for a call - i.e. a warm lead.
For example, if they look at the pricing page. Or if they read a case study showing how another of your customers solved the same problem they have.
Examples of flows that can process and heat leads
Method one: Short emails with links to relevant resources
The most common method for warming up new leads is to follow up with a series of short emails linking to relevant resources. You don't need anything fancy in the email - just relevant links to other things they might be interested in depending on what they've done on your website before.
Some good ones tend to be links to blog posts about what they have shown interest in, studies on the subject, guides you have on relevant areas, case studies on how other customers have solved similar problems, or if the lead has shown a reasonable amount of interest, even links to your product videos or brochures.
Follow-up emails should not be intrusive, but short and adapted to what your lead has downloaded. Two or three paragraphs are sufficient, with links to other relevant resources.
Case studies are usually a particularly good resource because they are interesting, selling and show you if your lead is hot. People usually read case studies if they are interested in a company's product or service.
You can extend your follow-up cycle to several months if you increase the waiting time between each email. This is especially good if you sell complex products with long sales cycles. If your material is interesting to a potential buyer, not only will you be perceived as helpful, but your contact will often pass on your material to other decision-makers. Several of our clients have shortened their sales cycles by many months using this method alone.
Method two: Long informative emails with deeper content
The second follow-up method for warming up leads is to write long, informative emails. This method is suitable for those who sell information products, such as training courses or workshops.
Then you can break down the information you sell into smaller pieces and educate your contacts over time via email. If you do this well, your email sequence itself can be so valuable that you can use it as a lead magnet. They then opt-in to take part in your email education. Each email teaches a concept. If you really want to go all-in and create value, you can even in each email give the reader homework and offer to give feedback on their homework, or in other ways create interactive elements in your training so that you offer more than just text.
Interactivity can be through feedback from you, or automatically through submissions and assignments on your website.
At FunnelBud, we do just that, as education is a big part of our offering. We have created a fun loop of educational emails that in an interactive way both demonstrates FunnelBud and teaches our methodology with the three marketing processes over a few weeks. During the course of the training, you will see both live demos of how FunnelBud works, and get screenshots and videos from us that show different things that happen on our side when you perform certain things in our emails.
Click below to try it out for yourself! It's completely free and we won't try to sell you on the course, but it shows you different aspects of FunnelBud in an interactive and fun way:
Would you like to try being promoted to?
Want to see how it feels to be marketed to with a Marketing Automation system? Try our automated flow with one email a week for 5 weeks where each email with videos, screenshots and fun exercises shows how the system reacts interactively to your actions.
A good method to standardize your Inbound Marketing.
Want to generate warm leads but not quite sure how to do it? Just follow our proven method below! Based on many customers who have done exactly this, we know it works:
Offer lead magnets on your website that capture leads. Then follow up on these with automatic emails that send more information and relevant case studies. When the lead shows engagement, it's time to follow up.
You can even automate the follow-up email from the responsible salesperson, saving even more time (and making sure things don't fall through the cracks when salespeople are busy).
When the seller receives a reply to "their" email (the one that was sent out automatically), the conversation goes on naturally from there, and the likelihood of a meeting is high!
If you create a number of these"Funnels" and link to them via blog posts and social media posts, you will soon create a stream of traffic to your website, of which about 20% converts to leads and about 10% of these become meetings. In the long run, this will give you more meeting requests than you will be able to handle.
How SharpSpring creates warm leads
Create visual diagrams of automatic sales flows
Use automation to warm up leads
Create personalized follow-up flows that warm up your leads automatically for you. Keep your leads warm long after they convert through long-term lead nurturing such as retargeting ads or newsletters. See when leads visit different pages or click on emails that indicate they are warm.
Mail showing different content to different people
You receive two leads. One has filled in the title "finance manager" while the other has filled in "IT manager". Now, in the follow-up email, you can show the finance person savings opportunities, while the IT manager instead sees improvements your product or service brings to their environment.
Show different email content to different readers
Create a qualification model with lead scoring
See how hot your lead is by looking at the lead score.
Score different actions. See a simple list of all your hot leads. Use the pre-built template for scoring, or modify as you see fit. Reduce scores when leads are inactive so old leads disappear automatically.
Get notified when leads are hot enough to follow up on
Create emails that go to the salesperson who owns the lead that is hot. Send the email when the lead reaches a certain score or when they perform a certain action (e.g. they visit your website after a certain time, look at certain pages, or click on a certain link in an email). See with one click everything the lead has done and follow up with relevant conversations.
Get emails when leads get hot enough
There are a limited number of hours in the day, and it takes a long time to follow up on all the leads you will soon receive. Lead qualification helps you to focus on those leads that have done the right things, filled in the right information (e.g. a specific target group, title or seniority), and also shown interest in learning more.
By automating the process, you can filter the list of leads down to the hottest ones. The rest are automatically followed up via May and given time to read at their own pace. When they are ready, your qualification model will tell you, and then you can follow up.
This makes it easier to keep track of a large number of leads. It's almost like having an army of friendly junior salespeople doing the hard work of keeping in touch with a large number of leads for you, until they want to talk to someone to move on.
Even if you only have a few leads, it's nice to have a couple of follow-up emails sending relevant information that you've shown interest in, rather than being called immediately by a hungry person who wants to sell something.
If you follow up for a few weeks with good, relevant material that you can provide yourself, the call will be much more pleasant when you do call.
Even with a few leads, it is difficult to remember what the lead has done, what you have sent, and what you should send next. It can easily take 15-20 minutes per lead and email, which is a very long time if you only have a few leads per month to follow up on once a month or week. Then it is very helpful that the system does it for you.
Moreover, the results are usually better when you let the system do this job. Because you can analyze what material your leads read and click on, and what is not interesting, and constantly improve your content and flows.
SharpSpring: Marketing Automation & CRM for a low monthly cost
SharpSpring is an easy-to-use cloud solution that helps you get more leads, keep track of your business, and sell more. Complete with advanced features like tracking, lead scoring and automation. We offer it called FunnelBud and help you with setup, customization and setting up automations and business processes at no cost.
Low monthly cost. Everything included. Great support. Don't hesitate to contact us for a demo!
WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SHARPSPRING?
No more complicated systems to integrate. All your contacts in one place. Lots of great features to help you manage both your marketing and sales in one place, with all your company's customer communications in one place. And with low monthly costs and a dedicated FunnelBud specialist to help you, you'll be up and running in no time!