Business & Marketing Tip: Following up with leads and relationships

23 February, 2015/0 Comments/in Direct Marketing, Email, Lead Generation, Marketing, Sales /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

A mutually beneficial client winning strategy

Marketing education is a big part of our overall new business strategy. At Creative Agency Secrets we strive to find ways to connect with our potential clients and be a part of their marketing success whether they work with us or not. We hold complimentary marketing management and idea calls, host free marketing seminars, create appraisals for websites and so on. But what makes it all work is our ability to follow up with the people we meet and educate. It’s one of our core lead generation and client winning strategies, and it could work for your business as well.

What following up does for your business

Staying connected develops relationships between you and your prospective clients or friends. This means you build up a network of people who can use your services, direct you to new clients and endorse your work.

Here’s a case study of a sports equipment online retailer we manage marketing activities for called Space Saver Rowing Systems. The client was so impressed with our work that when their manufacturer started looking for marketing assistance, the client directed them to us.

In another example, we worked with Zeald website designers to host a free marketing event. From that connection we gained several new clients, among them – European Auto Spares. We followed up with them individually after the event.

We’ve got loads of these stories and all because we helped our contacts in their endeavours and kept up communications with them. In short, following up with people can net you leads and create a healthy flow of revenue for your business.

Keep the relationship flowing: the different ways we follow up

Meeting summaries for prospective clients – summaries are quite common, usually in the form of a dreary PDF or bullet-pointed word document. Along with that, we like to include anecdotes or a friendly sentence relating to something new we learned about the prospective client from that meeting. This gives those who joined the meeting more reason to read the email and even better, a reason to reply. To the right an example of a regular email following up a business meeting.

Something that we love to include in these that makes all the difference, is a link to one of our helpful blog posts or free eBooks. We look for a related topic in the email, then link a keyword or two and mention it may help. For example, if the email pertains to construction an email campaign, we might link to our cold emails eBook!

Newsletters – if you run a regular newsletter about your personal or company activities, invite your contacts to it. Make sure first that they’ll get something out of your blog posts and focus on explaining that to them. Newsletters don’t only inform, they help keep you and your business in the minds of others. This can make the difference between whether or not they think of you when new work arises. For an example, sign up to our newsletter list and see what you learn.

Related business – categorise your past clients and business friends by business type. This lets you update contacts in different industries on related updates to your activities or information you find. To make the most of this, as soon as you form a new business relationship you should create a related industry update alert via a tool like Google Alerts. This way you’re following the industries most related to your activities and the alerts remind you that you have a connection to that industry. Then you can report any exciting news you find straight to them.

Us? Well, we’ve created our subcontracted services listing for exactly this reason. It’s an activity we do whereby we list all the work we can’t do or isn’t related to our services, and those listings get picked up by other businesses with the right set of skills for the job. It’s a fairly simple information sharing activity but with huge potential impact. As a result, people loves connecting with us.

Follow them – if you keep up to date with the activities of your contacts you can provide more relevant input or updates. This is another exercise making sure you keep your follow ups linked to you with context as opposed to random email drops asking them how they are.

Daily tasks for this would include reading LinkedIn status updates. Weekly or monthly tasks include reading your contacts’ newsletters. One way we keep up with our industries and clients is by setting Google Alerts searching for company names. We also set an event on our Google Calendar that has a list of company websites and blogs to read up on in the description.

In Summary

Be diligent and consistent when you’re following up with people. Sometimes they are busy or skip emails, life gets in the way. Keep trying while not being too aggressive and you’ll grow on the minds of your clients and leads. Change up your approach to be more informative if a friendly nature doesn’t catch their eye. For example, you could direct them to tools or blog posts that will directly improve their way of business or provide them with a new opportunity. We posted up several examples of catch up emails and following leads through email that we’ve written previously to help you on your way.

Many of these ways to follow up with contacts can fit into your day to day activities, especially if you’re a marketing agency like us. If you spot yourself working on something that could help out some of your business contacts, send them an email and keep up to date. But more importantly – keep your business in their minds, and leading with a positive impression.

The blue icons opposite are part of our 8-Step New Business Development Methodology.

