When I saw this I was Shocked…but not surprised.
“Vendors Do Not Follow-up With 7 out of 10 Tradeshow Leads”
Wow… 70% of tradeshow leads fall through the cracks.
Wasting their tradeshow marketing opportunity…
But what a great opportunity for you… just follow-up with a prospect and you are ahead of 70% of the competition. Not bad for a little bit of the work. just follow-up with a prospect and you are ahead of 70% of the competition. Not bad for a little bit of the work.
Here are a couple of other facts.
1) A study by Dr Allen Konopacki revealed that 80% of your prospects are not ready to buy when you meet them at your booth.
2) The Sales and Marketing Executives International reported that 80% of sales are made after the fifth contact with a prospect.
Great even more opportunity! You can be the cream of the crop and turn more prospects into customers. Just follow-up with your prospects and then continue to stay in touch with your prospects.
Would you like a simple, inexpensive way to do this?
OK…Here’s what you do.
Automate your tradeshow leads follow-up with an automatic email responder system. You would be surprised how easy it is to do. When you read this I am not suggesting that you drop your other prospect communications – phone, letter, meetings, etc. These are especially important for hot prospects and existing customers. To have the best effect you should have an integrated approach to prospect follow-up.
If you follow these steps you can quickly and inexpensively implement an automated follow-up system for your tradeshow leads. Here is a simplest approach. Also you can expand in this system or use different variations depending on what you are selling and number of products that you sell.
The main objective is to make sure that you collect your prospects name and email then feed it into the system. If the show that you are attending has an Internet connection you can even have your prospects enter their own information for a free gift or registering for a prize. Otherwise you need to have someone enter the information at the tradeshow, hotel or office.
Now follow these steps.
1) Make sure that your product information and typical questions are available from your website.
2) Write a “Thank You for Visiting the Booth” email letter – Include the website links to the each of your products and any FAQ’s on your website. This letter will be emailed immediately to the prospect. In many cases your prospect will read this letter before they leave the tradeshow. Impressive!
3) Draft follow-up letters that will go out on day 4, day 14, day 30 and then every 30 days after that or until the prospect unsubscribes.
4) Set-up an automatic responder system to capture the prospects name, contact information and email address.
5) Set-up your thank you and follow-up letters in the automatic responder system. Set your “Thank You” letter to be sent immediately to the prospect. Set your follow-up letters to be sent on day 4, day 14, day 30 and then every 30 days after that or until the prospect unsubscribes.
6) You will need a computer and Internet connection at the tradeshow or hotel to enter your leads.
7) Assign someone who is responsible to make sure that the information for very prospect is entered in the automatic responder system. This could be done at the tradeshow immediately or at the hotel at the end of each day.
8) Train the booth staff to make sure that they get the e-mail address for everyone who stops by even if they just want to leave their business card. You may what to use a gift or prize as an added incentive to collect the attendee’s contact information.
How difficult is this to set-up?
Very easy. It will probably take you longer to write your follow-up letters than to set-up your automatic responder system.
Someone can set-up an account with an automatic responder service in a few minutes and within the hour you could have your system set-up to automatically send out your follow-up letters.
Many systems will allow you to set-up multiple automatic responders. This way your follow-up can be tailored to specific products that the prospect requested. Doing this will take longer but will be much more effective.
The cost for using an automatic responder service will range from free to $50/month. Pennies compared to the 200% – 300% increased prospect to sales conversion rate that many companies experience.
An added benefit is that once you have the automatic responder system set-up you can use it to send your newsletter or special announcements to the prospects that have already requested information.
You now have an inexpensive following-up system to stay in-touch with all of your prospects until they are ready to buy or move to the next interest level. So start now, before your next tradeshow to boost your ROI with 110% follow-up.
Jeffrey Jordan, President of Net Marketing Results. He has 20 years experience enhancing profits for Fortune 500 companies to small businesses providing expertise in marketing, systems integration, manufacturing, software, e-commerce and online business.
jdj@netmarketingresults.com
http://www.netmarketingresults.com/
