As long as you follow this one tip, you will never make a mistake that will cost you your business.

Focus on the Lead’s Experience

Make it obvious that you are there for them. It is good to know that you are the best in the business and that you offer spectacular value, but if the customer does not feel you are out for their best interest, they will not care about the other things. Think about companies that you hate dealing with. You probably have thoughts like, “They take forever to return my calls,” “They just try to sell me their most expensive product regardless of my needs,” or, “Their product doesn’t do what they told me it would do.” The reasons for disliking a company aren’t usually based around a negative experience with the service or product, but based around the response you get when you encounter a problem with them. Think about the companies you love. You might have thoughts like, “They offer free shipping on returns,” “I can go into their store and they will help me set up the product,” or, “I am not rushed in my decision to purchase.” The reasons are usually not because their products work all the time every time. When you have a problem with a company you love, they assist in sorting it out. They are there for you. That’s what you have to do for your customers.

Make sure you always do the little things. Send them an email on their birthday. Call them back when you say you will. Find out their needs before you offer a solution. Use your imagination. It is usually the creative small things that stick out in a customer’s mind and that they tell their friends about.

What are some of the small things you do that you think made a big impact on your customers? Share some in the comments!

In my last post I discussed some good goals for your email marketing campaigns. I promised another tip for nurturing the relationships with your subscribers, so let’s jump right in. I said it was important to learn how frequently you should contact your subscribers. But just what do you talk about with them from the very first encounters all the way up to when they have a lot of knowledge about your company and what you do?

Be Honest and Give Them Useful Information

When you first make contact with them, you should treat it just as if you are meeting a new person for the first time. You wouldn’t jump into a conversation with someone you barely know and ask them to go on a Carribean cruise with you. So don’t try to sell them tickets for a cruise or whatever product your business sells. A good idea might be to tell them some good things about Carribean cruises in general. You might link them to some news stories about a related topic. Anything that sparks their interest and gets them thinking. If they sense any effort to sell something, there is a good chance they will be turned off or ignore your email. Explain who you are, what you are involved with, and, most importantly, give them some helpful and honest information.

Once you think your relationship has blossomed beyond the ‘getting to know you’ stage, you can start discussing your products and services. The subscriber will be familiar with your company and it is likely that they will actually want to learn about what you offer. After all, they haven’t unsubscribed, which means they are beginning to trust you! You are becoming their ‘go-to guy’ for your particular service.

How do you know when you should start mentioning products and special offers? You test different campaigns, of course! Set up two different campaigns. In one, don’t mention any products or offers until you have given them some information about what you will eventually offer them. In the other campaign, start mentioning prices and products within the first or second email. You should be able to compare unsubscribe rates, open rates, and conversion rates and determine when the appropriate time is to approach them with a sales effort. Every business’ market is different and you need to learn as much as you can about yours.

Have you made any discoveries about the best steps for approaching a new lead for your business? Share them in the comments!

We’ve all been in a high pressure sales situation as a buyer. And, if you are like me, the only thing you wanted to do was run away!

The most effective salesmen create a relationship with the buyer and give him or her the information necessary to make a smart decision. Salesmen who help in this way usually have buyers pressuring them to sell them the car. Instead of running away, the buyer might say, “I’ve done my research and this is the car for me! I’m ready to buy.”

The same basic rules of selling apply to email marketing as well. The goal of email marketing isn’t to make a sale. It is to build a relationship with your potential customer. A large portion of your sales will not happen right after you send out your email campaigns. They will happen months or years later when a subscriber finally has a need for your product or service. If you have cultivated the relationship properly, that subscriber will immediately think of you and make a purchase.

Obviously, email marketing is much less personal than face-to-face communication. But it doesn’t have to be cold and impersonal. Here is one tip for building a relationship with your subscriber:

Keep in Touch

There is a delicate balance when it comes to the frequency of your messages. If you send too frequently, you risk overloading the subscriber with too much information. If you wait too long between each of your messages, you risk being forgotten. Both situations cause the subscriber to treat you as spam and that’s good for nobody. This balance depends on who is on your list and what you are sending. The best way to tell what works the best is to test different strategies. Set up a weekly campaign and test it against a monthly campaign. I recently tested a weekly campaign that sent a message once a week for eight weeks. 55% of the conversions came after week five. Those subscribers probably wouldn’t have converted had I not kept in touch beyond the first month.

Stay tuned for some more tips on nuturing a relationship with your subscribers. Do you have any clever ideas for keeping in touch with your subscriber list? Let me know in the comments.