Your customers are bombarded by a virtual tsunami of messages every day. Inevitably such a torrent will flush out even the important messages, the one’s your customer really wants to remember.
Trying to swim against this digital riptide for both marketer and customer is almost impossible.
If you’re following up a lead, customer enquiry or even sending a communication to a new subscriber it can pay to start the relationship from scratch, all over again.
(Sort of like pretending you’re meeting your wife, hubby or partner for the first time.)
Make Your Customer Feel Special
First of all by starting again the prospect will probably appreciate it. It means you’re making an effort and not taking anything for granted.
Plus, if it was something that a prospect was really interested in, something of potential value to them, but had forgotten, they will be thankful to you for reminding them. And that puts you a lot closer to gaining a customer.
I was reminded of this, this week in two separate incidents.
How to Warm Up Your Cold Calls
Firstly someone rang me up, as a follow up from a business networking event I had been to. I had no idea who this person was, but he was talking as if I did. IE: Too familiar; and you all know how unnerving that can be.
While he was talking I was frantically looking up his Linkedin profile and checking out his company website, but even after that, I still had no recollection of ever meeting him.
So I politely told him that I go to a lot of meetings and asked him which one it was that we had met. In other words I took the time to re-establish the relationship, warm up the call, even though that should have been his task.
Avoid Unrequited Email Love
In the second incident I got an email from a company saying “We hope you find this eBook informative and helpful.”
Firstly there was no eBook attached, secondly I couldn’t remember downloading their eBook. I did vaguely recall the company name, so I trawled thru the hundreds of yesterday’s emails and found where I had subscribed to a download.
However, I had never gotten around to actually downloading the eBook.
But I remembered it was something I was interested in, so I did download it, and discovered it was something that I found valuable.
In both of the above examples the instigators of the conversation were taking something for granted, the relationship.
Most people don’t like being taken for granted. Both interactions could have been handled better with just a little bit more thought and care.
This gets back to the whole point of this post.
Remind, Reintroduce and Re-seduce
Always Remind people of who you are, reintroduce yourself and re-seduce them.
That is, gently tell them how wonderful and valuable your product or service will be to their lives.
In fact, if your product is good enough you could skip the first two and just re-seduce – if they were interested in you the first time they probably will be again, providing you do the work.
