6 Foolproof Ways To Win Back Lost Leads

Companies tend to spend large amounts of money to generate leads in sales. However, they’re also guilty of spending money to keep these leads all the way up to the official sale. In fact, recent studies show that 74% of companies spend more than $50 per lead generated, with only 5% of them spending more than $1000.  On the customers’ end, it takes 7 to 13+ touches before they turn into sales-ready leads; however, it’ll take 84 days for leads to turn into opportunities, and 18 days to convert those into deals. But what happens if you lose a lead within that time frame?

Don’t panic! It doesn’t have to be that way! If you get to work on gaining your leads, as well as keeping them, then you won’t have to worry about losing any.

Here are six effective ways you can win back lost leads, and eventually convert them into loyal customers.

Analyze The “Why” And Resolve With “How”

“It’s important to analyze why you lost leads, and then ask yourself how you can fix any problems,” says Lauren Whittaker, a blogger at Best essay writing service UK. “It’s normal to make mistakes when marketing to people. However, you can still learn from your mistakes, and pick yourself back up.”

First, you’ll need to know the “why” – why your current strategy didn’t work. Here are some questions to consider:

• Has your client become hesitant on buying your product or service?
• Did you remember to follow-up on your client?
• Did your client get a better deal from your competitor?
• Did you offer the wrong product or service to your client?
• Did you mislead your client in any way?

“Anything can happen during the sales process,” adds Whittaker. “However, it’s still your responsible to know what went wrong, and how you can prevent yourself from making the same mistakes again.”

With that said, here are possible solutions to the above concerns:

• If your client has pushed the date on making a decision on buying what you have to offer, you can encourage them with a special offer or discount. It’s okay to encourage them, but don’t push too hard.
• Following-up is essential. Although it’s easy to forget to follow-up with customers, be sure to keep in touch with them in any way possible. And, always apologize for any inconveniences that might have delayed your response time.
• If a client is looking to your competitor(s) for better pricing, and or better products/services, try to match that better offer with your own, or offer a discount that comes closest to the competitor’s price.
• Make sure that you offer the right product or service to clients. Don’t ever offer them something that they don’t really need, or else they’ll shut you down on site.
• Be transparent with your clients. Don’t ever hide the truth from them, or else they’ll sense dishonesty. Also, make sure that all the details about your products and services are up-to-date with customers.

Create Actionable Emails

Responding to your customers is essential to your business, especially after people have made a purchase from your site. However, if you’ve lost a lead, it’s especially important to persuade them to stick around. And if you let them leave, then that won’t good on your part, because that’s telling the consumer that you’re not willing to either compromise with them, or offer them something better. Also, if you try to contact them weeks or months later, then your efforts would be in vain, since customers already don’t like slow response times.

Therefore, response time is something to think about, when trying to persuade leads to stay and buy something from you. Response times will determine whether leads can make you successful in a sale, or suffer from the lack of sales. And with the world being a lot busier today than way back when, it’s important to respond to your clients and customers within a short time frame. In fact, a recent study showed that leads are more likely to respond to an email that was sent to them within five minutes of a sales process than an email that was sent out a half-hour into the process.

Sending your leads follow-up messages is easy. Just write a message like “Thank you for contacting us. We’ll check back with you within 24 hours,” and that will ensure your prospective clients and customers that you’re thinking about them.

Give Limited-Time Offers And Or Promotions

Customers love when they can get discounts off the things they want; the same is true for clients – they want a sweet deal. And limited-time offers and promotions can sweeten the deal in many cases, because they create a sense of urgency among your prospective clients.

Here are some ideas on how you can go about sending these rewards to your target audience:

• A simple discount code with a time frame of when recipients can redeem it
• A message saying something like: “only 24 hours left to take advantage of a discount rate on the following products”

With limited-time offers and promotions, leads will make a quick decision and, perhaps, buy something, because who doesn’t want to miss a good deal?

Tweak Your Marketing

With more and more customers turning to social media, laptops, desktops, and mobile apps to getting their shopping done, it’s important to cater to these different avenues to reach these shoppers.

To ensure that you’re reaching more customers with your message, you’ll need an efficient marketing strategy that will help you reach them through multiple channels and devices, and help you take your leads through all the stages in the buying cycle from start to finish. Here are some ways to go through with your marketing strategy:

• Email marketing campaigns
• Facebook Ads
• Trade shows
• Building a link

Another great way to market to your target audience is through drip campaigns, which aim to nurture leads (old and new) through the sales pipeline by having prewritten and auto-generated messages “drip” (or get sent) repeatedly to your leads. As such, these campaigns tend to create high visibility and familiarity with you and your brand through exposure, which nurtures your leads’ trust.

Practice Appropriate Contact Timing and Mode

Timing is crucial when contacting leads, because let’s face it: No one wants to receive a phone call or an email at, say, the middle of the night when people are sleeping. If you try to sell them something when they’re still tired and groggy, chances are they’ll get annoyed and shut you out. And holidays? That’s also a definite no-no. Therefore, try adjusting the time(s) when you connect with your lost leads – alternate when necessary, and stick with the times that work best for both you and your leads.

Also, look at how you’re contacting your leads. Some people prefer to be contacted by phone, while others want you to get a hold of them by email… or they’re okay with a multitude of ways like emailing, texting, calling, etc. Either way, you’ll need to know their contact preferences as you keep in touch with them. Try to have a consist way of contacting leads by alternating between various modes of contacting people – emailing, calling, texting, etc. – without doing so in an obsessive manner to where they start to get annoyed. The last thing you want is to cold call someone who is sick and tired of getting multiple calls from you. As you utilize your strategy correctly, you’ll start seeing leads going back into the sales funnel.

Utilize Digital Signature Technology

Getting signatures used to be finalizing a contract with customers. However, getting physical paperwork signed by hand can take a long time for it to be delivered to the customer, given a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ signed, and then sent back to the reseller either by mail, scanning, or faxing.

Luckily, in today’s world, there’s digital signage, which allows people to sign documents online. Digital signage is beneficial in the following ways:

• Turnaround times are reduced, when people can sign on the spot online.
• Digital signage ensure that you get every signature, leaving none behind.
• Overall sales productivity will increase, as a result from more signatures made on the fly.
• Digital signage ensures better communication between the reseller and merchant.

Nowadays, people are more apt to sign for things online, rather than wait for a paper document or print them. Digital signage allows them to sign right away, thus bettering the response time for both you and consumers.

Conclusion

A lot of times companies make the mistake of not nurturing their leads through the sales funnel from start to finish. Sometimes, companies make the mistake of pressuring clients to buy something and or take action. Don’t let that be your business!

It all takes a conscious effort to communicate with your customers, and to keep that customer-company relationship alive. No matter what you’re selling or offering, you need to keep in touch with leads, or else risk losing them for good.

As you following these six tips above, you’ll not only bring enthusiasm and interest in your leads, but also be able to transform them into loyal customers.