In last week’s post we left you with the question: “how can one stop … loss to competitors, and how can one get touches with higher levels of engagement than with email alone?”.
The answer that we have seen emerge lies in utilizing a mix of media. Alongside emails, we’re talking phone calls, voicemail, texts, notes, among other methods.
Everyone knows it takes more than popping out a few emails to really drive engagement, and that if your competitors are the ones who are really engaging prospects, they’re going to be the ones taking the sales.
Let’s look at some of reasons using a mix of media works.
Mix of Media: Keeps prospects in the funnel
For one, there’s opportunity where clutter doesn’t exist and where touches actually get noticed. A call, a voicemail, a text, a handwritten note – these are things that still stick out to us because we don’t get nearly as many as with emails.
On top of that, engaging with a real human voice, even if it’s just periodic, identifies you as a real person where a stronger relationship and trust can be built.
We’ve seen that it’s a mistake to leave making a human connection to the bottom of the funnel only. And it is a mistake to let your competitors be the ones engaging prospects more than you.
Actually, in a study called Dale’s Cone of Learning, we see that more engagement generates more recall – people remember 10% of what they read, but as we go up in engagement, 50% of what we hear and see, a 5x improvement.
Mix of Media: Better at qualifying prospects
Another benefit is that you can’t truly qualify people without actually getting details about their situation. And to get this info you have to actually have dialog with them. And to talk in this
way, they need to be engaged.
Armed with reliable info, when you know that they’re not truly qualified, you can loop them back higher up in the funnel to let them simmer until their circumstances change.
And if they are in fact truly qualified, they can be pushed down the funnel faster to the sales team which in turn will grow more sales. Either way using a mix of media is going to help get the engagement to enable this process.
More Engaged Means More Sales
And so to bring it home, recall the McKinsey study earlier that echoed our results. If 70% of buyers are more predisposed to choose the company who engages them more with a mix of thoughtfully integrated email, voice touches, texts, notes and so forth, rather than the company that uses email alone, it really means companies are potentially closing only up to 30% of their prospects. This means that doing a better job of engaging prospects in this way can result in 2.3x more customers. (Note: increasing share of sales from 30% of all prospects, to 100% of all prospects, is 2.3x more sales.)
Sales can be increased in this way by virtue of not losing prospects to competitors by having built stronger relationships with them, while at the same time keeping prospects more interested and engaged as a result of communicating with varied media. And by making prospects feel like they are being treated well, their expectations of post‐sale service stay at a level that further supports their decision to buy from you rather than your competitors.
At the end of the day, companies today are adding a mix of media to their contacting plans, rather than relying on email alone, to generate sales‐ready leads because it works, increases prospect conversion, prevents loss to competitors, and generates more sales.