Click each icon to find more blog articles on the topic – educate yourself in modern marketing

Email text for freelancer pitching a brand

3 February, 2015/0 Comments/in B2B, Copywriting, Email /by Rebecca Caroe

I am working with a newly freelance graphic designer and am introducing her to possible clients.

This is the email she sent to follow up on one introduction and I just had to edit the text.

An introduction is the MOST favourable way of getting a new business face to face meeting. These folks won’t turn you down, generally. So what was wrong with this message?

Hi

I hope this finds you well and the new year has got off to a good start for you!

I wanted to get in touch with you following Rebecca’s introduction in December last year, as I am now in a position where I am able to provide brand packaging design on a freelance/contract basis.

I’ve attached my CV and portfolio of work with this email. If it suits you, I’d love the opportunity to come in and introduce myself and have a chat. There would be no commitment required, just an opportunity to see if there is a fit between my skills and experience and your company.

Kind regards,

Elements of email to improve

So what was wrong with that message? The first paragraph is fine. The second leads off with the right information in the right order but it uses too many words to make the point. Making it two sentences is punchier.

The mention of the portfolio being very short is deliberate – don’t show everything until you have a commitment to meet. You are more impressive face to face than showing finished work. So just send a taster. Select products that align with the recipient’s likely needs.

Then move onto a focus on them – talk masculine words like ‘investment’ and ‘role of design’ – philosophise a bit – you learn a lot about their attitude to good design if you can find these things out in a meeting. And that will inform your likely future work more than just showing a portfolio – discuss how design can help them achieve their business objectives.

Email introductions that get meetings

Here’s my suggestion of a re-draft of the email which may get better result outcomes.

I hope this finds you well and the new year has got off to a good start for you!

We were introduced by Rebecca in December last year, and you said I should “get in touch in the new year”.

I am now providing brand packaging design on a freelance/contract basis.

I’ve attached my CV and a very short portfolio of work with this email

Understanding XYZ’s business is very important if you are to consider working with me. And so I would like to invest my time learning more about your products, markets and the role of design.

Can we meet during the week of 15th February?

I will call you on (name date) to discuss fixing a date and time to suit you.

Kind regards,

So, can you see what I’ve done with the text? I removed all the “maybe” and “if it suits you” and “no obligation” words. These are very cautious.

You are good at your job, you will not be wasting their time meeting you. Sound and communicate your confidence that you are the best thing that’s happened to them and that you will help them achieve their business objectives.

Let me know if you try both which comes out best!

Cluetrain has New Clues – time for newbies to read the original!

27 January, 2015/0 Comments/in Advertising, B2B, B2C, Blogging, Branding, Content Marketing, Digital media, Direct Marketing, Email, Marketing ideas, Metrics, Sales, Social Media, Strategy /by Rebecca Caroe

I listened to the FIR podcast #790 and found that Cluetrain has been updated!

Cluetrain Original

New Clues published in January and numbers 52-67 apply to our marketing communications world in particular. [see below]

Oh, and also pay attention to number 100

You want to know what to buy? The business that makes an object of desire is now the worst source of information about it. The best source is all of us.

It will be hard to adhere to them – because marketers are busy fouling their own nest, much as we did with banner adverts, SEO and oh-so-many other internet tools which we over-exploited so the makers ended up changing the rules to exclude our actions.

Seems to me ever more of a message about the quality of content, ease of discovery and honesty of presentation.

Your marketing strategy for 2015

If your marketing strategy for this year even remotely resembles what you did for the past 5 years tear it up. Forget it. The businesses who will thrive understand Cluetrain, they present their wares at least in part in a Cluetrain-format and will reap the $$ rewards accordingly.

Just call us if you think you want to change and don’t know how.

Rant over.

Now, what do you think?

I’m going to get my whole team to read Cluetrain original next week as their homework!

New Clues for Marketers

The New Clues that directly relate to the practice of marketing. Numbered from the original. Read more

Email marketing subject line recommendations

8 January, 2015/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Case Studies, Direct Marketing, Email /by Rebecca Caroe

This week has been spent writing direct response emails for client campaigns.

And so it was delightful to receive one which has a really awesome subject line. You may want to emulate it.

Direct mail subject line text

What a timely question! This week I am doing the business planning for Creative Agency secrets during 2015. And so yes, the beginnings of my 2015 lead generation is now in place.

But it may not be for you!

Here are three more subject lines I’ve used this week

Subject: Ride the escalator to business success; don’t climb the stairs
Subject: You can run your business the way you always have….
Subject: Closing the loop

The last one is particularly effective for getting decisions from prospects and pushing them into buying.

Ask me about it….

Do you need help writing direct response emails?

Download our e-book on Writing direct response emails. It covers a range of scenarios from cold emails to driving sales and includes samples which you can use and adapt.

The blue icons opposite are part of our 8-Step New Business Development Methodology.

Click each icon to find more blog articles on the topic – educate yourself in modern marketing

Below you’ll find the full text of Mark’s email and the event he and David Baker are promoting.

Autoresponders Email Marketing – A Good Example

12 December, 2014/0 Comments/in Email, Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

We recently visited GetSpokal.Com and were pleasantly surprised when we received 3 spaced apart automated emails after signing up to their newsletter.

This is a brilliant example to show you Autoresponder Email Marketing done right.

Not to mention their service description landing page is magnificent. Here are the autoresponders we received…

Autoresponder Email 1: intro and thank you

Hi Rebecca,

I was just browsing the web and came across Creative Agency Secrets’ site. I’m a bit of a marketing nerd, so love to look and compare the strategies of different inbound marketing agencies – I actually think it’s fun! What you and your team are doing with Creative Agency Secrets looks really interesting.

I wanted to reach out to you today, because my company, www.getspokal.com helps agencies like yours manage their inbound marketing strategies quickly and more efficiently.

It’s kind of like HubSpot but at a much more affordable price point, and integrates seamlessly with WordPress.

First off, I’d like to invite you and your team to a free 14 day trial of Spokal to get a feel for how it works and how it can help your inbound marketing strategies.

If you like Spokal, and want to start using it for your clients, we also have an agency program where you can earn a 30% commission on all client accounts you manage. So not only does your work with clients become easier, it becomes more profitable too.

To set up a trial account and get familiar with our platform, just head over to www.getspokal.com/free-trial. If you like what you see, I’ll personally help you get set up on agency program so you can start using Spokal with your clients.

If you have any questions at all about our platform or agency program, just reply back to this email and I’ll be in touch as soon as possible.

Thanks,
————–
Chris Mack
Co-Founder & CEO
Spokal
1 888 470 5990

Autoresponer Email 2: service description and offerings

Hi Rebecca,

I just wanted to follow up with you to see if you received my previous email. I think Spokal would make a great fit for your agency, both for your internal use and for your clients.

I’d love to invite you to a free trial of Spokal at www.getspokal.com/free-trial and if you like what you see, we can get you set up on an agency plan where you earn 30% back for all of your clients who you manage while using Spokal.

Just reply back here if you have any questions.

Thanks,
————–
Chris Mack
Co-Founder & CEO
Spokal
1 888 470 5990

Autorseponder Email 3: reminder and farewell

Hi Rebecca,

I just wanted to send one last email to make sure my emails weren’t missing your inbox.

Your agency looks like a great fit for what Spokal offers – a full-fledged marketing automation solution for WordPress.

Would you like to give Spokal a spin for a free 14 day trial? If so, just head over to www.getspokal.com/free-trial and sign up for our free trial. I’m sure you’ll like what you see, and if you want to get your clients set up on Spokal, you can earn 30% back in commission as an agency. Just like that, your client work becomes more efficient and more profitable.

Just hit reply if you have any questions and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Thanks,
————–
Chris Mack
Co-Founder & CEO
Spokal
1 888 470 5990

Teach yourself how to use Autoresponders.

They can be an effective weapon in your marketing arsenal

Buy a training programme!

Includes E-book, Workshop video and Workshop powerpoint slides.

FREE eBook: Cold Emails – Doing it right and netting yourself leads

12 November, 2014/0 Comments/in B2B, B2C, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Direct Marketing, Email, Marketing, Sales /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Email is a vital tool to growing your business. It’s non-invasive, interactive, and most of all – integral to business communications, so often get noticed.

One way to use email is through cold emailing, which is emailing to people you don’t know. It can come across as underhanded, but when done correctly it’s a marketing practice that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Find out about cold emails and how to write them in our free eBook…

Cold Emails – Doing it right and netting yourself leads

In this eBook, we’ll go through how to:

Write cold emails that encourage a response.
Tailor your cold emails to the right clients.
Personalise cold emails.

Looking for more insight on how to build great email campaigns, and sell directly to your audience? Contact Us!

Christmas Campaigns That Shine

7 November, 2014/0 Comments/in Advertising, Branding, Direct Marketing, Email, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Sales, Social Media /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Christmas campaigns may seem like a gimmick, but they work. That’s because it’s a time of year where people are looking to buy and as a result, customers are far more communicative.

Hellmann’s Christmas Advert

Look reactionary by planning early

Planning early has many benefits. For example, you don’t want to get a campaign stopped behind bureaucratic doors and miss your chance to launch it at the best of times. If your campaigns are pre-approved you won’t miss those good opportunities to launch them when they come by.

Nothing says “viral campaign” like a relevant one that comes out as soon as a meme starts. Start planning your campaigns early, and plan multiple variations for different situations. Then all you need to do is keep your finger on the pulse throughout the run-up to Christmas period and unleash your chosen campaign when the best opportunity arises.

Here’re a few campaign ideas:

Relevant product promos – promo your 2015 calendar when advent calendars start getting popular.
“Still time to buy” reminders – customers often rush for purchases just 1 week before Christmas, so a little timely reminder can go a long way.
Discount codes & free delivery – while most common of Christmas campaigns, a time-liimited discount campaign is often short and sweet enough to catch more attention.
Extended returns period – take the “giving mood” approach and develop a relationship with your customers.

One things for sure, each campaign must decide on a clear goal. Review previous campaigns, check their strengths and weaknesses, then carefully plan out how you’ll support your campaign goals through action.

Focus on increasing dialogue with customers (not necessarily hard sales)

Christmas is a great time to develop customer relationships as well as just push sales. Use the increase of inbox opens and social media interactions to build your email lists and get more in touch with your customers. Outside of capturing emails you could also push feedback forms and surveys to capture behavioural data which can improve all your 2015 campaigns as well.

You could:

Simply wish Merry Christmas via email or pop-up box.
Run social media competitions that require email opt-ins, but instantly give a discount when a customer enters.
Re-engage with past buyers by offering them something special for doing business with you again.
Have fun and test out marketing platforms you wouldn’t normally use, potentially opening your exposure up to a whole new crowd.

Offer something DIFFERENT

Make an impact and stand out from the crowd by doing something different. Implementing a wishlist on your website (EXTRA: can use data for targeted mailing!), personalising your promotions and running some exciting social media competitions are a few ways to have your company look both professional, and interested in its customers.

The question you need to ask yourself now is – “what’s the best Christmas campaign for my business”?

7 steps for creating your Christmas marketing campaigns

STEP 1: Collect and assess behavioural data from past campaigns.

This should be as straight forward as going into a database and looking through campaign statistics. If you’re not doing this already, a simple excel spreadsheet and recording past campaign data should be your next course of action!

STEP 2: Think of 5 opportunities/ circumstances for sending campaigns.

These opportunities should be periods around Christmas (start of advent calendars, last week before Christmas, etc). Try to find opportunities that can easily be related to what you offer as a company.

STEP 3: Write up these campaigns.

Carefully plan out each campaign with action lists and then make sure you’ve got the content ready to go for each action.

STEP 4: Schedule campaigns that can be scheduled.

If your campaign is time dependent, schedule it and make an alert to remind you when it goes out. Once it is live, you should still have to take action (such as sharing your campaign via social media), so have that ready.

STEP 5: Create daily Google Alerts for topics that the remaining campaigns can react to.

If you’ve created some reactionary campaigns for the holidays, make sure you’ve got ways of identifying when they can best be activated. We use Google Alerts to track conversations so that we can react to them, and it’s a great way for looking for that perfect campaign launch opportunity.

STEP 7: Recap on all campaigns (analytics and assessment).

Once is all said and done, sit down and have a good look at the results of each campaign and how they went. This is very important as it will help you create more successful campaigns for the future!

Looking for fresh ideas and assistance on your Christmas marketing?

Drop us an email and we’ll be happy to brainstorm ideas for you!

Long copy email as a sales tool – example

7 October, 2014/0 Comments/in B2B, Direct Marketing, Email /by Rebecca Caroe

Writing long emails

Writing and reading long emails [Image credit ContactMonkey.com]

There are people who do not favour writing long messages, yet there are others who buck the trend to compress and shorten messages. Because they have a beautiful writing style they “get away” with long messages.

I often read these.

David Baker runs ReCourses – a service advising owners how to run their marketing agency as a better business.
Read this example.
Hi Rebecca,
I came across this interesting statement recently:

“Incorporating interactive can move your firm upstream strategically, especially if you understand that interactive work is really database marketing reborn. Providing [prospects] with interactive opportunities is tantamount to allowing them to emerge incognito from the protected castle to sample the promises before they lower the drawbridge again. In this [case] the consumer has initiated and then defined the sales context. And as a potential buyer he is far more likely to buy because he has reestablished control, first by learning more in an environment where he controls the shape and pacing of the information, and then by giving [you the] permission to sell to him.”

The concepts are important, of course, but what’s most interesting is that it was written in April, 2000, nearly fourteen years ago. I wrote it in an article for Persuading, trying to help agencies like yours understand how digital work should fit within the marketing mix.

There was some real enthusiasm in writing that, largely from the promise that the internet would provide a new era in marketing. It didn’t fulfill that promise, really, as privacy concerns, inept agencies, and lousy UI dominated the lack of innovation.
Enter marketing automation technology (MAT), though, and the internet is finally delivering on its promises. This is especially true in the marketing of professional services, where decisions are more considered and where authenticity and truth can be established via thought leadership content.
While the wait has been lengthy, the pace of recent developments has far exceeded what we have come to expect. MAT is a milestone that will honestly change every single thing about selling your services:
You can establish a funnel to define the most likely path to hiring you.
You can develop the tools to bump leads to the next stage in the funnel.
Prospects will be fully aware of your abilities, your remuneration, and what you won’t do. In the process of discovering that, prospects will self-select themselves out of the running so that you avoid the biggest danger in business development: dating prospects that are not marriagable.
Best of all, it changes the equation from pushing to pulling.
The amazing thing is that—no matter how good you are at selling—if you are in front of a prospect that has already taken the safety chain off the door and invited you in, you can sell. Yes, you can sell. What you hate about selling is trying to convince a prospect that they need you. No more. MAT has changed that for you.
There is so much to learn about this and I hope you will join us in Chicago on March 6 for a packed day of learning MAT, both for yourself as an agency and in your work as an agency for clients.
David C. Baker
ReCourses®, Inc.

Why is this long email effective?

Deconstructing this email the method David uses is this:

Open with a statement (the quote)
then challenge my understanding by explaining it’s over 14 years old!
explain its relevance today
Bullet point list of benefits [not features] of the technology
Give reassurance of the ‘amazing’ outcomes available to users
End with an invitation to buy from him

So that’s a series of subjects that you can use for your next email (whether to a cold introduction or a luke-warm prospect).

A note on subject lines for cold email

2 October, 2014/0 Comments/in Copywriting, Email, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

I am subscribed to get emails from Nick Johnson from Incite. His copywriting is exemplary and I regularly find myself wanting to take the actions he requests.

Look at this picture taken from my in box of recent messages I’ve received from Incite.

Cold email subject lines

Did you notice that few of the subject lines actually say what’s in the message. So if I want to know what it’s about I HAVE to open the email.

some of the message subjects aren’t written with capital letters – makes it look like Nick wrote it quickly and forgot – but it’s more a feature of personal email not mass email and so I think this is clever, if used occasionally.

They clearly experiment with subject lines – one of them is a ‘Newsletter’ and is titled as such, but the content of many of them could be classified as news.

I have highlighted two parts because they show best practice.

The Red box surrounds subject lines in which they’ve included my name. It feels like it was written just for me – but I know it’s just a personalisation insert from their database – but nonetheless it’s effective.

The Orange box encloses a subject “a quick heads up” which they used twice. The first one follows the pattern of not saying what’s in the body of the email. The second is sent with the same subject but as a forwarded (FW) message from Nick’s colleague, Kate. It is the same message inside, but it makes me think I’ve overlooked the earlier message and so I feel more inclined to open this one.

Very clever people – I recommend you subscribe to their newsletter – Insight and Debate on Marketing Innovation.